Parameters for world universities ranking unfair to Nigeria —EKSU VC
When I assumed office, I presented a nine-point vision which articulated my focus for radical restructure and remodeling of the university and I started with the area of infrastructure. Looking around, we’ll see that infrastructure is growing. Our vision is to sustain such growth and to even develop upon the achievement of the past Vice-Chancellor. I also spoke about intellectualism. That is, I will want our students to be equipped adequately in order to compete favourably with other students all over the world. I also envisage staff that will be globally competitive and in achieving these, I profound that, there should be exchange of programmes as staff and student going abroad could also bring people from abroad. We are also thinking of internationalisation that is we cannot talk of a University without being universal. Academic programme makes a university and therefore, we are fashioning out a situation where we are going to make our system conform to international standard and practices. Aside from that, I talked of informatics that is our system will be radically developed to come up to real ICT platform. When I came on board, we were predominantly manually driven and I felt that a 21st Century university should not be manually driven. So, I had that vision that, we will develop our portal, Website and our Network system in the university using optic fiber. I also said that, we need to employ modern day ICT specialists and I’m happy to inform you that, only last week, we interviewed some programmers and we are thinking of employing three of them. I talked about Internally Generated Revenue a cardinal point among my vision statements because a university in this present age cannot rely on government in terms of capital or recurrent spending. So, I have the vision to actually work seriously in the area of IGR so that we can turn our
Many universities in the country have had their share of crises, what measures have you put in place to prevent crisis in EKSU?
I said it the other time that we are for peace in our university. What I can say now is that, nobody fights what is right. Most of the crises we have in our universities precipitate on the fact that, there are doubts on executives. If an executive attains a position and the union doubts his or her integrity, students cannot vouch for anything he or she says then there will be crisis in that particular university. I therefore believe that, the antidote to crisis by universities should be transparency. The management should be transparent. When there is money, say there is money and when there is no money, say there is no money.
Sir, for the first time, education sector is having the highest budget allocation this year, what does this mean to you?
Money answers all things. When there is money in the Educational sector, I want to believe if such resources are not mishandled, we’ll be able to touch every sector of our Education enterprise. There will be no complaint about payment of staff, purchase of equipments, good buildings will be in the institutions, teaching and learning facilities will be available and lots more.
In your opinion, do you think the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board is still relevant for admission into tertiary institutions?
If you look at how Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) started and where they are today, you will commend the body particularly Prof. Dibu Ojerinde who is the Registrar of that particular establishment. When he started, people complained about cheating and they quickly came into it and started electronic testing and that electronic testing is an advanced e-testing not just ordinary. They use random items and candidates will be sitting side-by-side doing different things. As at now, when students write the exams within some hours, their results can be out and the idea of cheating completely minimize if not eradicated and even the organization has made it to the extent that there are no crisis in examination centres anymore. So, I score JAMB very high on this.
Despite NUC’s efforts in improving standard in Nigerian universities, our universities are still poorly ranked. What do you think is the problem?
In this area of ranking, I am going to speak in a different way today because the ranking to me is only predominantly one of the indices of colonization and this thing goes with what I’m saying that we don’t rank things that do not fall on the same scale. It is like ranking measurement using metre with ranking using grams. How can we be ranking universities in Nigeria with universities in the United States? Let’s use our parameter here whether they will not fail ranking in United States too. So, the point is that, it’s still an object of colonisation. What are the parameters they use in ranking? They’ll say if you are not using internet enough, you will not be ranked among good universities. So, ranking itself should be well defined. I believe that there should be national ranking. Nigeria should have their own ranking system; West Africa should have their own ranking system to the extent that we can say this is the best university in Nigeria. Ranking should take note of peculiar environmental situations. We are not as technologically developed as the other countries. There is what we call digital device. Because of digital device, they are more privileged than us here. Therefore the ranking is biased. So, they should be a way of normalizing it.
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