FLORENCE BANKU OBI, a Professor of Education, is the first female Vice Chancellor of the University of Calabar, Nigeria. Recently, she had a radio conversation on HIT 95.9 FM, Calabar, with ace journalist, IWARA U. IWARA, dwelling on issues that are helping to define her term in office as Unical VC. Excerpts:
You broke the ceiling as the first female Vice Chancellor of the University of Calabar. How does it feel to be the first female VC of Unical?
Well, being the first female VC of Unical, has been challenging. But sincerely, being VC of Unical is challenging on its own, whether you are a male or female VC; especially with the present economic challenges that we find ourselves in. With me being the first female VC, from the day I assumed office, the expectations were humongous because, I think people felt I was going to do some magic as VC of Unical, however, in the midst of all, it feels good that God gave me this opportunity, I made history, but then there is plenty of work to do, to make sure I justify the confidence reposed in me. I am still work in progress and this position calls for hard work; I have been doing my best, so far. I am working hard to reposition Unical, elevate it and make it the cynosure of all eyes.
I am drawn to say that in Nigeria, when we say we are repositioning things, it often comes as a veiled design to embrace an escapist route away from the reality of facing and doing work required. Please point us to the repositioning in Unical that you have been working on.
Repositioning for me, is not an escapist route, rather it is a clear attempt to work and bring back what should rightly be. Unical is supposed to be a place of academic excellence, but at the time I took over as VC, academic excellence was the least thing pursued in the institution. What I have vigorously pursued therefore is repositioning for academic excellence. Let me tell you this, when I took over, the students did not know their left from right, the reading culture had gone down to zero; shamefully the maxim was, “sort to pass, read to fail”. Nobody wanted to do anything with books, nobody wanted to read any longer, all what was happening was you just go, get money, pay to whoever, get grades and move on; this was a shameful disposition. I can say for certain that I have changed this narrative, now it is, “read to pass, sort to fail”. Apart from that, when I came in, the students seldom had results, we had thousands of University of Calabar ‘graduates’ who had no results. I mean you had a situation where from first to their last years, these students never saw their results, they didn’t know whether they were students of Unical or not, they just kept going; write examinations and defend their thesis and then claim they are graduates of Unical with nothing to validate this claim. Some of them did not even know that they had long been withdrawn from Unical and they were in thousands.
So, when I came on board, I discovered that they were thousands of very frustrated, supposed graduates of Unical and I just felt that this trend had to stop and we repositioned things. We went back and created what we call “Amnesty Examinations” and administered examinations to more than 25, 000 (twenty five thousand) frustrated students who were just stranded in the university; my administration brought them hope and that is part of the repositioning that I am talking about.
Our students use to also graduate and not participate in the mandatory one year national service, as at when due. Find out from the institution now, there has been a noticeable paradigm shift for the better. We now graduate students when they are supposed to graduate and students now see their results before they move to the next session, helping them know if they have met the requirements to continue studying a particular course or whether they have been withdrawn. I must inform for certain that, very soon we will be publishing our withdrawal list, so students can know their standing in school. All of these efforts on our part are helping to reposition Unical for academic excellence, which is for us a core mandate as an institution of higher learning
Equally, in infrastructure development, Unical was one of those universities that when you visit, the first set of buildings you see are those of the Duke Town Secondary School, that Unical inherited when she moved here and dislogded the secondary school in the 70s. We had pavilions in the school that can best be described as being ramshackle pavilions. I have turned these pavilions into real and befitting academic pavilions for the university. So our repositioning exercise cuts across academics, infrastructure and work ethic. We are conscious of this repositioning and let me also inform that we are running and encouraging our staff to embrace the constant workshops and conferences we are organising for the good of all.
Are you also doing some repositioning in the Unical Graduate School which over the years has had the monstrous reputation of being a place where post graduate students are tied down for eternity?
Yes, we have repositioned our Graduate School. I will agree with you that we use to have this monstrous reputation where people know when they get post graduate admission but don’t know when they will graduate from Unical. Now, if you apply for a master’s degree, it is for a duration of two years and a PhD is for three years, because we push you to have these done in the stipulated time so you can leave and we can admit others. In the last convocation exercise, we had a little above 550 PhD graduates alone. This is because we had to deliberately push them to come forth, defend their thesis and move on, this is the way we have gone and it is bearing fruit.
