AfriPulse
By Rauf Oyewole
A National Assembly bill seeking to amend the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU) Act to migrate the School from only science and technology related courses has stirred controversy among stakeholders within and outside the state.
The amendment bill, titled Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (Amendment) Bill 2025 (SB 910), aims to broaden the university’s mandate beyond science and technology, allowing it to introduce courses in law, social sciences, and other non-technical disciplines.
The Senator representing Bauchi South, Shehu Buba had sponsored the bill and had passed second reading which was referred to the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and TETFund for further legislative work.
Speaking on the development, a former chairman of Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Bauchi State Chapter, Barr. Jibrin S. Jibrin commended the efforts of the Senator, adding that the conversion to conventional of the institution would allow thousands of students within catchment area to access to art and humanity, social science courses.
“Despite the fact that we have other federal universities around us, if you go there to seek admission, it is always a war to get it because they give priority to their children. We are in support of this bill to scale through.”
He further argued that the Bauchi State, despite being “the most populous state in the entire Northeast geopolitical zone,” remains the only state without a conventional federal university.
“The other states in the zone each host either a conventional federal university or an institution with broad academic coverage. This situation has created a structural imbalance and a significant gap in access to higher education, particularly for students who wish to pursue studies in law, education, social sciences, and the arts, which are not offered under ATBU’s current mandate as a University of Technology.”
However, the Management of the Institution has declared that it is not aware of any legislation to repeal the establishing law and amend it to convert the Institution to a conventional university.
The Registrar, Alh. Kabir Garba Aminu said that the management only heard about the development in the news without being consulted before the initiation of the bill.
“Myself and the VC just woke up one morning to see a clip that our enabling law is going to be reviewed to convert the University from specialised to conventional institution.
“We are making clear that the process to change the law of establishing the Institution should start from the University. There are procedures if there are needs for the law to be amended.
“Our is that the University has not been contacted, there has not been a time where anybody contacted the School that there would be a review of the law. Universities operate as a system with organs responsible for the review of the law,” he said.
Aminu said that the two “major organs” in the University, the Council and the University Senate were not consulted or informed before the process. He said that the supervising Ministry of Education and the National Universities Commission (NUC) were not carried along in the process.
He added the management has written its official position to the Ministry of Education, NUC and the relevant agencies. He said that the management would attend the public hearing of the National Assembly to present the position.
Also speaking, the National President of the University’s Alumni, Mohammed Sani Wada, expressed disappointment in the process, saying that Alumni rejected the ongoing amendment, saying that the University remains the only Institution specialising in Technology in the whole of North East.
“ATBU was established with FUTA and FUTO and they are doing very well to bridge the technology gap in the industry.
“We have seen our state and federal governments sponsoring students on foreign scholarships to study specialised courses but we are in the process of collapsing our own few specialised universities. We urged our distinguished Senator to channel more of his constituency projects to the Institution, instead of making an effort to convert it to conventional varsity,” he said.
In his opinion, a former Executive Secretary of TETFund, Professor Suleiman Bogoro believed that the university should retain its mandate to avoid losing the “hard-earned” glory in science and technology strength.
Source: NigerianNewsDirect | Read the Full Story…
