FUNAAB VC SPEAKS UP ON JAMB ADMISSION PROCESS.

The Vice-Chancellor, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, and President, Association of African Universities, Prof. Olusola Oyewole, speaks about the nation’s tertiary education in an interview.

 He said and i quote "No Nigerian university is among the first 1,000 in the world and One should be worried about the poor ranking because, as a country we would be proud to find Nigerian universities among the first 50 or even among top 100 in the world. However, one is not so disturbed, because we are competing with other universities that have been in existence for hundreds of years. I think what is important for us now is not the ranking. What should really be our concern is the relevance of our universities to our own development. "

 He also said The order by The Education Minister, Mallam Adamu Adamu, has ordered universities to stop conducting post-UTM To an extent, you may say it infringes on university autonomy. On the other hand, you may also look at it that the federal universities belong to the Federal Government. More or less, the person who is putting down the money should have control over what is happening. Nevertheless, universities should still be giving a free hand in choosing who they want in the school.

• But is post-UTME still relevant?  

 We need to sustain post-UTME or look for other means of ensuring that students who are coming in through the JAMB are the qualified ones who also wrote the examination. We are not sure that JAMB has the fool-proof solution to the problems that it is facing.


ASUU claims that the Treasury Single Account is impeding research and infrastructure development in universities. What is your take on TSA?
I quite agree that the Treasury Single Account is impeding research and academic activities in Nigerian universities. You can imagine the shock that our universities have, waking up one day to find out that our funds have been moved away from the commercial banks to an account that we cannot even identify.
As I speak, there are funds of this university that have been moved away and have yet to be located in any system within the Central Bank of Nigeria. More worrisome is the fact that there are some external research grants that have also been moved away. These researchers cannot do the research work. The funds cannot be located right now and this is creating a bad image for our university system.
The international funding agencies are discouraged by the development connected with the TSA. It is not easy to convince them that when they bring money to support research in Nigeria, they should go to the CBN and then the means of accessing the money in the Central Bank of Nigeria is a problem. The Cassava Adding Value for Africa initiative is a typical example. CAVA is a Bill& Melinda Gates project championed by Nigeria, particularly FUNAAB, alongside five other countries. Suddenly, over $2m of the CAVA project has been moved away and almost a year after the commencement of TSA, we have yet to locate where the fund is. The danger is that the CAVA project is now being moved away from Nigeria to the United Kingdom. This is a big challenge.

Still on the TSA, what advice do you have?

For me, I think there is the need to exclude universities from the TSA system. Alternatively, government money should go into TSA, while research funds from outside the country should go directly into the universities’ accounts and be operated in the commercial banks.
Lecturers are accused of not doing enough to solve social problems and avert hunger in the land. What is your response?

 What are the challenges you have faced as the VC of FUNAAB?

I have always said that a Nigerian vice-chancellor operates in an environment different from that of his foreign counterparts. If you are a VC in the United Kingdom or anywhere in Europe, you do not need to be concerned about electricity; you do not need to be worried about water. You can only be interested in research and administration. In Nigeria, you are like a local government chairman or a governor, whereby you need to think about so many things that governors will think about.
More importantly, the system of higher education in Nigeria is politicised. There is also the challenge of unions, which every VC needs to contend with. I think these issues are understandable because we are in a country where we are facing many challenges. There is stress everywhere. The average person on the streets is facing many problems. There is unemployment. Many of the students have no hope of getting jobs after graduation. I think the society is experiencing too much stress and the universities cannot be isolated from these challenges.