School fees were recently increased in the university and wide protests followed. What is your own side of the story and then, is there a justification for this fee hike?
Well let me just tell you that in the university, the management, comprising the principal officers, are those saddled with the responsibility of increasing fees, it is not even the Senate of the institution. However, I even went to the Senate and informed them of the decision to increase fees charged by Unical. I also alerted them that I think a groundswell of protests will trail this increase because people will normally react to fee increases like this one with a protest. First, before we came up with what we thought was reasonable, we went to check the school fee schedules of more than 26 federal universities across this country. We looked at the fees they have been charging and decided to come up with figures close to what we saw, but not above their figures.
The next thing I did was to invite the student leaders for a meeting, informing them that this is the new development we intend to implement. I invited them a second time to show them the proposed figures and lo and behold, they told me point blank that they were not ready to look at the figures or negotiate with authorities of Unical on the new fee regime. Of course, for the first time in the history of Unical, this was a school administration calling student leaders together to make inputs on a proposed new fee regime; no Vice Chancellor of Unical has ever done this, and the leaders turned this down?
When we eventually published the new fee regime, of course as experienced school managers, we knew there was going to be a protest, but we had also agreed that when the students come out, we were going to get to the point where adjustments will be made and we had those adjustments carefully scribbled and kept aside. When the leaders finally accepted to sit at a round table with us and talk, we shifted figures a bit, brought out the figures we had scribbled and kept aside and they accepted these new figures. Let me still say that these figures are about the least charged by federal universities across the South South and South East regions of Nigeria.
Then too, I hope we do not increase school fees again because a truck of diesel was N5 million naira when I took over, today it is almost N64 million naira and counting. I hope you do understand that this cost will be borne by the students and not from my salary.
But for a university like yours, are you not considering alternative energy options instead of the huge amount spent on buying a truck of diesel?
We are seriously looking at that direction and I know for certain that between now and the month of August, we should have gotten that right.
The Senate of your university recently did away with the position of class representatives in Unical. What is responsible for this decision?
When I was in the university, we didn’t have class representatives. The class reps today are a problem to the students too, they are the ones who are forerunners to extortion. See, sometimes the course lecturers have no idea about what these class reps are doing. They use the names of lecturers, heads of departments, to extort money for themselves. What do the class reps do? When a lecturer says submit assignments by 2:30 p.m., go and do just that. if you miss the mark, they spread fear and tell you they are the only ones who have access to the lecturer, of course for a fee they charge you. You now see that to even submit your assignment, the class rep collects money, that students in most cases do not even have. Let me say here clearly, the class reps do not have to relate with any lecturer on behalf of the students, students must relate with their lecturers directly and without using any proxies. The world over, students access their lecturers, not through a third party; that is the standard practice that guided the Senate of the university’s decision.
You recently created the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research, Linkages & Collaboration. What gains informed the creation of this office?
A university is a place for teaching and research. To sustain teaching and research, you should have in-dwelling capacity to access grants from designated government agencies, individuals and corporate bodies, even trust funds. To get at these funds, you need to create an office with personnel compulsively designated to identify, track and apply for these funds, on the university’s behalf. So far, this office, within a short space of time has done very well and both students and staff can attest to this fact. Now we have eight of our students outside the country doing exchange programmes, some are outside carrying out research in other universities because we have now been able to achieve proper academic linkup in programmes as well as collaborations for staff and students. Remarkably, we are beginning to attract a lot of money to Unical.
Why would your institution publish an examination time table 24 hours before examinations, attracting the kind of furore that followed this publication?
We have never brought out a time table 24 hours before an examination. Let me explain the situation to you so that they will be better understanding.
The calendar for this current academic session came out in November, 2023. Now, when we introduced course registration as one of the changes to reposition things in Unical, students were resisting it and refused to register their courses because overtime, students had become used to going to school without registering for courses. Because most of them refused to register their courses with their lecturers, we kept pushing up one semester for up to seven months. I insisted, after a while that if students do not register for courses, we won’t have examinations. Our insistence on registration of courses will administratively help us know how many courses a student is registering for; to even help us prepare a timetable knowing how many persons to cater for in an exam situation. But at the point all of this was playing out, 90% of the students had still not registered and we had lost a lot of time. Keeping to our promise, when they finally registered, we published the examination time table and they started shouting that the time table came very late. I explained to them why this happened because this wasn’t the first examination my administration was conducting, this was the fifth examination. Ask a simple question, if the previous four examination time tables were on time, why wasn’t this one published on time? We had to stand our grounds, make sure students registered, that is do the right thing before we can publish the time table and administer exams. The examinations after, have come with no complaints because they complied and registered their courses as at when due.
