LASU signs MoU on degree verification
By Sola Fadare, Lagos


Lagos State University (LASU), Ojo has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Risk Control Services Nigeria Limited, a leading security and claims verifications consultancy on Risk Control’s Degree Validate product. The signing ceremony which was held at the office of the Vice Chancellor of the university , Professor Lateef A. Hussain had the Managing Director of Risk Control Services Nigeria Limited, Mr. Olufemi Ajayi and other key officers of the institution in attendance.

Degree Validate, the service, is a degree verification tool that organisations, institutions and individuals can use to verify claims of one being a graduate of a school in Nigeria. The service also helps to reduce the amount of time spent in going to schools for verification exercises by organisations.

The signing of the MOU passes the verification of all degrees awarded by LASU to Risk Control Services Nigeria Limited. From the September 1, 2008, Risk Control Services Nigeria Limited has the mandate to verify results of graduates of the institution as may be requested by organisations or individuals. The signing of the MOU relieves the institution of the burden of verifying results allow it to face it main responsibility of providing quality education.

The signing of the MOU is one of the steps taken by Lagos State University to reposition itself as one of the top five (5) higher institutions of learning in Nigeria. The institution is working to position itself in the top 5 cadre of tertiary institutions in Nigeria. LASU is the first institution to partner with Risk Control on DegreeValidate.

Professor Adebayo Adebiyi, Vice Chancellor, Achievers University, Owo, started his career at the University of Ibadan, where he was a Head of Department, member of the Senate, among other key offices he held. He was later at the Bells University, Ota, as Dean, Faculty of Natural and Applied Sciences. In this interview with Sulaimon Olanrewaju, the professor of Applied Zoology speaks of the differences between private and public universities, the uniqueness of Achievers University and how to improve education service delivery in the country. Excerpts:

Given your background as somebody who had worked both at the public and private universities, what do you think are the basic differences between the two?
The differences are many. In a private university, the chain of bureaucracy is very short. So, you can get things done faster than in a public university. In a public university, the vice chancellor has to go to Abuja and start moving from desk to desk. When he finishes with NUC (National Universities Commission), he probably has to go to the Ministry of Finance before he can get anything out. But here the chain of command is very short. All the VC needs to do is to articulate what the university needs with the Senate and he gets to the chairman of council, who himself is a member of board of trustees. I can get things done within 24 hours here. There is no way you can get that done in a public university except money has been appropriated for it. Even if money has not been appropriated for something here and all of a sudden I see that the thing is needed immediately, I just phone the chairman and tell him about the need. All he will say is that I should go ahead.


So, it makes things much easier, though it is more challenging running a private university than a public one. In public universities, especially the first generation ones, all the structures are fully developed; all the chains of command are fully developed. But in a private university that is just about six months old, the VC plays the role of so many people and so many committees rolled into one.


What has been your experience as pioneer VC of a private university?
Quite challenging. It is challenging in the sense of how to put structure on the ground and coping with the problem of power generation. Sometimes when you even have the money, you don’t get diesel to buy. All of these municipal services are taking quite a chunk of our money. But we are managing to cope. Our number is still very small. We believe that even at the ultimate development we don’t think we want to have more than 5000 students, so we can put our hands on a lot of things. We try to do what we know we can do best and try to add value to what is already on the ground. It’s been very exciting though challenging because there are things that I just think overnight and have to wake up very quickly and work out how to implement those things because things keep changing on a daily basis in a young university.


What is the vision of Achievers University?
The vision of the university is to be the best in Africa and one of the best in the world. Now, we have a vision of building a total person. One of the criticisms about the new crop of Nigerian university graduates is that they are not market-worthy. What we have done is to try to put in some centres that can enhance our programmes. Currently, we have two colleges on the ground. That is part of our first phase of development. By the way we have a 15-year development programme in three phases of five years each. We are just beginning our first phase in which we will have just two colleges. In the second phase, which will start in the sixth year, we will bring on board the college of engineering and technology and then environmental studies. In the last phase that we will enter into in the 11th year, we will bring in college of medicine. Of course, some other things can come in in the process, depending on how things change in the country.


