UNIABUJA, an Institution Faced with a Myriad of Challenges: VC Speaks of his Vision

Professor Michael Umale Adikwu, 53, was elected Vice Chancellor of
the University of Abuja on June 30, 2014. A professor of Pharmacy, he lectured at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, consulted for the World Bank, and worked in medical institutions before his appointment two years ago. In this interview, he speaks on the challenges of repositioning the University of Abuja and how universities could be relevant to government and industries.
You’ve been VC of University of Abuja for two years. How has the journey been?
It’s been interesting. We’ve done quite a lot of things since I came in.
One thing I keep thanking God for is that this university was known for strikes. That has not happened for some time now. We’ve had difficult times, but we’ve been able to pull through. One of the things that would have caused us crisis from January is this shortfall in staff payment. Staff members are willing to tolerate anything, but not their salaries.

In terms of infrastructure, one of the most basic problems of
the University of Abuja is infrastructural development. If you go to the mini-campus, you will find that there is nothing there that you can call
university standard. The buildings are not spacious. There are no
lecture theatres. Thank God, in the campus now we have few ones
coming up, one for Science, one for Management Sciences, but they
are also limited. Those facilities at the mini-campus have no
classrooms that could take the large numbers of students that our
university usually have. But, on the whole, before I came, there were
no promotions. Today, we have over 150 people who have got to the
rank of professor and associate professor. So, we’re trying to clear the backlog. Most of the promotion arrears we have cleared, up to level 13. We are now looking at the other levels. My thinking was that while we are paying from our IGR, government should meet us at a point. So, we now have levels 14 and 15 promotions to implement. Government has promised to give us that.

In terms of staff training, we are using TetFund and NEEDS
assessment money to train our staff. Some people are doing their
Master’s, others their PhD. In fact, we are improving globally. When
you talk about a modern university, a lot of things are involved. You
have to talk about structures, because if you don’t have the right
infrastructure, you can’t talk about accreditation. It may interest you
that between 2005 and 2014, NUC didn’t come for accreditation. But
immediately I came in 2014, they came. What that implied is something I don’t want to get into, but they only came to look at Medicine, Agric and Engineering; the areas that were most problematic. They had accredited Agric before I came. When I got here, some students introduced themselves as Year 9. I asked them, ‘Are you doing your PhD?’ They said no, that they were first degree students.

Year 9?
Year 9. Some of the engineering students spent nine years here!

How were they captured in the academic calendar?
They were just floating. The idea was that Engineering had not been
accredited and they were not going to graduate. I called the Dean and
said, ‘this is not right. You people have farmed out some of these
students. Some were taken to Minna (Federal University of Technology –FUT), others were taken to ATBU (Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University) Bauchi, some to Yola (FUT), so why are you still keeping them here? They tried to explain but I said I didn’t want to hear any explanation. I said if they had been farmed out to a standard school, graduate them. That’s how I forced them to graduate three sets. And when COREN (Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria) came, they said I was right.

So, now we have accreditation for Engineering. We also did that for Veterinary Medicine. The others are medical students. They have been there for 10, 11 years now, but we’ve got one level of their accreditation done. In Medicine there are three levels of accreditation. They got one level in September last year. By December they said they will come again. Maybe before March next year, we would have graduated the first set. That’s what we are
working on.

We are building a lab for them at the teaching hospital. We
are also building a hostel. So, we’ve been doing a lot of things here,
except that what we met here is what we can’t talk about - so many
things have to be undone. That’s why we are looking at them very
seriously and tackling them one by one.

A cross-section of ASUU Members in UNIABUJA during a protest staged in October, 2013

One of the issues that nearly created a lot of uproar is staff salaries.
How did you tackle it?
When I got here there was a shortfall of N42 million. We were making
up this but because we needed accreditation and there were so many
gaps, we recruited some more staff, but with that I also struggled and
the money was improved upon. We were getting about N272 million,
but eventually it was raised to N336 million. What crippled the system
was that by January, government reduced the N336 they were giving to us to N308. That’s where the crisis came from. So, part of what we’ve been doing is that there were some staff we were paying but were not entitled to some payments. We had to halt the payments, so it’s causing crisis but we are trying to control that. We are also looking at supplementing the amount with a little of our IGR, but on the long run, government will have to address staff salary.

The second issue is that most parastatals now are not responsible for salaries. Their salaries are under what we call IPPIS, the scheme used in paying federal government salaries. If government can do that for universities, that will take the burden off our necks. For now, we’re managing the crisis. We’ve met with the minister and he promised that maybe this June our salary will be complete.

Are you going to admit Engineering and Medical students now?
We’ve cleared the backlog of Engineering, so even in this current
admission, we will admit Engineering. We will admit for Medicine also. We are also admitting Veterinary Medicine. A lot of people will say there is no Medical Science at the University of Abuja?
It’s not like that. When you talk about accreditation, it’s either you are
working very hard to get accreditation or you have some delay. Benue
State University has just graduated its first set of medical students
after 12 years. Even in the regular schools many stay for nine, 10
years. In our university system, because of strikes, there are usually
delays. So, when they tell you they have been here 11 years, they have not talked about the gaps due to strikes and the rest of them.

