Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), has said there is no way the Federal Government could stop funding universities in the country.
According to him, the funding of federal universities by government is constitutional.
Osodeke said this in reaction to a statement credited to Minister of Education Prof Tahir Mamman, who recently said that the Federal Government will grant full autonomy to universities to explore new ways of funding their activities.
He said: “There is no way the Federal Government of Nigeria would say they would not fund public universities because it is there in the law. It is there in the Constitution. Look at Section 18 of the Constitution; it says university, primary, and secondary are free.
“The only problem is that it is not judicable; that’s the only problem. So I said, I don’t think this government, from what we have seen, is going to say we are going to hands off from university. If you check the ratio of Nigeria’s education budget to our GDP, it’s one of the lowest in the world.”