At inception, we created three centres to enhance our own curricula. We have what we call the Centre of Professional Training and Development, this is a centre that coordinates professional examination all across the disciplines. Our vision is that our students will be able to have professional qualifications such as ACA, Cisco, Oracle etc as at graduation. So, they will not only have their degrees, they will also have professional qualifications. That will give them an edge.


The second thing is to enhance the entrepreneurship programme that NUC has asked us to include in the university programme. We have elevated it into a centre with a wide range of vocations and cottage businesses. A student can choose any of them and be trained both in practice and theory. So that by the time he is leaving the university, he is equipped to the extent that if he chooses to be on his own he can really make a good living, practising his vocation. We hope that by the time we get to the fifth year, our micro-finance bank will have come on board and we will be able to give soft loans to our students who want to be on their own. It is a three-in-one programme that we have for our students; you take your degree, you have your professional qualification as well as vocational training. That will require a lot of time from our students. It means they won’t have time for mischief.


This is our vision for our students. We want to make sure that we operate in areas that we are very comfortable with. Though we are a conventional university, we don’t offer all the programmes we have in conventional universities, we pick our choices and work within that.


Do students have to pay for these additional training programmes?
They won’t pay for the training but to be registered for the professional examinations, they have to pay. The university will assist in the registration but they have to pay for the registration.


Your vision is to be the best university in Africa. Do you have the full complement of staff to accomplish that vision?
No university ever has full complement of staff at the onset. The university grows and acquires complement of staff. In any case, the NUC even dictates the level of staff that you can have at every level. It depends on the number of students you have and the number of programmes you run. The number of staff you have depends on a certain ratio that NUC has set. If you don’t stay within that ratio, you will find yourself in a very difficult situation because it is something that has been researched over the years and they know that if you stay within that ratio you will maintain quality and standard and you won’t carry excess baggage.


Of course at the onset, you sometimes overshoot that ratio because you know that the university will grow to meet those people. For example, those areas that we outsource like the cleaners and security people, we employ more than we should have under the NUC ratio but we know that we will grow to meet that. That is not a big problem for us.


There should be universality in a university. Do you have foreign staff members or do you have plans to have some? Do you have plans for exchange programmes or linkages?
We have just dispatched some letters for linkage programmes. We are also working with the British Council for linkages with British universities and things like that. It is one of the things that make for the universality of a university. If you are just a tin god within your own little environment, you are nowhere. You have to reach out to the world because the world of knowledge changes every minute. At the present funding even in public universities, no university can have a full complement of what it needs. So, we need to link with universities in advanced countries where you can send your staff on staff development, short term exchange programmes etc. We are working on that and we are already linking up with foreign staff. Right now, we don’t have any foreign staff because we are just six months old and started after all the universities had resumed but we are looking forward to employing foreign staff. We are also linking up with Nigerians in the Diaspora and they have been contacting us. Some of them want to come back for a short period of three or six months and we have been responding. We hope that by the time we get to the second year, things will begin to get better.


Research is an essential part of the university system. What are your plans for research in this university?
A university is not worthy of existence if it has no plans for research. There are three components of the mission of any university; teaching, research and public service. There is no way you can advance knowledge without research because research is like the laboratory from where you gain knowledge and plough back that knowledge into the classroom. So, in all programmes, there are plans for research; our laboratories are being stocked and very soon our central laboratory system will come on stream.

We have a central teaching and research laboratory on the plan which will not only serve us but will also be put to the service of whoever wants to use it for a fee. So, it is an integral part of a university that is worth its salt. You can just sit down and say you won’t do research. How are you going to relate to your environment? How are you going to relate to the nation? It is the responsibility of those in universities and research institutes to find solution to the problems in the society. That is what we still need to imbibe in this country; our leaders, our people in the private sector need to realise that the people in universities and research institutions are tools for development and they should make use of them. The idea of wanting to carry out a research and taking it abroad should stop. Most of the big companies in the country link up with their mother companies abroad to do research, that is not fair. It is not fair on the nation. Go to any big corporation abroad, hardly will you not find Nigerians holding key positions as researchers. They are people who have migrated from Nigeria to these countries. Those of us who are here we have been in the universities abroad and we did very well. The only difference between those countries and ours is the way the government of other countries fund their own universities. They see universities in other places as tools for development.

