VC Canvasses More Private Varsities, Secondary Schools in Nigeria
Kuni Tyessi
With the less than 155 public and private universities and several secondary schools in the face of over 170 million Nigerians, the Vice Chancellor of Nile Turkish University, Prof. Dr. Husseyin Sert has said that with such statistics, more secondary and tertiary institutions are needed to serve the needs of the ever teeming and growing population.
Prof. Sert who made this known, while briefing Journalists, in Abuja, compared secondary and tertiary education in Nigeria to that of Turkey, the university’s medical laboratory is well-equipped based on global standards and best practices and more importantly, has scaled its National Universities Commission (NUC) standard, adding that based on quality, it has continued to keep the number of its students population very low.
He described university education as a social responsibility saying that Nigeria needs more private universities and more secondary schools, while calling on the public and private sector to fully support it.
“Turkey has a population of about 70 million and has at least 300 universities which are mostly private. In Turkey, we didn’t have a single private university in the 90s, but now we have almost 300 universities in Turkey and the population is 70 million. 300 universities for 70 million population and most of them are private universities. Nigeria needs more universities because the federal government cannot support everything,” he said
The VC thanked the Nigerian education authorities for their cooperation in the past years, noting that despite the on-going recession, his institution school is determined to continue unabated due to promises it had made, and to its credit, it has not and does not hope to sack any of its staff which are mostly Nigerians.
“We make money in Nigeria and we reinvest in Nigeria. We do not take a single kobo out of Nigeria. It’s very important. We make money from the parents and from the students and we reinvest. Despite the fact that we have schools in six states and the economic recession is also affecting us, we are determined to continue.”
He called on the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) to look again into it’s enabling Act and see the need to support private institutions especially in present day realities of high cost of fuel, epileptic power supply, as well as other infrastructural amenities.