Assessing the Adequacy of Federal Government’s Budgetary Allocations on the Provision of Office Accommodation to Academic Staff in Nigeria’s North-Central Zone Federal Universities

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the adequacy of federal government’s budgetary allocations on the provision of office accommodation to academic staff in federal public universities in North-Central Zone of Nigeria. Apart from extracting relevant Documents relating to budgetary allocations from the sampled universities, a descriptive research design was employed and data was collected from university Vice-Chancellors, bursary staff, lecturers and students from the five sampled federal universities. While all the 5 Vice-Chancellors were considered, a sample of 101 out of 254 bursary staff was sampled. In addition, 437 lecturers out of 2,912 were also sampled, 50 students were purposively sampled. The research instruments employed for data collection were questionnaires for bursary staff and lecturers, interview guide for university Vice-Chancellors, and Focus Group Discussion Guide for university students. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to analyze the data. The findings from the field and documents showed that universities budgetary allocations for the provision of academic staff offices were only 8.9 percent of their capital allocations in 2014. In addition, a simple regression model showed that budgetary allocations to universities influence the provisions of academic staff offices. Furthermore, it was discovered that 72.1 percent of academic staff shared offices with negative effect on their performance and productivity in their official duties. The study recommended among others that an effective reward system should be developed so that efficient managers will have more funds to build more offices for their academic staff, in addition, budgetary allocations to universities should be increased by government so that universities will have more allocations to construct academic staff offices.