University and research institute staff should be made sufficiently comfortable so that they won’t feel inferior material wise to their colleagues in the corporate world. They should be made sufficiently comfortable such that they can sit down and think through the problem of the nation to get a solution.


What do we have in Nigeria, the moment a lecturer gets home, there is no current, water is not running, the wife tells him there is no gas, so he is fagged out. Research work is a mental work. Sometimes ideas come to you in the dead of the night and you want to put on the light and make some jottings. If you are living within the university, you may even want to go to your laboratory even in the night. But the government does not recognise the need for those things. They look at it as if university staff are over pampered. But that is not the case. There is nothing any nation can do without backing it up with proper research. Look at this example; if you go to any supermarket abroad and you want to buy a shirt, no matter how big or small you are you will get your size. Why? It is backed up with research. From their population census they know the height, the weight, everything. And the private sector is tapping into the database to meet the need of the people. But here, it is a different kettle of fish. We need a leadership that will understand that this nation can only be developed by Nigerians. You can go and bring in 20,000 World Bank experts; they can’t develop this nation for us. I know the nooks and crannies of my town, you know yours. There is no foreigner that knows your place better than you. You know your people. If it is a Social Science research, you know how you can deal with your people, how you can encourage them to talk. How can a foreigner do that?


How do you think the government should handle the issue of funding research? Do you think there should be a pool from which researchers can draw or what?
Normally, government will have a pool of money from which researchers can draw. But government should also have projects to which they will attract researchers. Look at JF Kennedy; he planned to land man in the moon within 10 years. He did not just say that, he put his money where his mouth was and funded the project. Government can have a policy that it wants to solve a problem and mobilise researchers to go to work on the project. There are centres of excellence all over the place and I must say that centres of excellence are not dashed out. A university becomes a centre of excellence by the quality of work that is done there. Having identified the centres of excellence, these could be funded to embark on the research project. When it comes to research, we must do away with federal character. If the pool of your researchers are from the North, let the people do it.

Do not say because of federal character, Ogun people must be represented, or that there must be somebody from Calabar or elsewhere. Let the best hands be given the job. If you do that, you end up getting nothing. That is what I mean by putting your money where your mouth is. In this country, we use sentiments in so many things. I believe that federal character, much as it is a political solution, should also be balanced on the basis of quality. If you are bringing somebody from Position X, and let’s say you need somebody with an A in a particular subject at the school certificate level, then bring people with A from Oyo, the North and everywhere to compete. Don’t bring people with B from some areas to compete with those with A. If we continue to do that we will never get anywhere. These are some of the ways we can move forward in research.


What do you think the government should do to correct the malaise in the education system?
We need to provide a conducive environment for education. Even at the primary school level, the environment must be appealing to the pupils. If you go to some primary schools, all you will see are dilapidated buildings. To me the best of structures should be in primary schools so that those little kids are impressed from the word go. Everything that a teacher needs to motivate them should be there. Once you do that, you bring out the best in them. The same should be done at the secondary school level. Then the job in the university will be easy. It will just be polishing. The entire education system needs overhauling. It should not just be an ad hoc kind of thing. We need to start from the beginning and do things the way they ought to be done. We need to do the right thing about education. Underlining everything is education. If you are properly educated you will scarcely fall sick because you know the kind of food to eat, you know when not to expose yourself etc. Even those who are enemies of the state will not do some things if they are properly educated. They won’t cut electric wires, they won’t vandalise pipelines etc because they know that those things are important to them and their families. So, education is very important to the well being of mankind.


 

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