From Kayemo News
The Federal Government is reviewing its foreign scholarship and bilateral education arrangements as part of efforts to eliminate unnecessary expenditure and redirect public resources towards strengthening Nigerian tertiary institutions, the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, has said.
Alausa said the government could no longer justify spending scarce public funds to send students abroad to study programmes that are already available in Nigerian universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.
The minister disclosed this while explaining the rationale behind the Federal Government’s decision to review its overseas scholarship arrangements, stressing that the policy was driven by the need to build domestic capacity and ensure better value for public expenditure.
He recalled that shortly after assuming office, he was presented with a proposal involving about 100,000 Nigerian students travelling to Morocco to study courses taught in English, including mass communication and journalism.
According to him, the proposal raised serious concerns because the courses were already available in Nigeria, while the students would have had to spend their first year learning French before commencing their programmes.
Alausa said, “Number one, we have all those courses in Nigeria. And yet, number two, they were going to spend the first year learning French before they started the programme.”
He added that the cost of supporting such students abroad could not be justified when Nigeria had developed considerable capacity in its tertiary institutions over the years.
“And number three, in the position of a few million to support this in Nigeria, we support thousands of them,” he said.
The minister said the government therefore concluded that continuing the arrangement in its previous form would amount to an inefficient use of public resources.
“So the Bilateral Education Agreement was not making sense, again, to us in government. It was a way to waste government funds,” Alausa said.
He added, “And this President will not waste any public funds.”
The latest position builds on the Federal Government’s earlier decision to discontinue government-funded Bilateral Education Agreement scholarships while retaining support for students already enrolled under the previous arrangements.
The Federal Government has clarified that existing beneficiaries of the bilateral scholarship programme would not be abandoned and would continue to receive support until the completion of their studies, while new government-funded awards under the arrangement were discontinued following a review of the programme.
The policy does not amount to a blanket ban on Nigerians receiving scholarships from foreign governments. Foreign governments willing to sponsor Nigerian students can continue to offer such opportunities, but the Federal Government intends to be more selective about committing Nigerian public funds to overseas education.
Alausa similarly explained that foreign countries willing to continue sponsoring Nigerian students could do so without necessarily requiring financial support from the Nigerian government.
“But when you stop the scholarship, you say countries that want to continue to give the scholarship can continue to do that,” he said.
The minister said the circumstances that justified sending large numbers of Nigerian students abroad decades ago had changed considerably.
“When those programmes were set up 20 years ago, they were meant to get students to go to the government colleges where we did not have capacity,” he said.
“But in the last 20 years, we’ve built a number of capacities in the tertiary institutions — universities, polytechnics and colleges,” he added.
The scholarship review comes amid broader reforms by the Federal Ministry of Education aimed at repositioning Nigeria’s education system under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda. {The Punch}