[FILE] Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu AdamuMartins Oloja’s typically detailed and characteristically incisive piece in his Inside Stuff column in The Guardian on Sunday of June 27, 2021, practically took out from my mouth, an issue, which has agitated my mind in recent weeks and months. Titled, “Nigeria Needs Better, Not More Universities,” Oloja interrogates the exponential expansion of universities, public and private, in the country and wonders why government is licensing more and more private universities and building new ones itself. He contended that existing institutions could be improved upon via adequate funding and provision of infrastructure.
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Indeed, on a social media platform to which Oloja and I belong, a very eminent and distinguished administrator and statesman, commented on the said piece by remarking that “there are 1800 universities in The Philippines, for a population of 105 million people.” He explained further, that most of the universities in Philippines, which, he cited as an example, do not require vast acreages of land like we have in Nigeria, because they are “specialised institutions.”