*Prof Oloyede (File picture)
Registrar of Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof Is-Haq Oloyede has called on Nigeria to come up with appropriate frameworks and guidelines for attaining Academic Qualification Equivalence with sister African nations.
Prof. Oloyede who is the former president, Association of African Universities said this would promote academic mobility, regional and international integration in education, especially in the light of the failure of some African countries to sign the Arusha (now Addis Ababa ) Convention.
The JAMB Registrar made the call recently in Cairo, Egypt, during the Conference of Rectors, Vice Chancellors and Presidents of African Universities, according to the latest edition of JAMBulletin, a weekly publication of the Office of the Registrar, made available to The State Online.
*Participants at the Conference*
According to him, Nigeria should come up with appropriate regulations to achieve Qualification Equivalence because the country is a signatory to the Addis Ababa Convention which mandates African countries to commit to the implementation.
He regretted that many of the participating countries have failed to actualize the provisions of the convention as they have not been able to synergise with the operators of the various institutions in their domains.
He added that “When I was the President of the Association of African Universities, I discovered that 90 % of institutions in Africa were not aware of the conventions that their governments had endorsed. This portrays the fact that the synergy signed by Heads of Governments which took the decisions was not translated to the operators of the various institutions.”
Prof Oloyede noted that the challenge of unification of qualification has been on for decades. He said “There is the Arusha (now Addis Ababa) Convention on Qualifications which our Heads of Governments in Africa accepted and changed to the Addis Ababa Convention. What they didn’t realise then were the political implications of the change. This is because it made the original Arusha (now Addis Ababa) Convention adopted more than 30 years ago by Ministers of Education in Arusha to be seen as emanating from the much later Bologna Convention. This, of course, played into the hands of the Western world which had always sought to give the wrong impression that they are the ones helping Africa.”
Speaking on Nigeria’s performance in the education sector relative to other African countries, Prof Oloyede said “Nigeria is doing well considering what others are doing. The only thing is that we’ve not consolidated on the different efforts. We talk about poor percentage of our education budget and we remove other monies spent on the sector but from the same national budget. These other monies are also being spent on education but they are not consolidated. The challenge in Nigeria is that we don’t have consolidated expenditure on education.”
Responding to the partnership between Africa and the European Union, Prof Oloyede said “ We have had enough of external imposition of direction of our educational directions in Africa. We, Africans need to advance and formulate our own plans and then seek the assistance of genuine friends to actualize those plans, otherwise, others would be dictating to us the direction to go. We should all remember that he who pays the piper dictates the tune.”
Earlier, the incumbent president of the Association of African Universities, Prof Orlando Quilambo called on governments, industries and policy making institutions to work together to improve investments in higher institutions so as to help achieve the African Union’s vision of an integrated , prosperous and peaceful Africa whose development is driven by its won citizens and representing a dynamic force in the global stage.