By Wuraola Oyedokun
A former minister of communications,Barrister Adebayo Shittu is set to establish a specialised university in Ibadan.
Shittu disclosed this in a chat with journalists in Ibadan.
The former minister said: “I hope within the next one year the university will be ready . By the grace of God, it’s going to be in Ibadan. Let me say a little bit about the ICT university.When I was minister, I initiated the establishment by the government.And how did the idea come about?
“Early in my life as a minister, some young graduates of Computer Science came to me to seek financial support to go to India. There’s an institute in India called  the Indian Institute of Information Technology. I asked, what were they going to do? They said they were going to acquire skills. I was wondering what was the essence of going to that university when they were  already graduates.
“They said all they took away from Nigerian universities are paper qualifications. They said they were not skilled and not job-ready. For the first time I heard from them the term job ready. So, they said the practice is when they graduate from Nigeria, they go to that institute in India for six months or one year to acquire a skill. It is from there they would become job-ready and can get a job. So, I reasoned that, if I gave these two people money, what of the many other graduates of Computer Science from Nigerian universities? It would be better if I go to India to study that institute and replicate it here so that people could  have a place where they can acquire skills without the payment of transportation and school fees in dollars. So I went there, and convinced that we could do something similar in Nigeria. I therefore established a committee. At that time, Professor Julius Okogie was just retiring from the National Universities Commission. I got him appointed as chairman with about 20 others.
“They gave me a full report with all the information. I took this memo to the Federal Executive Council, armed with  the additional information that Singapore with less than two million people already had two ICT universities, and New Zealand with about five million population had about three.
” Unfortunately, it was knocked down. Many of our ministers had been compromised by certain forces who did not want me to take over what is a small establishment linked with the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC. The ministers were against it. Some argued that the government already had enough universities. They brought all  kinds of very baseless arguments.
“At the end of the argument, President Buhari commended me for the hard work on this memo. But unfortunately he said I could see that it was an over-ambitious project. So, we had to step it down. I felt really bad. That was my saddest day in government. People could not see into the future. After we left the meeting, a few sympathetic ministers advised me to wait for another six months to re-present it. I decided to execute it as a private initiative. So, I started from that moment to look for land. It will soon take off in Ibadan”.
2 Comments
Good day Sir,our former minister, so there’s no piece of land in Okeogun where you can establish the university, thankful for developing Ibadan…
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