Alausa made this known while fielding questions from newsmen as guest at the 2025 Ministerial Press Briefing series in Abuja on Thursday.
He said that there is need for the country to put more efforts on how existing universities would be better equipped to offer quality learning to produce competent graduates instead of creating new ones.
Alausa who decried the unprofitable outcome of having too many universities come up especially at the federal level, urged the legislators to be more sensitive in their clamour,
He added that proliferation of universities was not the only proof to show legislators were carrying out their constitutional mandates.
He said: “I want to use this opportunity to talk to our legislators, members of the National Assemblies. Please, we need to stop this floodgate. There’s so much pressure on the President. We have to at least be sensitive to him as well.
“They’re passing a lot of bills. Today I can tell you there are almost 200 bills in the National Assembly for new universities to open. We can’t continue this. Even the ones we have, we don’t have enough infrastructures there. The capacity for a university to admit is not there.
“What we need to do now is to rebuild the capacities to ensure that we can offer more viable courses to our citizens.
“We have about 64 federal universities, 68 state universities and 138 private universities. If you put the entire enrollment together, and the 138 private universities accounts for just about 7.5% of total undergraduate enrollment.
“Even in our 64 federal universities, the total number of undergraduate enrollment today is just about 875,000, which is abysmally low. We have universities with less than 1,000 admission of students, undergraduate students and there’s this intense clamor for more universities to be open. We have to stop that.
“We have a clear plan; the President has given tentative approval. We’re working on the document, on the fact memo to address that because you’re talking about inadequate take-off grant.
“Those take-off grant is dependent on the numbers of federal and state universities that we have. The grant amount is a numerator, and the number of universities is a denominator. As the denominator increases, the X number, which is equal to the grant, reduces and that’s why we have to stop this deluge of just opening universities.
“I understand the sentiment of our legislators. They want to show that they’re working.
We know they’re working but then, we have enough assets, we have enough opportunities out there for students to go to universities.
“What we now need to do is now to begin to mobilize more resources to develop infrastructures, build engineering workshops, build laboratories in these universities, recruit international standard teachers, so that we can begin to get these universities to develop, to deliver high quality of education that will be known for as a country.”
The Minister further revealed that government has put some measures in place to equip and empower Almajiri children with learning and life and skills such as conditional money transfers, school feeding programme and vocational training programmes.
“We’ve had programmes before that just brought numeracy and literacy to these schools. We’re having vocational education to the Almajiris’.
“We’ve done a clear mapping of these Almajiris, and we’re also including the Tsangaya School and the Quranic Quranic school. We’ve now laid out clear delivery link indicators that we will be using to grant to these malams, to these teachers of these Almajiris schools. We’re linking those grants to the extent in which they let us bring in numeracy, literacy, and vocational skills.
We know skills that they can learn quickly; vulcanizing, plumbing, electrician.”
Alausa who noted the challenges confronting the Almajiri system, explained that the malams who teach the Almajiris’ need financial support.
“When government starts giving these financial support, those kids will not go out. And it’s also linked to what’s causing the migration. Over 90% of those kids are coming from the rural areas. Those parents don’t have money to feed those kids that’s why they send them to the urban areas to be trained on how to recite, memorize the Quran, and other trainings.
“We’re also going to the source of the problems. We’re designing some conditional transfer. That’s why this school feeding is really key to us, an alumna programme on girl child education.
“By the time we go right into the communities, we’re helping the mothers with conditional cash transfers. That is linked to the children going to school. We will monitor the attendance percentage. If they don’t meet over 75% attendance in school, they won’t get those grants. As we do that, year after year the number of kids, the large urban migration of these kids to go to Almajiris will reduce significantly and also, the ones that are already there, we’re now incentivizing, we’re collaborating with the malams, and those schools who are working with some national governments.”
While revealing that most of the 115 Almajiri schools that were constructed during President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration were dilapidated or never put into use, the minister noted an active collaboration with the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) and the Almajiri Commission to retrofit the schools.
“The Almajiri Commission will take over those schools. They can operate schools now. So they will be operating those schools.
“We’ve designed additional funding from UBEC to the Almajiri Commission for the Nomadic Education Commission as well. These fundings are clearly stated, it’s not just them getting money, hey’re linked to deliverables.”
