From Gyang Bere, Jos
Vice Chancellor of Plateau State University, Bokkos, Prof. Yohanna Daniel Izam has said providing security for students on campus, accreditation of programmes, training and retraining of lecturers in foreign Universities for quality learning has been the focus of the institution.
Can you give us an insight into the strike by Senior Staff and ASUU in Plateau State University?
Well, we are looking into their demands but these are backlog of arrears from 2010. But the management with the support of the State Government has been able to defray three sessions from 2010 to date. Let me say this so that you will know the efforts that are being made. Beginning from this year, what the government decided to do was to increase the subvention of the University to a level where moving forward will not be accumulating arrears of Earned Allowances and as we speak now, it is being mainstreamed into the salaries of staff. What we have right now is a backlog of about five seasons which as soon as resources become available, this will be paid. You can also make your findings, this is about the best of public universities you can get anywhere. You are aware also that the Federal Universities were also to go on strike on the same 2009 agreement that have not been implemented in Federal Universities to a stage where Plateau State University has implemented its own but yet they are on the table negotiating and putting pressure on the Federal Government to release fund; I learned recently some money were released so that the arrears of Earned Allowances can be paid. It is very unfortunate that this cut across all the unions, it is not only Senior Staff Union, the Academic Staff are also part of it; we have NASU, the Non Academic Staff Union, they also have the same level of arrears for payment; we also have the Association of Academic Technologies, they also have their arrears of Earned Allowances that are yet to be paid. So, I think there is nothing new, what is now new is that individuals are now carrying out protests unknown to proceedings in the University; there are rules of engagement which naturally should be followed. The ASUU you have mentioned, they have also quietly decided to say they are going on strike; nobody carry placards to show that his allowances have not been paid, everybody including the Vice Chancellor has an allowance that has not been paid. I cannot go and carry placards because allowances have not been paid and if the funds are available, this money would be paid but our appeal to staff is to exercise more patience because government has made a commitment that they are going to defray this cost as soon as the finances improve. Also on the ASUU strike, we have been on this. You could remember that there was government committee that was set up to negotiate with the various unions and by February/March, an agreement was renegotiated and the challenge is funding. Government always will negotiate based on the faith that something will come; I want to appreciate the state government for making that commitment for saying we are ready for this and that in the agreement but of course, you know that the reality sometimes is not in the hands of nobody to determine what will happen; therefore, the issues surround Earned Allowances and we hope that this matter would be resolved as soon as possible.
The issues of insecurity in the country has affected Universities where students are kidnapped and some schools have been forced to close, what is the management of Plateau University doing to improve security of students?
The insecurity is a national problem now and whether you are still living in your home, we are faced with some level of challenges with the security situation in the country. For the management and state government, a lot have been done to an extent that we have been able to enforce the security architecture by attracting a police post very close to the University; we are only waiting for the mobilization of men that will operate in the police station which was not there before and this is part of the management initiative. We have rented a place and donated to the Police and we are now waiting for them to send the personnel who will come and be working there. We have also commenced the building of some broken parts of the fences which actually shouldn’t have been a problem just that, this is a University that is located at a semi rural area. In advanced economics, top ranking Universities are not fenced, the Universities are integrated into communities; you will come and walk through it and pass without knowing that you have passed through a University but here in Nigeria, people talk of fencing as if it is even an issue. Even if you build the fence, if somebody wants to undermine your security, he breaks some part of it. Because even the fencing that has been done, some of them want shortcut from their neighborhood and some of them open doors there. These are issues that we should not duel so much energies discussing; these are administrative issues. We got to some point where we had challenges with land owners and we are back to the table again discussing compensation issues with land owners which have not yielded. In terms of the security manpower, we have escalated the number. We have employed 20 additional security men who are conventional and we have the unconventional. We have license vigilante and if you notice in the last one year, there have been no much challenges because those ones are licensed to carry arms. I think that anybody who is coming near the hostels in Plateau University, must know the level of preparation that we have made because we have put trained people there who are carrying arms. Also, if you hear anything happening, it will be most likely be in the neighborhood where most of our students are resident and this is beyond the powers of the management; it belongs to the national security architecture to handle. Insecurity is a challenge that we have to continue to address as a people, everybody has a responsibility not just the government or the management of the University, and something is being done about that.
The University is growing and new facilities are coming on board, do you have the required staff to improve quality of learning in the institution?