When you were coming to the University of Abuja from the University
of Nigeria, Nsuka (UNN), what was uppermost on your mind?
As this university is at the federal capital, I was thinking that we should be able to interface more with the federal government. In some countries of the world, government does not take any decision unless it is subjected to research. In this country, it’s time for government to challenge the university system. There should be government, industry-university linkage. Governments and industries should be given to asking: this is our problem, what do we do? We have sociologists, economists, political scientists, scientists. University of Abuja is not interfacing with the federal government at the level that I thought it should be. We are addressing that.

Now, how can universities be useful to industries?
In the United States, some of the universities generate $4 billion, $5
billion, $6 billion per year. In some, when you say you want to lecture,
they say come and lecture but we are not responsible for your salary.
What do you do? You write for grants. Research grants will sustain
you. You are only looking for a space where you can say this is my
office and then they give you grants. A lot of grants come into the
system from industries that want researches done. Nigerian universities should interface with industries and have researches done that industries can use. It is such a waste to do research and place the result in shelves. We need to link with industries and very fast too.

Unemployment is growing at alarming rate, what do we do about it?
The other time we were having a workshop on university-industry
linkage, someone asked, where are the industries? If there are no
industries, how is TetFund (Tertiary Education Trust Fund) able to
survive? One of the problems we have is that when companies
contribute to TetFund, they don’t go back to ask, ‘What are you doing
with my money?’ Even when government gives out money, they don’t
ask questions afterwards. We must demand for results.

What can universities do to highlight their research work for industries to know of discoveries that have been made, as there are no regularly published credible journals?
The other day, there was a publication from the University of Lagos
where they characterized the researches they have done. That’s a good way of doing it. First of all, for a useful product, the first point is not to publish it. Many of the things you see the developed countries do are our works which have been published in their journals. They go to the lab, refine them and produce. When you have a research work that is useful, the first thing is how to patent it and obtain intellectual property right. Besides, when it comes to promotion in the academic circles, patents are rated higher than journal articles. And there are journals, except that they may not be high-impact journals. What happens is that the Internet has lots of junk journals coming from many of Asian countries. Those ones are rated low. What I did when I came here was to start an office for research and innovation. I’ve told them to produce a research policy. They told me they had one already, and I’ve asked them to let me see it. Some of these older universities have research policies. When you do your research, the person who conducted the research should gain from it if the research has to be patented, that is, if the research gets into the market. The person that supervised it, what does he get? These are the issues. What comes to the universities? In Germany, for instance, whatever money you make from consultancy or research, you can take only 6,000 Euro. Everything else goes to the university because they are the ones paying you.

From your experience at the World Bank assisted project, what lessons can be learnt from the provision of equipment?
I did the project, STEP-B (Science and Technology Education Post-
Basic) Project, under the Federal Ministry of Education. We were able
to buy a lot of equipment for Nigerian institutions. There are a number of centres of excellence. We had 11 of them under the STEP-B project. We gave them as much as $5 million. That looks small to Nigerians, but that’s what many West African countries borrow for their country. We borrowed that. We gave some institutions $5 million: FUT Minna, NARICT, UniMaid, Unilag, Ife, so many institutions. They got a lot of equipment. As far as I’m concerned, that project should pay for itself. There is going to be a moratorium of 10 years. After that, government will begin to pay. The equipment should be put into use and the money used to pay back.

Any monitoring of the process?
In Nigeria there is continuity gap. Everybody who comes in wants to
start things of his or her own. When we were leaving, we had a
gentleman’s arrangement with the funding agencies to continue to
fund the project, but you know, World Bank projects have life spans. If
the project is for six years, after the six years, no more. World Bank
believes that government must be responsible, at least for continuity.
Our idea was that every school should have a monitoring unit. The
money covered all the 104 federal government colleges, 21 colleges of education, 22 polytechnics, and 27 federal universities. They should have a department or unit for that project. But you know what Nigerian schools do? They cover the equipment with water-proof, so that when people come for accreditation, they bring the equipment out and the inspectors say, ‘Oh you have passed’, and then they cover the equipment again.

You are expected to be using the equipment to generate revenue for sustainability and to repair if the equipment spoils, or to buy new equipment. This is part of what I expect the World Bank project to do for Nigeria. I don’t know because I’m no longer there, but if it is not doing that, then it is very unfortunate. We must not start everything afresh every time. Currently, there is what we call African Centres of Excellence under the same World Bank, and Nigeria has 10.

