We must have education that pays for itself – VC

As you prepare for one year anniversary can you tell us some of your achievements?Before I assumed duty, the university had a lot of problems; the academic staff and Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) were on strike. I had to bring them back from that strike after signing a MoU with them. There […]

As you prepare for one year anniversary can you tell us some of your achievements?
Before I assumed duty, the university had a lot of problems; the academic staff and Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) were on strike. I had to bring them back from that strike after signing a MoU with them. There were so many courses that were not accredited and they couldn’t graduate students such as Engineering, Veterinary and Medicine and the students were causing lot of problems. We went into negotiations with the students and their deans and as a result of our efforts we have graduated two sets now in engineering and veterinary. Also, a lot of structures are coming up in the university. Before I came, promotion was a very worrying process here, but so far we have promoted 22 professors and numerous associated professors and other categories of staff.
Some universities are gradually switching over from the faculty system of operation to collegiate, are you planning towards that in UniAbuja?
We have not done that. Here, we only have one college so far, that is the College of Health Sciences. It is not just adopting a system that matters but functionality of it matters. In the United States they have that collegiate system. But here we do believe that the faculty system we are having now may be much better because that gives us the opportunity to go into details. In fact what the collegiate system basically does is to bring so many related units into one college but in our university system we don’t usually agree building a team from diverse systems. The system is more of American and what we are running is more of British.
Universities are encouraged to widen the scope of their Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), what is the situation in UniAbuja?
When I took over as VC, one of the things I have paid attention to is IGR. What we are doing based on our own system is to try to do some Public Private Partnership (PPP) arrangements. We have a lot of land and we are making arrangements for people from outside to come and use these lands for other things so that we can generate revenue. So far, we have gotten people who want to build hostels, restaurants and others for farming activities. Recently, we signed MoU with about five farmers who agreed to cultivate various crops on our farms; produce table water, vegetable oil and some other things. We are hoping that in the next six months they will start bearing fruits. We have also gone to the Ministry of Water Resources asking for them to provide a dam that we can utilise for power and irrigation, and the agric-city coming up on the main campus.
The quality of graduates produced by our tertiary institutions is questionable because majority cannot defend their certificates after graduation, where do you think the problem lies?
In the 70s and 80s, that problem is not there because there were many foreigners in the system. Globally, anywhere you go to apart from Nigeria you will find out that there is a mix of multitude in the education sector. But in Nigeria it is not like that; universities in the regions are largely dominated by people from that region but that doesn’t happen overseas. In the 70s British people and Indians were all teaching here. The most worrisome aspect of the whole issue is that products from our education system are not getting to the market; rather most of them are left on the shelves. The second aspect I want to point out is what people tell us, that education in Nigeria before was very sound but is that the truth?  If we have a solid foundation and you build on that foundation it doesn’t crumble. When the white men came to Nigeria they were only teaching us how to read and write to interpret in churches, to do theoretical work in offices; that system has not drastically changed.  In other parts of the world, education is dynamic; people are into different areas but we are still traditional here that is why our educational system is going down. We are too homogenous as far as our education system is concerned and we need to be more heterogeneous to move forward educationally.
With the proliferation of universities, do you think the issue of access, equality and quality can be met?
Well, we are trying to solve the problem of access and equity by encouraging more people to go to school but what about the quality? Many of these private universities are employing the retired academicians from the federal system; some of them are in university using HND to teach, it’s as bad as that. I see all those things in various places, do they have enough staff? I went to a city in Germany where they started a new university and they called people from different parts of Germany who were Nobel Prize winners to come and train masters and degree students before they could start undergraduate programme but here they just open a university with virtually no lecturers so our quality will go down more. I think we are doing a great damage to this country; you open a new university without having adequate lecturers. It shouldn’t happen that way. Even the federal ones don’t have enough, not too many Nigerian universities can boast of adequate lecturers not to talk of the private ones.
Can these universities serve as solution to incidents of our students going abroad to study?
It is not the solution to our problems in the education sector. If the existing public universities in the country can admit the required number of students, I think things will change for the better. After all what is the strength of these new private institutions? Even federal universities that they are bringing in, some of them take only 500 students in a year. It’s just that we don’t know where we are facing. You cannot open a new university with about 3,000/4,000 capacity of students. Our universities here have about 15,000 capacity; only few universities are admitting up to 50,000 students. So it’s not just about opening a new university but, are they carrying out the functions of a university? And in our old universities are we doing research, how many times have you seen advanced research carried out elsewhere being carried out in our own universities. So we must focus on quality. However, every village can have a university but will that solve our problem? Can products of these universities be able to get jobs? Are they entrepreneurial enough to set up businesses that will employ them and employ others? These are things we should be looking at.
If you are asked to set educational agenda in the country what will it be?
First we must have education that is sustainable; education that pays for itself. We are looking for the federal government to fund education all the time. Secondly, I don’t know why people don’t want to come to Nigeria from elsewhere to study. In Ghana someone told me that in a university he went to do a sabbatical, there were 5000 American students – that is the multiplicity that makes that place to become a centre of excellence. So you cannot have universities that are very narrow. I am looking at the university that is strong and we must stimulate this. We have 11 centres of excellence that should be functional; some are aspects of our culture. So honestly, we are too lazy in this country.
The federal government is set to verify foreign certificates because of complaints that most of them are fake. How can this help in addressing the issue of fake certificate?
The problem of quality education in Nigeria is not caused by foreign degrees. Nigerians just want to travel abroad for studies, most of the schools they attend are not better that our secondary schools here. And when they come back if they are subjected to exams of Nigerian education standard only few of them will pass the exam. So what standard are we talking about?
Most public universities always have the problem of congestion, how are you coping with the situation in your varsity?
We are building more structures in order to curtail it though Nigerian universities are not developing fast but you need to do that if you must have more students. Every year about 1.4 million candidates sit for JAMB and we take only about 350,000 because our universities are not expanding. We must expand; have theatres where students can take lectures comfortably. Federal universities should be given opportunity to expand.
Your students are complaining about crash programmes, that lecturers only attend classes few weeks to exams. What would you say about this?
Those are human issues and they are very difficult to deal with. However, we are looking at this problem in a holistic manner to ensure that our lecturers have more time with the students. As a student you have the right textbook you should be able to do a lot of things by yourself at the undergraduate level but most of the students spend three quarters of their time on facebook and chatting and when exam comes they will fail. It is a lot of issues interacting. So we can’t just say the lecturers are not teaching. We have a committee and quality assurance unit and we also monitor the exams, but I can’t say we are free from the students’ claim.