Addressing Abscondment Problem of Academic Staff from the Nigerian Tertiary Institutions’ through Effective Motivational Packages

This paper discusses the motivational strategies to address the problem of abscondment among sponsored foreign academic staff from Nigerian tertiary institutions after completing their training abroad. As a position paper, it relies on secondary data collected from both online publications and print resources. The content analysis method was adopted to distill the literature into key themes relevant to the study. The paper identifies several strategies to combat this issue, including increasing salaries and allowances for academic staff, developing infrastructure facilities, providing adequate research grants, granting autonomy to public universities, and ensuring a conducive work environment free from strike actions. Based on these findings, it is recommended that administrators and managers of tertiary institutions in Nigeria increase budgetary allocations for education to formulate motivational packages that will attract and retain academic staff. Furthermore, it is advised that administrators embrace public-private partnerships to enhance infrastructure development in these institutions. Additionally, both administrators and the government should increase research funding and establish dedicated departments in each institution to manage research grant programs for internal and foreign sources. Lastly, the government should grant autonomy to all universities to foster competition and innovation within the educational sector.