Trending 
Former Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Professor Suleiman Bogoro, has urged the National Assembly to halt plans to convert Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, from a specialised university of technology to a conventional institution.
In a press briefing in Abuja on Thursday, Professor Bogoro, an alumnus of the university, described the move as “ill-informed and unnecessary,” arguing that it could derail ATBU’s founding mission of promoting science, technology, and innovation, the very tools driving global competitiveness.
“When I got the news, I said, well, people have different levels of understanding of the original purpose for the establishment of my university. Permit me to call it my university,” Bogoro said during a press briefing in Abuja.
He recalled that ATBU was established in 1980 by the Shehu Shagari administration as one of Nigeria’s first three federal universities of technology, alongside Akure and Owerri, to promote technological education across the regions.
He warned that altering ATBU’s focus could “set back decades of achievement” in technical research, noting that “engineering at ATBU was rated the best in Nigeria for over 10 years.” Bogoro urged lawmakers to prioritise expanding support for specialised education rather than diluting it.
Bogoro lamented that the Northern region already trails behind other parts of the country in scientific competitiveness and said removing ATBU’s “Technology” focus would worsen the imbalance.
“Northern Nigeria has had the disadvantage of trying to catch up with the rest of the country. We cannot change the status, and we should not change the status of ATBU,” he said.
He explained that ATBU and the Federal University of Technology, Minna, are the two leading technological universities in Northern Nigeria, consistently winning research and innovation grants both locally and internationally.
“When I was rounding up my PhD in Cambridge in the mid-90s, a friend from Shell told me that in Nigeria, the best computer science graduates were from ATBU,” Bogoro recalled.
He added that Bauchi State already hosts Sa’adu Zungur University, a conventional university that meets the demand for social sciences and humanities, stressing that “there’s no need to duplicate efforts or dilute focus.”
