Claim: A viral video claims that the federal government of Nigeria has put federal universities up for sale
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The educational system in Nigeria has many issues bedeviling it, such as inadequate funding, poor infrastructure, overcrowded classrooms, low teacher morale, insufficient teacher training, outdated curriculum, lack of technological resources and frequent strikes.
Other issues are poor governance and policy implementation, low student performance, high dropout rates, gender inequality in education access, lack of access to quality education in rural areas, examination malpractices, and an over 18 million out-of-school children rate.
Often, there has been several industrial strikes by Nigerian university workers such as the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), Non Academic Staff of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU) and the National Association of Academic Technologists (NAAT).
Recently, a video was circulated on social media, especially on WhatsApp, claiming that the Federal Government has put federal universities up for sale.
Boldly written on the video is “Federal Institutions to be sold out”. A man in a white dress and a white cap is seen speaking in the video.
The man in the 7:21 minutes video claimed that the Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, disclosed that the federal government was planning to sell off higher institutions under its control.
“It is now official. Courtesy of the voluntary disclosure by the Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman that the federal government has come to a final conclusion that for Nigerian youths to have quality education in quote and for them to further to further their own studies and inn view of the federal government to keep on funding federal institutions, it has come to a final conclusion that investors would have the gates of all federal universities and institutions to come and invest.
“In other words, gates of universities are now open for anybody with any source of money; legitimate, questionable, doubtful, fraudulent to come and invest and take over the universities.”
He went on to say that involving investors in running universities will be for the investors to make profit and would make it impossible for Nigerian youths to go to universities and other higher institutions.
He said: “This policy is meant to send the children of the poor, the indigent and the downtrodden from being educated forever.”
The video can be found on Facebook here and here, on YouTube and X here and here.
Given the suspicion surrounding the video, we conducted this fact-check.
Who is the man in the Video?
We analysed the key frames in the video through Invid. Part of the results we found via google Lens was an X (Twitter) account of Mahdi Shehu (@shehu_mahdi). His profile description reads: “Non Commercial Whistle Blower | Budget Tracker | Human Rights/ Wrongs Activist | Public affairs Commentator | Political Commentator| Who loves Nigeria.” He has over 71 thousand followers as of September 11, 2024.
Screenshot from the X page of Mahdi Shehu
We found that he posted the video on X on July 7, 2024 with the caption, “All federal educational institutions are now open to investors (sic). This is pure wickedness and sadism. Whoever is responsible for this senile decision will never end well and ignorance will run through his entire progeny up to the last generation.”
The video has 81.3k views, 113 comments, 554 retweets, 891 and 131 bookmarks.
There are several other videos on his page and they can be found here, here and here.
Early this year, he was arrested and detained by the police. His lawyer, Barrister M.I. Abubakar, said he was arrested for calling on President Bola Tinubu to probe former President Muhammadu Buhari and some of his top officials, his counsel, Leadership reported.
However, Daily Trust reported that an erstwhile Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, said Madhi Shehu was arrested for attempted extortion.
Daily Trust added that a statement from Malami’s firm alleged that Shehu was arrested in Kaduna when he tried to take advantage of his wife, Aisha, for a sum of $500,000.
According to Leadership, Mahdi was similarly arrested and detained twice by the same IGP Monitoring Unit between 2021 and 2022 over allegations he made against top officials of the Katsina State government under the leadership of Aminu Bello Masari of allegedly diverting billions of naira belonging to the Katsina State government under the guise of security spending.
We are not selling Federal Universities
Using an advance keyword search on Google, we found that the claim was debunked by the federal government in July this year.
We found that the Academic Staff of Nigerian Universities (ASUU) and Congress of University Academics (CONUA) accused the federal government of planning to hand over federal universities to investors through public-private partnerships.
Reacting to the claim, the Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman, said the federal government had no plan to sell off federal universities. This can be found here and here.
As reported by Punch, Mamman said “transnational education is a policy on what this government is doing to open up tertiary education by taking people from the rest of the world to come and invest in our tertiary system.
“Some people are carrying information that the Federal Government is selling off to private investors its universities. This is an absolute lie and completely false.
“This government believes in our public institutions. However, as we all know this government has reforms that this country needs. What this government has done is to open up the tertiary education level, in particular the universities, for global competitiveness.”
Based on what Mahdi Shehu said in the viral video, the Minister of Education voluntarily disclosed that the universities were up for grabs by investors and the same minister said such information was false.
Conclusion
Given the available information, there is no concrete evidence that the federal government is selling federal universities to private investors.
