Vice-Chancellor, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Prof. Bamitale Omole, in an interview with journalists, speaks on the challenges of administering a tertiary institution in Nigeria. SEGUN OLATUNJI was there
What are the challenges facing OAU now?
There are a lot of challenges. During my undergraduate days, there were few students but today we have about 35, 000 students with a workforce of about 6,000. You can imagine how big and cosmopolitan the institution is. It’s like a local government area and you can imagine the bill we pay on electricity and other services every month.
We pay about N30m on electricity alone and the government gives us about N13m, out of which we can only take out N3m. So, the question is how do you now get the balance every month?
What are the changes you have made since you became the VC?
Before I became the VC, Webometric ranking put the institution in number 79 among Africa’s best universities. We are now ranked 14th on the continent. When I became the VC, we were number six in Nigeria and I said in the next five years, we should be number three but today we are number one in Nigeria. This is a job that demands sacrifice and a lot of initiatives.
In the past, students had difficulties getting their results and the result was that many spent more years than they should for their courses. When I became the VC, I looked into the situation and found out that some people were exploiting the circumstances. Today, results are uploaded on the internet immediately after the lecturers must have completed the marking of the examination papers.
Some critics believe that Webometric rating is often influenced by politics. Do you agree with this?
That is not true and anyone who says this belongs to the Stone Age. There is nothing political about the ranking. The parameters used to rank the universities are clear. First, they want to know the output of your research, how the lecturers are conducting their research and in what areas. All these are put on the internet for assessment by a neutral body. They are also interested in how peaceful the institutions’ campuses are. OAU was shut down for nine months at a time and that accounted for its poor rating. So, there is nothing political about the ranking.
What about infrastructural facilities needed to drive teaching, learning and research in the institution?
Some few months back, eight universities tendered their bids for what is termed the cloud computing and telepresence facility. It is a $3.6m worth of World Bank project. OAU was among the institutions that tendered their bids and we won the contract.
It is a new generation 3D in computing. What that means is that students will be here in Nigeria performing experiment in our laboratory and the supervisor will be giving instruction in far away Harvard University. It is only in Ife that such a thing is happening. That is the way to be a 21st century university.
Instead of embarking on new projects in the school, what I decided to do is to complete all the abandoned projects. Some of them have been abandoned since 1982 just like the Environmental Design and Management building. It is the largest building on the campus but we have taken up the challenge to complete it and make it functional.
With the student population of about 35,000, how does the university cope with inadequate public facilities?
One third of our student population lives in our hostels. But we have begun the process of building more hostel facility by inviting private entrepreneurs. We have a place called students village where students pay for accommodation. The price is determined by the facility in the room.
Those apartments are much better than what we have in the hostel. Each student pays N2,050 per annum for a hostel accommodation but that has to change because in other universities, students pay more.
There is no home in Nigeria today where people pay N2,050 for rent per annum, using electricity, water and clean sanitary system.
What’s your comment on the falling standard of education in this country?
When I was in the primary school, all I did was arithmetic using my head to do simple calculations and for that age it was okay. Do you know that the mathematics that I did when I was in the secondary school is what they are doing in primary six now? That is the reality now because during my time, there was little competition in space technology and nanotechnology. In terms of the quality of what is taught in our schools, it has not really gone down; in fact it is increasing every day. People are anxious about the standard of our education because there is a lot of policy summersault.
When we were growing up, we knew the names of the country’s ministers because they retained their positions for a considerable period of time.
Today, in a year you can have up to five ministers in a ministry. Each of them will come with different policy and at the end of the day, what we have is movement without development.
As a result of that, pupils no longer receive standard education in schools. Teachers are no longer respected because the impression people now have is that the job is for those who fail to get better job opportunities.
Minister of Education, Prof. Rukayat Rufa’i, has been following her trajectory and I am not surprised because she is an educationist. If she is allowed to continue for more years, I am sure the result would be great.
When the nation itself is running in a circle, it affects all the other formations. Nigeria is at the lowest end of maternal health according to the UNESCO/UNDP rating. We have the highest maternal mortality rate. It is not only in education that we have this very depressing information. Let me mention one particular area, the register of English has really gone bad in Nigeria.
Students now speak sub-standard English that is not acceptable anywhere. In my days, I was using books but today students use the internet to solve academic problems. In my generation, all they taught us was physical organs in Biology, but today they talk about sex and molecular biology even at the secondary school.
Do you agree with those who believe that Nigerian graduates are not employable?
Well, it is a function of lopsidedness and the lack of policy. We have educational policy that is not fitted for the market place. Nigeria is the only nation in the world where every family wants to produce polytechnic and university graduates. We boast of having five graduates in a family doing nothing. Those who made great invention attended technical schools. In Nigeria, you have university agricultural graduates that should be on the farm for three years as part of their programme but they will only be there for three days. They don’t know how to use the tractor, harvester and other farm equipment. How can we have quality graduates when the school is closed for seven months in a year? The number of graduates that are coming out are more than what the economy can absorb.
The UNESCO has rated Nigeria as the country having the worst education indicators. How will you react to this?
I think they are right because there are pupils that sit on bare floor under trees in Nigeria today. Any nation that wants to develop must devote 30 or 40 per cent of its annual budget to education. We have not even met the UNESCO minimum recommendation for budgeting on education.
In many areas, the wrong people are filling the positions. Federal character will never help us. For the first time, people were happy that we won the African Cup of Nations, but what people are not talking about is that this is the first time Nigeria will assemble a team that has no federal character. There is timing for everything; I think that the issue of federal character should be looked into again.
Source: punchng.com
Source: punchng.com
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