In this interview with AHMED TUKUR, the Vice Chancellor, Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Professor Muhammed Akaro Mainoma, speaks on measures put in place to improve the 12-year old university amidst some challenges
My agenda for the university
Certainly, we have a structure that is already established. First, we want to build on what is already established and how we want to do it is to ensure we have the welfare of staff and students at heart and most especially the academic culture of the environment and to ensure that our people do what is ethically standard and also ensure the right teaching quality content and standard. Secondly, we will as well ensure the quality of research in terms of quality and quantity.
Relationship with host community
Recently, I went round to the places that our students live and the condition is very terrible, and in fact I was saying that even the students should also think of making their environment clean. But also, the governor is doing everything possible to build more hostels accommodations so that within the couple of one or two years, you will find out that we will have the majority of our students housed within the environment.
We also have some private developers that are working towards having standard hostels that will be properly managed.
To your question directly, we are doing everything possible to talk to the landlords to make the environment more conducive and recently we provided boreholes in those areas that our students live. So we are bordered about their welfare whether they are living in the university or outside the university.
University’s area of specialization
The university is just about twelve years and actually trying to get on its feet, because even the first set of PhDs are just afresh, so we are rolling to see what would be our major area of competences. But as of now, every faculty is doing its best and we have seven faculties and the research in these faculties are meeting international standard. So either agriculture or sciences, you find that we are bordered about geology, mining. In liberal arts, we are bordered about the quality of languages and culture of people. In the financial sector, we are concerned about the quality of reporting and those things that make for integrity in the system.
Take education for instance, we want to produce the best teachers that can take care of our primary and secondary schools. Also in the social sciences and political sciences, they are doing their very best to ensure we are actually on the map.
Other courses introduced
Within In the last couple of months, the institution’s Senate considers and approved guidance and counseling which was not available in the faculty of education because we see the need to have our people being guided and our people have keyed into it and we also introduced B.Sc taxation as a new course of study and we have split the department of religious studies into departments of Islamic studies and that of Arabic. There are efforts to ensure which ever units that can be created without much additional funds like for example B.Sc Taxation we have the people to teach these courses but the program was not there. So within the last four months, we have additional four courses.
Improving the lecturers
The first thing we do is to expose them, we make them participate in conferences so that they see what others are doing in those areas so that they now know what exactly is the current state of art in the disciplines they profess.
Secondly, it is to encourage them to participate in research, because research is something that you acquire the skills gradually so until you participate in doing it you will never have the skills. So, we are encouraging them to participate to what ever level.
Apart from making them take part in conferences, seminars, workshop and conduct researches, we also make it compulsory that every department must have departmental seminars because from the seminar people will generate ideas and conduct researches that can measure up to the International level.
Meeting up with increasing students’ population
Truly, we do not have enough manpower particularly at the higher level because for instance if you want to do master’s programme for every ten candidate you admit to do an M.Sc, you require one senior lecturer to supervise them. So, a situation where you have 200 people been admitted for a programme, it means for that purpose you require at least 20 senior lecturers and above. So, we have what we call visiting lecturers that are existing in other universities and they visit us here and on monthly basis we pay them about one hundred and fifty thousand naira and with that they ease off some of the challenges in terms of supervision and in teaching some of the courses. We pay the visiting lecturers over a million naira monthly.
It is not just about students coming into the university, but we also bring in the visiting lecturers and professors to also develop our own staff who enroll for postgraduate courses because most of the staff are either B.Sc or M.Sc holders and they are in the majority because the institution has just about 40 professors and out of about 700 people that we have as staff, we don’t have up to 200 that have P.hd. So, we are using these visiting lecturers in the post graduate school to develop capacity of our staff and also ensure that our own programmes at M.Sc and other courses are been managed properly and that way we are getting results.
So if you look at the level of graduation in our post graduate courses, it is really high and we are encouraged by what is happening with the kind of capacity that we build in our staff.
Improving the university’s road/security network
We are grateful to government for coming in to assist in terms of road network. In fact, left to the government, by now most of the roads in the university should have been tarred but because of some problems they had with some of the contractors because of lack of capacity and attitude. The intention is to ensure the roads were completed before the raining season but up till now, the project is still on and is entirely the fault of the contractors. The present one working appears to be doing at the pace that is satisfactory, so I hope very soon we will have major issues of road construction sorted out.
On the security matter you made mention of, we are making concerted effort but we realize that we are going to have a major investment to have the campus fenced. But for now, we are managing with security patrols and we have increased the number of security personnel to monitor the university because of increase in population and increase of activities within the university.
We are managing but a long term solution will be to have the whole university fenced because of even issues of encroachment as people will want to enter into the environment.
