Influence of Security Challenges on the Management of Public Universities in North Central Nigeria

The study investigated the influence of security challenges on the management of public universities in the North Central Nigeria. Three specific objectives with corresponding research questions guided the study and three hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study adopted a survey research design. The population of the study was 9,708 academic and senior administrative staff in seven Federal Universities in North Central Nigeria. The sample size for the study was 384 academic and senior administrative staff who were drawn using purposive, proportionate stratified and convenience sampling techniques. The instrument used for data collection was a structured questionnaire titled “Security Challenges and Management of Public Universities Questionnaire (SCMPUQ)†. The questionnaire was validated by experts and its reliability was established using Cronbach Coefficient Alpha Method which yielded a coefficient of 0.87. Data collected for the study was analyzed using Means and Standard Deviation to answer the research questions and Chi-Square Goodness of fit to test the hypotheses at 0.05level of significance. Findings of the study revealed that armed banditry and cultism have significant negative influence on the management of public universities in North Central Nigeria. The study also revealed that ethnic crisis does not significantly influence the management of public universities. The study concluded that security challenges such as armed banditry and cultism in North Central Nigeria pose a great challenge to the management of public universities. Based on the findings, the researcher recommended among others that the Federal Government and university management should be proactive in creating and sustaining a peaceful, threat-free environment by providing sufficient surveillance vehicles that will be very useful in timely fighting and containment of armed banditry activities in university environment and the university management should tighten up measures to check cult activities on campuses and all identified cultists should be rusticated from the institution by the university management.