Matthew Tabe
The President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, has said that two presidential candidates are planning to sell off federal universities through Public Private Partnership.
Osodoke made this known in a meeting in Markurdi, the Benue State capital.
Although he failed to identify the two presidential candidates, he said they have plans of privatizing the universities or initiating student loans.
He further said that the presidential candidates will soon come out with the agenda to privatise federal universities through Public Private Partnership, PPP, or settle for the option of student loans with five percent interest.
According to him, “If you don’t know, they are planning to sell the universities (federal universities) through Public Private Partnership.
“This is being planned by two presidential candidates and the other plan is to initiate student loans at 5 percent interest.”
Speaking against Nigerian universities partaking in student loan programmes, the ASUU president said; “In Nigeria where you have graduates that cannot get jobs for several years and by the time you spend 30 years, the loan will run to N40 million.
“After we are done with federal government, we will come back to the management of funds in our universities because some of the universities have problems of poor management of funds.
“As universities, we don’t know how money is spent, how many of the universities have budgets. The federal government, national assembly have their budgets but this is not so in some universities. We are going to fight that soon”, Osodeke promised.