By SAM OTTI
The Vice-Chancellor, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB), Prof. Olusola Oyewole, had another feather added to his cap when he was elected the President of the Association of African Universities (AAU). He presided over the 13th General Conference of the AAU held recently at the University of Omar Bongo, Libreville, Gabon.
The conference, which meets every four years, is the apex institution of the association, responsible for policy formulation and overseeing the Conference of Vice-Chancellors, Rectors and Principals (COREVIPS), of all its member Institutions.
In this interview, Oyewole, who had spent 28 years in FUNAAB, explains his vision for the university and his determination to raise the bar of academic excellence among African universities.
You assumed office as the Vice Chancellor over a year ago. How has the journey been?
It has been great. I have been teaching in this university since 1985. I became a professor 12 years ago. In the course of my stay in this school for the past 28 years, I have had opportunities to work outside this university.
I have worked with the AAU, firstly as a Project Officer for quality assurance. While working as project officer in charge of quality assurance, I had the responsibility of coordinating the World Bank project on quality assurance for universities in Africa.
Really, that was in 2007 and 2008. One of the things I did then was that I made sure we built up capacity for quality in institutions and countries in Africa.
As at then, we found out that not many countries in Africa had a body like the National Universities Commission (NUC) regulating higher education in their respective countries. One of the things I did was to work with these various countries and ensured that they develop their own regulatory bodies. From there, I moved on to the African Union Commission. I was employed there as a senior expert on higher education before I returned to my university and a year later, I became the Vice Chancellor.
I see leadership as having a vision, making the people in the environment or in the community to buy into that vision. I came in with a vision to make FUNAAB a different university in Nigeria. Our vision is to build a world class university in this place. We are a University of Agriculture but we are looking at it as if we are building future leaders for this nation and for the entire world. When I say our students, I am not just seeing them as students; I see them as people who will take leadership responsibilities in different aspects of life.
My experience in the past one year is to say that I am on the way of fulfilling my vision of making this university a world class university. And this can be seen in the last Webometric ranking, even though I do not believe that Webometric ranking is a reflection of total quality of a university, I look at Webometric ranking as a commitment to excellence. We came second in the last Webometric ranking. We came second in Nigeria. We came 29th in Africa but first as the University of Agriculture in Africa. We also came seventh as a university of agriculture in the world.
What are you doing differently that would make your students stand tall among colleagues?
There is a unique programme we call Community Based Farming Scheme. What we do in this scheme is that we were able to get four locations in Ogun State. Four different communities agreed to give the university 50 hectares of land. What we are doing is that on a yearly basis, students of this university, who are in their 400 level, spend six to nine months in these local communities working on farms, practising agriculture in these local communities, introducing the local farmers to modern agricultural techniques. We started this programme for two years now, when you get to these communities now, they have changed. The lives of these communities have improved with our presence. We now have information that some of our students that passed through this programme now go back to these communities to practice commercial agriculture.
Therefore, we, as a university, are building future farmers. We were able to challenge the young ones not to run away from the farms but to love the farms. Our students are not afraid of the rural setting because of this kind of programme we put in place. Go all over the place and you will find out that our students are one of the peaceful set of students in this country, highly peaceful and highly organized.
We put up strategies. When we had the last Students, I was not interested in who becomes the students union leader. I knew that whoever comes up, I have a plan for them. And what I did as soon as they were elected, I organized an external agency to take them through a leadership-training programme. We organized leadership training programme for our students and we have seen the effect of that on them.
When I came in, one of the things I promised was that our university would start a new session with a Commencement Lecture. Commencement Lecture is not strange to a place like the United States. It is not a common thing in this part of our world. What we did was to bring in somebody, who can challenge the young ones coming into the university system.
Last year, we invited the former Speaker of House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole. He delivered the commencement lecture to challenge these about his own life, so that these students would aim at a greater height. Look at the mission of our university: to raise great future leaders and generate knowledge. We are not just interested in books, we are interested in a total man.
Most graduates set their minds on white-collar jobs after their graduation from the university. How would you convince them to embrace farming and change the popular belief that their success lies solely on white-collar jobs?
That impression is changing. Those who had that orientation are realizing their mistakes. We are developing. Development in life is in phases. We are now in an era where the purpose of education should not be limited to getting a civil service job but being able to contribute to development of the people and the society. That is the new orientation and that forms part of the conference of the Association of African Universities held at Libreville, Gabon. We are talking about employability of graduates in Africa. We are saying that for graduates of African universities to be relevant, they should not have that orientation that they are going to the university to be able to get a white-collar job. They are going out to compete with other people. Therefore, they must acquire the necessary skills. For example, if you are a graduate of Chemistry and you don't have the simple skill of relating with people, ability to communicate with others or even the ability to use the computer, you cannot survive. We are now saying that young people should not just go to the university alone to get expertise in your subject area. Get the necessary skills that you need to become employable, necessary skills that you need to create jobs. Some years ago, I was the Head of Department, Food Science and Technology. Part of our programme is that our students spend about six months in some industries under the Students Industrial Work Experience Scheme (SIWES). I found out that only the children of the rich were getting placements for this programme. Others were not getting placements. As the HOD, I summoned them and told them that we can help ourselves. I asked them to form a pseudo company, it was not registered anywhere. We called the company Challenge Foods. I gave them a small amount and told them that they will not go to any industry but to stay on campus. I told them to appoint a Manager, a Production Manager and even labourers. They started producing on campus. Then, they were producing cashew juice and so many other things. The following year, some students offered not to go out but to stay with the Challenge Foods. About three years later, a students that participated in the programme sent me a sample of a product that he was making in the United Kingdom.