In one or two months ago, the governor has given approval for employment of additional staff in view of the new faculties that are coming. Currently, we have that approval and it is just the administrative processes and the budget support because the approval has to be converted into cash. But this major milestone has been achieved; we are on the same page with the proprietor on the need to expand the number of faculties in the institution and approval has been given for recruitment. To be specific about the new faculties, we have the faculty of law which is presently at about 80 percent completion; the second one is the faculty of environmental sciences which is also 80 percent completion; we have the faculty of health sciences which is about 95 percent completed. We are hoping to start the faculty of education which we already have a completed block but awaiting furnishing and the staffing that I earlier mentioned to commence. The school of Post Graduate Studies is also very key to the vision of the University which we can put at probably at about 75 percent completion; we have already mobilized out programmes to the National University Commission for resource inspection and for approval to commence Post Graduate Studies, so it will look like five faculties with the PG programme.
What has been the progress of the State University in the last three years?
I think it is important for students of Plateau project to understand the historical background of the University. If you don’t understand where the University is coming from, you will not know the depth of the struggle. By the grace of God, the University started in 2005 and I was privileged to be a founding stakeholder right from when I had the opportunity to serve in the state executive council as Commissioner of Housing between 2003 to 2007. We had a situation in Plateau State where the overall contribution of states to University enrollment was an average of about 0.9 percent and if you do a simple calculation to know that if every state was contributing equally to admission process through JAMB, we should be talking about an average of about 2.7 for the 37 states including Abuja and here is Plateau that has the heritage of educational development; within Northern Nigeria, we were seen as a state that held a lot of promises for advancement in the education sector. He was a state that metamorphosed over the years from a giant state that comprises Nasarawa and Benue states and becoming a smaller entity as it were with new development challenges, requiring higher education interventions that could bring about the expansion in the economic fortunes of the state at different frontiers whether it is agriculture, the civil service, health sector and so on. The thinking then was that something drastic need to be done to advance the average from 0.9 to at least 2.7 percent which is the simple national average so that we can now be listed as a competitive state in terms of the admission possibilities for our citizens. When I talk of Plateau, I am referring to people who are resident in Plateau State, who gained access to tertiary education and this is key to the National policy on education. We started cracking our brains to remedy the situation because the only institution, the University of Jos was not able to absorb the large number of credible and competent candidates from JAMB and so you will be throwing out everytime like 10,000 to 15,000 competent candidates because of lack of availability of space. In his wisdom, the then Joshua Dariye administration now saw that the dream of having a University is not just very urgent but critical to the development of Plateau State. That dream metamorphosed into the law that was passed by the Plateau State House of Assembly in 2005 for the establishment of Plateau State University. Ever since the establishment of the institution, there has never been a single admission exercise that we have had less than 6000 qualified candidates. We started with carrying capacity of less than 1000 in the initial stages, it grew above 1000 and now we have carrying capacity of 1500 students and we hope that it will continue to expand, particularly now that we are about to open new faculties.
What have you added in the life span of the University since you were appointed Vice Chancellor in 2018?
Looking at the background of where we are coming from, we came on board in 2018 with two broad agenda. First, to deepen the quality of programmes in the institution, the programmes that were on ground as of 2017 and 2018 were 27 in number and when we came into office, only two of the 17 programmes had full accreditation. My first assignment as I came in in March 2018 was to do accreditation for programmes that were on interim basis but you cannot talk about the quality of a University if the programmes are fainted or walking on one leg because students too will be graduating under those programmes and will not have the compliment of the confidence that they were breed under a system that was quality-satisfied. Accreditation becomes an important exercise for measuring the quality progress of the University. I am happy to say that as we speak, the narrative has changed, all our programmes except one out of the 17 have full accreditation and this to me is a very important milestone in terms of deepening quality and excellence of programmes.
What were some of the challenges you have overcome to deepen the quality of programmes in the institution?
We went through a lot of challenges to have this done with the infrastructural base of the University which is now gradually transformed. We have had also to increase the number of lecturers for the various programmes. We have luckily received our lecturers who were on foreign training. One thing that I did was to reengineer the success rate, I understood a couple of visits, the first one was to South Africa where we had a Memorandum of Understanding; we send it to our lecturers and they trained them in various fields; we are happy that many of them are now returning. Also, the strength of a University resides on the manpower in the departments because they are the people that do the teaching and the research; you require the research for higher visibility.