The Chairman, Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP), the Polytechnic Ibadan chapter, Comrade Kola Lawal has urged federal and state governments in Nigeria to put an end to the idea of bringing people from the university system to superintend over the affairs of polytechnic education in the country.
He made the call while speaking with the Nigerian Tribune in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital recently.
While corroborating his point, Lawal noted that: “You have a settlement and there are people who have lived all their lives there, then you want to pick someone to rule over the people. Such person must be someone who have also lived there and have deep understanding of the people, their culture and tradition.
“But if you leave the people who grew in the settlement alone and you bring somebody with a different culture to come and rule over people whose culture is different from his, it will take him quite sometime to understand how things are done in the new environment.
“I want to take the afoementioned analogy to the polytechnic education system in Nigeria. Most of our government rely on bringing people from the university system to come and rule over the polytechnic system and this is one of the problems that is killing the polytechnic education in Nigeria.
“When these people come, they are bringing in the culture of the university system. The National Board for Technical Education said anything we do, we have 70 percent of practicals in our content and 30 percent theory. Whereas in the university system, reverse is the case. So when they come to administer us here, they look at us with the eyes of the university they are coming with. They do not understand the sytem.”
Lawal, further stated that majority of Rectors of Polytechnics in Nigeria are professors, saying: “We have chief lecturers in the polytechnic system. Professorship is just a promotion. There are a lot of lecturers in the polytechnic system who now have PhD. I make bold to say here that in this Polytechnic Ibadan, we have more PhD holders than some universities.
“Our national body has started that agitation that henceforth, we will not allow university professors to come and be Rectors of polytechnics in Nigeria. Fortunately, that advocacy got to the National Assembly and we now have what we call the Polytechnic Act that has clearly stipulated that anybody that must govern a polytechnic in Nigeria must be a chief lecturer from the polytechnic sector.”
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