With inadequate funding coming to universities, how were you able to run FUNNAB programmes successfully.
We avoid wastage. We commit ourselves to discipline. One of the commitments I made when I was coming in was to provide a credible leadership for this university. As I look at it, leadership is everything. If the leadership is right, if the leadership is disciplined and focused, if the leadership has a vision, then, others follow.
What is happening in this university is not because of the Vice Chancellor. We are blessed in this university to have a great man as the first Vice Chancellor, Prof Adedipe. The foundation he laid for this university is what all of us appear to be riding on. I was here when he was the Vice Chancellor. I saw him as a man of discipline, a man committed to what he was doing at that time. All of us followed his footsteps. The second Vice Chancellor of this university happened to be the current Executive Secretary of the Prof Julius Okojie. You will see that our university has a great legacy. We have great people who have led us and we cannot fail.
Your vision of building a world-class university came at a time that Nigerian universities are ranked poorly among others in the world. Do you feel threatened by the results of this ranking exercise?
I am not bothered about their ranking. Really, the focus of universities in Africa today is different from the focus of universities in Europe. Our own focus or mission would be to make us relevant to our own people. The challenges facing us different are quite different from the challenges facing those in Europe. If my university can fulfill the vision set for it, then, I am okay. In terms of the ranking, we may not be able to compete with foreign universities because the criteria used for ranking is not fair.
For example, one of the criteria is the number of Nobel Laureate the university had produced. On that alone, we are disadvantaged. Therefore, when I was with the African Union, we developed another system that can help universities, not to rank themselves, but to improve their quality. We called it the African Rating Mechanism where institutions rank themselves based on the mission and vision of such university.
Low carrying capacity in universities has robbed many students the opportunity of accessing university education. How would you address this problem, starting with universities?
When you talk of the carrying capacity, you talk of the laboratory space, the classroom space, facilities and so on. When our university started many years ago, our orientation was that no course would have more than 100 students. So, classrooms were built to contain at most 100 students at a time. But now, things have evolved. We are no longer thinking of building 100 students capacity classrooms, we are now building 100 capacity lecture rooms.
What we are going to do at the AAU is to explore other modes of learning. There are distance learning, e-learning, the involvement of our classrooms to become ICT classrooms. Those are the ways we can meet the current challenges. I believe that our universities should keep on moving with developments. For the next one-week, 20 Vice Chancellors have been invited by an institution in Germany. Ten will come from Nigeria, while the other 10 will come from Ghana to visit some universities in Germany and see what they are ding. I think our university should no longer be local players. We should partner other universities from other parts of the world in order to make our university to be great. It is so sad that many young people today only think about university education. Our country should also be concerned with vocational education. We should also know that we need to support the improvement of our polytechnics. We must not relegate them to the background. The idea that it is only those that couldn't get university admission that should go to the polytechnic is not a good idea for our system. You can go to the polytechnic and still be fulfilled in life. So, polytechnic education is still relevant to our development.
The controversy between B.sc and HND certificates has dragged on for long. What is the way forward?
The controversy is a diversion. What is important is what the various graduates need to contribute to our development. We need those who can think and we also need those who can work with their hands.
All of them are needed. It is a political question to say which of the certificates is higher. As the President of AAU, I regard both of them as tertiary institutions. My own take is that everybody is needed for our development. Let's encourage all of them.
As an institution set up mainly for agriculture, running other programmes seemed like a digression from the initial mission for establishing the university. Why did you allow such programmes?
Agriculture is our major focus. But we now know that in agriculture, if you fail to construct good roads to the farmer's village, the food will get rotten in the village. We need engineers to construct the roads. For the farmer to survive, he needs water and irrigation. So, engineers are very relevant. In the past, we looked at agriculture as a developmental issue. Now, agriculture is a business and to promote it, you need business principles. The farmers of today should be farmers who can relate with the banks, take business decisions. If I have my way, despite the fact that we bear University of Agriculture, we should also be able to offer degrees in Law, Medicine because even as a farmer, you will have legal challenges. I am looking at a time when we will have dramatists in this institution. Drama is relevant, arts is relevant to agriculture. As an elite, you can only communicate with our local people through arts and drama. And that is why we need all of us. We do not want to be limited by the name, University of Agriculture. We want to be a university that is concerned about development. Indeed, this university would have been better called university of development.
Via: Sun News Online
That would always be the aim and vision of so many Nigerian VCs being that oiur Universities are nothing to write home about now.