But why is it that we don’t rank among the best universities in the
world?
Many things are involved. In Nigeria, if you have university in your local government area, if you are not from that area, nobody will allow you to be Vice-Chancellor. There are universities in the UK whose Vice-Chancellors are from America. University is universal. You don’t create a village school and call it a university. That’s why we are not ranking well. Go to Ghana. One of my staff told me that in one Ghanaian university there are 5,000 American students. People must come from all over the world to you. That is adventure. Another factor is winning of Nobel Prize. How many Nigerians have won it? You rank universities based on criteria. When university started in 1088 in Bologna (in Italy), if you were the one that was excellent in, say, Music, people would come from all over the world to you. That’s the universality in university. University is a place where people should be creative, not where you put your village person and say that’s our Vice-Chancellor. You bring people from all over the place to generate ideas and produce things. Such is not happening in our universities, so how can we rank well?

In Nigeria, we emphasize certificates. I have a PhD! In countries like Canada, the approval of their regulatory agency like COREN for engineers is more important than the certificate, so that you don’t have certificates that you can’t defend. It has nothing to do with politics? It’s not politics. If they see you performing well, if you are not among the first 10, you should at least be among the first 1000. How many Nigerian universities are among the first 1000? There are so many factors. Go outside and look at our students. They all hold their phones, but it’s difficult to find them with books. When you are travelling, at the airport, the white man is reading his book. Do we read books? If you want to improve, improve on what you are doing.

My late Head of Department studied in the UK. Each time they wanted a Dean they would write to him, asking, ‘Do you know any person that
has done a research, has attracted grant, to apply for this position?’
They continued to write to him until he died.

Asking for suggestions?
Yes, but in Nigeria, when an appointment is being made, the first
question is, where are you from? That’s the first question. What is your religion? That will not take us anywhere. If you want to rank high,
behave in a way that will make you rank high.

As one whose university offers courses in Agriculture, what do you
make of students who graduate in Agriculture but don’t practice?
I’ve mentioned that Nigeria is a country where people worship
certificates, where the practical aspect is left to the backstage. If you
graduate from a department of agriculture, the next thing you do
should be that you quickly go back to the land and practice what you
learnt.

What about people who say they lack equipment and the capital to
practice?
That’s where we get it wrong. You tell a lecturer to do research; he
says there are no facilities. When you have a defeatist tendency, you
can’t make progress. It’s in the mind. There are lots of things people
can do, but they sit on ideas, complaining. ‘Government is not giving
us money’. ‘The research facilities we have are old’. It’s not true. I have always advocated that we have equipment audit. Do an audit of all equipment that we have and put it on the net. If I need to do anything, I know where to get the equipment.

You do inaugural lectures so often these days. What informed the
frequency?
Inaugural lectures are meant for a person who has been made a
professor to come and tell people how he became a professor. It’s one of the cultures in the university system. Before I came here, 11 people were produced. Now, we have reached 20. The university started fully in 1990. From that time up till 2014 they had only 11 inaugural lectures.
Now, we want to make it as regular as possible. It’s wonderful, because usually inaugural lectures are printed. You can see from it how he became a professor, the work he has done. People can come from town and listen. In countries where people are commercially minded, they can say, ‘Can we commercialize some aspects of your work?’

What are you doing to ensure that the courses that have problem with accreditation are accredited?
We’ve done a lot of renovation and other things. This generator giving
us electricity, I struggled hard before we got it working. It generates
power for the entire university. We want to put the entire infrastructure in place. We need some computers for accounting, we have to get them. Chemistry, their lab got burnt; we also have to look at that. Microbiology has never been a full-fledged department and failed accreditation, we’re looking at that. We’ve completed the Language lab, except that I was told somewhere is leaking. We’re seeing to it that it is blocked. With what we’re doing we’ll be bringing people for accreditation from time to time.

Student population is high, up to 300 students taking a particular
class. How do the lecturers cope?
It’s a big problem in our universities. We’re working here on cutting
down from time to time where necessary. There is what we call staff-
to-students ratio, which also affects accreditation. But there are things that government and the accrediting bodies need to look at.
Sometimes they are too harsh. Some of the universities that our
children go to overseas are not as good as what we have in this
country, but because it’s overseas, they come to tell you that they
went to heaven and returned.

What do you hope to do in this university in the next two years that
will make you feel fulfilled?
It’s not just feeling fulfilled. There are certain things that are normal.
This is a conventional university. There are certain things we expect of a conventional university. Our student population now is about 15,000. To me, that’s a waste of money. There are universities in this country with less than 2000 students. It’s a waste of money. The population of many of universities in Ivory Coast is 50,000. They have all the courses. This is a conventional university that should have all the courses. Here, we don’t have Mass Communication, and we are in the federal capital. The neighboring states: Nasarawa, Kogi are very rich in solid minerals, yet we don’t even have a department of Geology. You know of Ladi Kwali of Abuja. She was a woman from this region and she was famous for pottery. You also know of the Nok Culture of Southern Kaduna. Yet we don’t have a department of Archeology. The world is talking about global warming, environmental factors; yet, we don’t have a faculty of Environment. These are courses I want to introduce if I can attract money from the federal government. And if we have Pharmacy to complement Medicine, then we can now say we have a complete medical school. These are issues I’m looking at. A normal university should have expanded capacity. I always say that this is the university at the federal capital. People should be able to say, ‘I’m proud of this university.’

Daily Trust