‘Education demands more than just teaching’
What’s your impression about education in Nigeria? Education generally is life, anything one does in life he has to have education, the know how to do it well. So education, if you ask me is light because it is only education that can teach you how to do things. Nigeria is backward because it does […]
What’s your impression about education in Nigeria?
Education generally is life, anything one does in life he has to have education, the know how to do it well. So education, if you ask me is light because it is only education that can teach you how to do things. Nigeria is backward because it does not have quality education system. The Chinese, for instance, though they teach in their own language, their education system is very strong and robust. It’s a direct education that impacts on productivity directly; I mean if you are shown how to do plastic automatically you are a plastic producer, if you are shown how to do a telephone or mobile phone automatically you become a mobile phone producer, so their own education system is very practical and as such they are excelling in their own field of endeavours.
Nigeria is so enriched, so endowed with people. I am talking of a population of about 170 million and may be more people, beautiful vegetation, I mean land mass and very intelligent, hardworking people and if you check the demography of Nigeria you will discover that majority of the population are young and productive people. But we are not taking advantage of that to educate our people effectively, in such a way that they can go into the labour market and be productive, be self-employed.
However, in Chelsea Company we took it upon ourselves to develop a quality university. All processes have been concluded and the school has been structurally developed and we are now at the point of the second inspection by the National Universities Commission (NUC) so that we can get a licence. But beyond that we are sourcing for lecturers all over the world because education is about imparting knowledge from people to people. A classic example I can give you is that if you bring Rotimi Williams – as we know him Timi the Law – and put him in a classroom that whatever he has in his head he transfers it to about 100 people, if Rotimi Williams is worth 10 hundred million it means that those 100 people each will be worth 10 million. Just see it from that point of view. So even if you paid Rotimi Williams 10 million to produce 100 Rotimi Williams you can see that what you are paying Rotimi Williams is very negligible. So the quality of university we are developing is such that we want to partner with the Nigerian society to develop people, to produce producers.
In our own process when we partner with the students, we teach them in their own disciplines what they should know and then we give them the opportunity to do three months practical in every session. By the time they are graduating they have enough practical experience and therefore we can stand guarantee for them to source a little amount of money from banks – let’s say three or five million and then be self-employed. We do not want educated people who will be gathering certificates and looking for jobs everywhere. We are going to develop future captains of industry. That’s the objective of building our university. Even though we have associate businesses and institutions that we want to affiliate with to be posting the students to develop their practical experience, we have made entrepreneurial studies compulsory in our school because our mission is to produce future employers of labour in Nigeria and producers of goods and material resources.
Without quality education we cannot do anything and it is very urgent now that we will have to start practical education beyond theory as it stands now. Every year Nigeria churns out close to a million graduates that are not employable and my heart bleeds because the biggest resource in this world is human resource and if these human resources are allowed to waste, what a waste it will be.
How many courses are you proposing for the take-off of the university?
In line with the National Universities Commission (NUC) policy and guideline, you cannot start with more than 15 programmes so you can choose to start with two faculties with 15 programmes and then you will not take more than 500 students each year. These are policies designed by NUC to regulate what the universities are doing and also to help the universities to find their feet to crawl before they start running. So by the time you populate those 15 programmes, before you start moving to other faculties and other programmes, then you gradually mature and grow in the university system.
What kind of relationship have you built with the NUC in terms of accreditation of your courses and approval?
The National Universities Commission is very impressed with what we have done, the quality of the structures; we are developing the documentations of our submissions, our academic master plan, the necessary documentation of the master plan, like the topographies and other things that we have provided. They were highly impressed. They have keyed into the philosophy of the university, they appreciated it a lot and they believe this will be a big service to the society and to the first sets of people that will be students in this university. Of course it’s one of the first universities to be in town and it’s not by accident because the quality of people we want to source abroad and all over the world to lecture in this school will surely be high standard.
Is there any affiliation to other universities across the world?
Yes Chelsea intends to affiliate to different universities across the globe. For instance for our library we intend to affiliate to the University of Oxford. Oxford Library is the biggest Library in the world and our library is going to be an e-library so that you can access all the text books that are affiliated to your discipline all over the world. We are also discussing with Texas A and M in the US on agriculture. And also we intend to affiliate with the Indian Institute of Technology. We are not only going to affiliate with them but also source resources from them to make sure that we bring our IT section to that level so that we can start producing people here to help us in IT development because the world is going digital and with digital approach to issues it becomes easy to manage ever-growing population. So we want to start this university on a very good footing so that our products become the university’s marketing strategy. The initial product of this university will be the ambassadors of the university.
There seems to be many private universities in Nigeria, what’s your take on proliferation of private universities in the country and how can they be standardised to ensure quality?
The universities in Nigeria are regulated by the National Universities Commission. The mere fact that they are regulated by the NUC means that the procedure is standardised because for you to be licensed and your courses accredited there are procedures you must follow and there are procedures for being licensed, so it is standardised but then even though there are standards, promoters have their own personal character, personal differences which rob off on whatever they do. People who are quality people might go beyond the standards to provide e-quality service.
The NUC gives general standards to all the universities but in terms of quality or output of the students that is where the individuality of the universities comes to play.
As an educationist, what would you suggest towards improving the quality of primary and secondary education in the country and checking failures in WAEC, NECO and other examinations?
I believe that by putting the right premises we can achieve the best of results because Nigerians are generally very intelligent people: Teachers have to be paid well; they need to be trained etc. Governor Oshiomhole has exposed where teachers couldn’t even write or read and yet they are teachers in our schools. So, what do you expect these teachers to produce if they themselves cannot read and write and the cases are everywhere in the country.
So I strongly believe that we go back to the teacher training college system, where the teachers are taught and certified. Government should make it a policy that nobody who is not certified is allowed to teach in our schools. You can’t just come because you went to the university, bring your certificate that you want to be a lecturer or a teacher in a secondary school or teacher in primary school. No, because beyond teaching in academics there is so much more in primary and secondary education; in the curriculum, in their behaviour and in other activities of the school.