Prof. Ayatse doing us Proud: Professor James Ayatse is the vice chancellor of Federal University, Dutsinma, Katsina State. In this interview with MUAZU ELAZEH, he says Nigerian universities perform poorly in global ranking because of poor internet facilities. He also discusses his administration’s efforts to tackle the teething problems of the new university. Federal University, Dutsinma, is the first to commence academic activities among the nine new universities established by the federal government. How has the take-off been? Well, we started with appointments to the position of vice chancellor and we were presented to the government and people of Katsina State on March 10, 2011. That is when all the activities started as we were able to mobilize, move in and start recruiting the staff. We did renovation of take-off campus with massive support from the Katsina State government which donated N1 billion for the take-off projects. The money was used to renovate a lot of structures and put some new structures on site. We also had a take-off grant of N1.5 billion from the federal government through Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund). The combination of these two sources of funding facilitated our efforts to prepare for the take-off and, understandably, we were the first to take off in July last year. We have already started our second set of students. Again we are the first among the nine universities to start the second set of students. We have the largest number of programmes and we also have good staffing on ground, the facilities are adequate. In fact, we are on. Where does the university hope to be in the next five years? In the next five years, we hope to have carved out a niche for ourselves and distinguish ourselves in our area of strength. This university is configured to be ICT-driven. We want our services to be ICT-driven; we want to capitalize and emphasize that and develop strength in it. Right now, all our exams, everything, is ICT-driven. Students get results in less than three weeks after exams, and they can access their results anywhere in the world. So, in the next five years, we want to be a university that is efficiently operated and managed with academic activities designed to be cutting edge. We hope to be among the top universities in Nigeria and, hopefully, get listed in the top 200 universities in the world. Emphasis is gradually shifting to entrepreneurial education due to dearth of white-collar job; what is the university doing in the area of entrepreneurship training? Well we have just started and, already, we have started the entrepreneurship programme. We are hoping, by next year, to have our entrepreneurship centre fully developed. We do believe in hands-on experience. We believe that the students should not just have a university education that is theoretical, but they should be able to use their hands to contribute to the economy of this nation. So everything is planned to have a full integrated entrepreneurship centre. We are already compiling and developing areas and skill that will be mounted in the university. Already, there is a lot of emphasis on computer hands-on experience and the students are quite comfortable with that. We plan to move to our permanent site, all things going as planned, before the end of the year, and as we move programmes to permanent site, we will have our entrepreneurship programme there, fully developed and equipped. We also planned to tailor our programmes in such a way that students will have sufficient time to learn new skills that will create an advantage for them in the competitive labour market. How many programmes and faculties is the university starting with? For now the university is organized in three faculties and within these three faculties, we have 18 programmes. We have Faculty of Arts, Management and Social Sciences, Faculty of Science and Education, and Faculty of Agriculture and Agricultural Technology. That is the general guideline that we were given. But as you can see, the faculties are configured in a way that they are all gathering manpower and resources. In one or two years to come, the faculties will actually be more than this. For example, the Faculty of Arts, Management and Social Sciences will naturally be split into three faculties. The Faculty of Science and Education will be split to two faculties and the Faculty of Agriculture and Agricultural Technology will be split in two faculties, too. So this is how we plan to grow as a university. The university recently awarded scholarship to some students; what informed that decision? The scholarship was awarded to outstanding students and we did that because of our belief that it is important to promote excellence, and create an environment for healthy competition among students. So right when they came in, we told them those that did very well will be given scholarships. We did that because we believe that we have to go back to where emphasis is on quality. The essence is to make sure students have something to look up to. We want them to focus themselves on excelling. Federal University, Dutsinma, is at its pioneering stage; what are the challenges you are facing? As you can imagine, in any pioneering work, there are challenges of setting up the system, like getting the required manpower, especially now that we have many universities competing for the same manpower - to get PhD holders as teachers. Getting the critical mass of staff that we need is a challenge, especially experienced peoples like professors and senior academics. But then, that is being addressed as we have been able to get experienced people who are on board as either on full time or on sabbatical. For the student population we have now, we have the required number of staff but we had to go through several ways to be able to arrive at that. Another challenge is that of infrastructure. We need infrastructure to be able to take off and at pioneering stage, there is always a challenge of having all the offices and lecture hall we need, and there is the issue of students’ hostel, staff quarters and so. These are real challenge. We are doing well relative to the other eight universities. But then we are still facing challenges of infrastructure as we don’t have enough offices for the staff; we don’t have adequate hostel accommodation for the students and staff - getting houses is a real challenge because of where we are located. But thank God, for every challenge we have, there are steps towards addressing them. The local government council has constructed and handed over to us some houses that we will rent to the staff. For offices, new structures are coming up. Then there are other real challenges like water and power. We don’t get public power supply here – for 24 hours, we are on generators. As young as we are as a university, we already have more than 10 generators to cater for, and it is quite expensive; that is a very big challenge. Supply of clean water is equally a big challenge. But thank God, effort is being made as the Katsina State government is upgrading the Dutsinma Dam to provide the volume of water that is needed. We are also trying to do our own mini-waterworks to meet our immediate water needs. And then the big one for all universities is the bandwidth for internet service. We are paying very hugely to get the bandwidth to run our internet service. It’s a lot expensive as we pay N2 million every month for that. We are hoping that, eventually, when