Let me put it on record that course registration is free and no student is expected to pay any money to anybody as course registration fee.
Can you please address the issue of acceptance fee and hostel fee rates?
Government use to fund and cater for several things in universities before now, it is no more the case today. We are now told to generate money and run our universities and it is highly expensive to run a university now. Government pays our salaries and that is all government does. All the money with which we run the system, we generate from the students. An acceptance fee was introduced before I came on board, about 15 years ago, so it is not a new thing. And for the hostel rates, the students are paying N31,000 for a whole session, isn’t this fair enough?
On staff welfare, how are you faring as VC?
I won’t shout louder than this; I am the only VC of Unical in the past few years who has paid all staff entitlements. I am not owing honorarium of staff, the drivers accident bonus, I have paid, school security atimes even receive extra cash from me, just because they work extra hard, the technologists in the school have also been paid.
Recall that technologists were owed for about eight years. I have cleared the backlog of their wages and have just a few more months to clear it all. I struggle to make sure staff are not owed their entitlements and I have repeatedly showed this commitment. However, I am deeply saddened that, because the issue of promotion arrears is not within the university’s financial schedule, we have been unable to do anything. However, I have made countless representations to Abuja on this issue. Even as we speak, the school Bursar is in Abuja with a comprehensive list of what our staff are being owed.
Why did you seal up the Transcript Section of the Registry?
I know this has become a huge issue and I know people who are concerned will ask this question. I shut down the place on January 27, 2024, because there were a lot of problems in that section of the Registry. May be you do not know, the transcript section of any university is the mirror through which the world sees us as a university. How will you say you have a transcript section and people will apply for transcript, one, two, three years after and they cannot get their transcripts? It doesn’t augur well for the image of our institution and my style of administration. I have had time to interface with this section; in fact I just effected a change of headship in the place. I am pursuing a holistic reorganization of the place, so that we can get it right.
See, a lot of bad business was openly going on in that place. There was even talk around that I could not shut down the place because the people were making returns to me; very appalling, I must say. I got to discover that people pay N25,000 to the university for transcript while the individuals ‘facilitating’ the process, charged N50,000 per transcript. I have responded by posting someone there who has a clear mandate to sanitize the place and give us a Transcript Section befitting the emerging face and direction of our university.
You were one of the Vice Chancellors in the country who spoke up against full university autonomy. What are your reasons for taking up this position?
See, if we are to fully fund ourselves as a university, it means we will also be entirely generating funds, paying staff salaries and taking on university running costs. I tell you, at the end of the day, no federal university in this country will collect less than one million naira as school fees, that was why I opposed full university autonomy. We have 346 professors in Unical, calculate their wages and see what it comes to and then imagine if we were fully autonomous, what will we be charging students to be able to pay just salaries for these professors?
Some of your lecturers complain that they are owed allowances for supervising undergraduate and post-graduate students. How do you react to this complaint?
Lecturers who say so are not fair to my administration. I said earlier that I am not owing salaries or allowances/entitlements and I will say so again. When I took over, most of them were owed honorarium for about five years and expected me to immediately pay them. This payment were to have comes from school fees previously paid by students in the administration of another VC who didn’t pay them. How do they now expect me to use the present fees collected to pay them when they should have collected their monies tied to previous fees? Unfortunately, all of these years they slept over their rights and now want me to pay? See, the best I could do for them was go back one year and pay them, the other four years are gone and there is nothing I can do about that.
Right now, we have a policy that sets aside some money for external supervisors, no external examiner will be owed any money, we have kept money aside in a different account for this particular purpose and we do not intend to owe examiners and supervisors again, not in my time.
Years from now, where do you want to see the University of Calabar?
I want to see Unical ranked among the top five universities on this continent. But then, we can only get there if we change our work ethic, raise our academic standards, release results on time so our students can go forth and fulfill their dreams and represent us as worthy alumni of Unical. If we can also attract foreign students into Unical, we will be properly positioned for a better ranking.
Thank you for your time Madam.
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