Nigeria Needs Capacity, Not More University Signboards
By Joel Maina
The Nigerian Tribune editorial of September 1, 2026, titled “These New Varsities,” raises a concern that anyone who has watched Nigeria’s tertiary education sector expand faster than its capacity should immediately recognise. I agree with the writer that approving new universities while existing ones remain underfunded, understaffed and in many cases barely functional is a poor way to solve the real problem of limited admission spaces. But the contradiction the editorial identifies deserves even sharper scrutiny, because the issue is not only inconsistency — it is a pattern Nigeria has seen repeatedly, and one that demands a different solution than simply adding more institutions.
The contradiction is straightforward. In August 2025, the Federal Government announced a seven‑year moratorium on new federal universities, polytechnics and colleges of education, citing proliferation, overstretched resources and declining academic quality. The Tribune endorsed that decision at the time. Yet barely a year later, the National Universities Commission approved 33 new universities — seven of them federal — bringing Nigeria’s total to 309 licensed universities, reportedly one of the largest higher‑education systems in Africa by institution count. Whether or not each of these new universities technically satisfies the “operational standards” exception built into the moratorium, the optics are impossible to defend: a regulator that diagnosed proliferation as the problem is now the author of more proliferation.
This is not just inconsistency; it is a familiar Nigerian pattern. Moratoriums and tightened standards are announced with fanfare, only to be quietly eroded by exceptions granted to politically connected applicants. The editorial hints at this when it suggests the government “most probably acted under pressure from influential individuals.” That deserves to be stated plainly. Nigeria’s state and federal governments have a long history of approving universities and siting federal projects based on political loyalty and geopolitical balancing rather than institutional readiness. Until the NUC publishes the criteria used to assess each of the 33 new universities — and makes those assessments available for public scrutiny before licences are issued — “operational standards” will remain a phrase used to justify decisions the public cannot independently verify.
Where the conversation must go further than the editorial is in answering what Nigeria should do instead. The editorial rightly notes that hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates fail to secure admission each year due to limited spaces. This is not a minor detail. JAMB has consistently reported that Nigerian universities admit only a fraction of candidates who pass UTME, leaving many young Nigerians without a pathway into higher education. A moratorium that simply freezes institution numbers without addressing capacity is not a solution. The real failure is not that Nigeria is creating new universities; it is that Nigeria keeps choosing quantity over capacity — first by underfunding existing institutions, and now by adding more institutions to underfund.
Other countries facing surges in demand for tertiary education chose a different path: expanding capacity within existing, quality‑assured institutions before licensing new ones. South Korea dramatically expanded university enrolment during its development era by growing capacity at existing institutions and investing heavily in vocational and technical alternatives. Germany’s dual education system remains a global example of how vocational and apprenticeship pathways reduce pressure on universities. Nigeria’s polytechnic system was designed to play a similar role, yet polytechnics remain chronically underfunded and treated as inferior to universities, pushing more candidates toward university admission than the system can handle.
The editorial also understates how directly institutional quality is connected to the “japa” phenomenon. Graduates who feel their degrees carry little weight — because their institutions are under‑resourced or instruction quality was poor — are among the most motivated to leave the country. Every new university licensed without corresponding investment in laboratories, libraries, qualified staff and research funding adds another cohort of graduates into a labour market that already struggles to absorb them, and adds another push factor toward emigration. A tertiary education strategy that asks only how many students can be admitted, without asking how many can be admitted into institutions capable of producing employable graduates, is solving the wrong problem.
None of this means expansion should never happen. Nigeria’s population is young and growing, and demand for tertiary education will continue to rise. The question is sequencing. Before approving new universities, the NUC and the Federal Ministry of Education should publish — institution by institution — the funding, staffing and infrastructure benchmarks each existing public university is failing to meet, along with a costed plan for closing those gaps. New institutions should be licensed only when readiness is demonstrated and independently audited, not through provisional licences that leave open the question of whether operational standards have truly been met. Private university licensing, where profit motives can conflict with quality assurance, deserves a genuinely independent accreditation and monitoring regime with the authority to withdraw licences from underperforming institutions.
The editorial is right that both the Federal Government and the NUC deserve blame for the confusion in Nigeria’s tertiary education policy. But the deeper failure is not simply that Nigeria keeps announcing new universities. It is that Nigeria has never treated tertiary education capacity as an infrastructure problem requiring sustained, multi‑year investment — the way it at least nominally treats roads, power or healthcare. Until that changes, every new wave of university approvals, moratorium or no moratorium, will produce the same outcome: more institutions, no more capacity, and a widening quality gap that neither existing nor new universities are funded to close.
Joel Maina is a Strategic Communication student at the University of Abuja.
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