the national project of getting bandwidth for tertiary institutions by the NUC is concluded, we believe that will be a relief. The challenges are there and they are those which every new university will go through, but we are ahead of others because of the commitment and support we are getting. Nigerian universities performed poorly in the recent ranking of world universities and, indeed, African universities; what could be responsible for this? Unfortunately, Nigerian universities are not doing very well. The key thing in most of these rankings is that they concentrate on web-metric analysis - your presence on the web and internet facilities. Generally, internet facilities in Nigeria are at a very low stage. We are having serious issue with the internet access. We don’t have the bandwidth to be able to do what we need to do. They used web-ranking, that is, the frequency with which people access your site. And when it comes to that, Nigerian universities do very poorly. People are not coming to look at your research, the staffing you have and the physical facilities and so on. They are just looking at your internet, how are you readily accessed on the internet. In most of the rankings, that is what they are using and, for that reason, Nigeria is doing very poorly. But I believe that with the steps that the current administration is taking, there will be improvement in the ranking of Nigerian universities. Do you subscribe to the view that the nation has more universities than it actually needs? I don’t subscribe to that view. If you look at the demand for university education, then you will appreciate why that view is not tenable. Up until now, we have not been able to admit up to 20 percent of students who want university education. So we cannot say we have more than is needed. For this year alone, no fewer than 1.5 million candidates have sat for JAMB, and for the total admission of Nigerian universities, we are not yet able to hit 200,000. You have 1.5 million wanting to come to the university but fewer than 300,000 are likely to be admitted. It is a range between 15 and 20 percent of students that is given the opportunity. People don’t have access to university education because the chances are limited. Even the number of universities that are available, they talk about carrying capacity. Our carrying capacity is not sufficient to absorb all the youths that want to benefit from university education. So I cannot say that we have enough universities. But I think what is important is for the government to expand the capacity of existing universities, in addition to the number. While we increase the number, we should also expand the capacities of existing old universities so that they will take on more students. When that is done, and we are able to take up to 25-30 percent of those that want to benefit from university education, then we can say we are somewhere. But at the level we are now, it’s so low and so I cannot argue that we have more universities than we need. What is your take on the view that rather than establish more universities, the federal government ought to expand infrastructure in existing ones? Well, that is one way of looking at it. I believe both will be needed. We need to expand the capacity of existing ones and establish new universities. We are talking about access. What the federal government is doing now is to have an equitable distribution of federal universities so that every state in the nation has a federal university. That is commendable. But while it is doing that, it is also good to expand the capacity of the existing universities. Yes, the private sector can come in and we have private universities and so on but the capacity of these universities are low. A good number of them cannot take more than 1,000 students. So it is important that federal government continue to expand existing universities so that we have both quality and quantity. We need to get to a stage where one university has over 200,000 students. It’s possible if facilities are expanded. But if they are not expanded and pressure is made to bear on the universities, they continue taking more than their capacity and classrooms that were meant to take 50 are now taking 100, it becomes a source of concern. So, what we need is an expansion of both the numbers and the capacity of the universities. The universities churn out hundreds of thousands of graduates every year with many arguing that the quality of these graduates keep decreasing by the day; what could be responsible? It boils down to issue of capacity - when the capacity of universities is low and pressure is made to bear on them to take more than they can actually cater for - for example, you have a classroom that has capacity for 100 students but that small place takes 2,000 students. There is the issue of eye contact and person-to-person interaction between the students and the lecturers, and because of this large intake, the ratio of teacher to student is becoming weakened. That is one area. So when you have large number of students relative to the teachers, it’s difficult to monitor them. It’s difficult to assess them properly and that is what is contributing to the falling quality. Another issue is that when we want to talk about quality, we have to start from the primary because at the university, all we can talk about is garbage in and garbage out. If the quality that is coming to the university is already poor, the university can only manage to improve marginally on it. People come into the university with all the number of credits but they cannot defend it because they cut corners. Of course, at the university, they also cut corners. Additionally, too, the society is more interested in materialism and paper qualification. So the old culture of a teacher sitting down with a few number of students and making sure he grooms them properly is gone. While he is labouring, somebody is out there amassing wealth. Because the teacher is a human being, he therefore joins the rat- race of trying to increase his income. The totality of this is contributing to what we see as decrease in standard. These are the problems we are facing. It’s not just the problem of the university; it’s a problem of the society. What is the way out? The way out is to go back to our value system. As a nation, we must re-assess our value system and go back to these good values of quality, excellence, integrity and the like. If we continue on the belief that what is important is ‘man knows man’, notes and so on, as people get out, quality graduates are not able to find jobs. So for us, there must be emphasis on quality. No nation progresses without investment on research and development; how best can we motivate lecturers to engage in research? The way to promote research is to fund research. The government should have a programme where research activities are funded, I mean, research targeted at addressing national problems. Government must be prepared to use the output of research coming from our universities. There must be a deliberate policy of government to promote research in Nigerian universities. All over the world, the top researchers, academics and scientists you hear mentioned are Nigerians. So, we have the brains and determination. So what we need is the motivation. Let the enabling environment for research be created.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 07:33:21 +0000
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