The Oasis Reporters

April 5, 2024

It is known that universities world over are repositories of knowledge and research that propel nations to growth and prosperity.

Nigeria started having Universities before it’s independence in 1960 and the pioneering institutions which are regarded as it’s Ivy League Universities are the first five: University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria) and University of Benin. They are all government owned institutions with pride of place in the heart of Nigerians.


These institutions and their astonishing research endeavors helped in no small way to provide critical know-how in terms of distressing health conditions and other technological breakthroughs.


Today, the universities owned by governments both at State and federal levels face enormous threats to their staying power and influence, whereas they should be engines that can properly propel growth in our national life if well nurtured.


Take the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Oyo State for example.

Workers have threatened to stay away from work over continued power outages in the hospital, even as it runs on 45 power generating sets. The cost of powering the sets is backbreaking for a government owned university that depends on diminishing budgets in a national economy that is seeing unprecedented inflation which is afflicting all facets of life.


As a long term resident of Ibadan city, whenever I needed to make clean photocopies of documents, I often went to the University of Ibadan campus because printers are there in large numbers occupying the multiplicity of shops on Campus, paying rents and boosting the campus economy.


I was there in the month of March and was shocked to see that most print shops that are being run by students and graduates, many of them running higher degree courses and even getting married there as they boost a new community that cuts across every ethnic divide. This time, many of them had closed shops while their printing machines remained idle.

Why?

Lack of electricity.

This was perplexing to me because universities need power. The supply situation had always been bad. But this time around, it has grown pathetic and worse. Many operators say they cannot break even if they buy gasoline to power their generating sets.

I spoke to one of the ladies that hitherto operated a print shop. She said that if she bought 10 liters of petrol to power her generator for the business at 6,500 naira, at the end of the day and by looking at the income generated, it would be in deficit. “The business is no longer paying”.

So most of them packed it all up and they now sell gala, bread and ‘kpof kpof’ (pastries) to students. As the saying goes, half a loaf of bread is better than nothing.



In the past I used to know many UI graduates that stayed back in Ibadan either to pursue a Master’s degree or a Ph.D.

To keep body and soul going, they hustle on the side by opening corner shops for printing and all the stuff that is available in the university economy. Most times they do it in conjunction with their ex-campus Sweethearts who they eventually wed and remain in Ibadan to raise a family.


Many of them made it. You’d see it in their fresh mint cars and the beautiful houses they finally build through what I call the UI economy.


All that has gone with the wind due to a lack of electricity. Not that the business is not there. The infrastructure has collapsed. Universities have their own economy. Unless you visit, stay and watch, you won’t know.

While at the University of Ibadan campus I did a walkabout and noticed that some departments people usually visit for one little scientific test, survey or the other were no longer using their laboratories. They contract tests to outside vendors at huge costs.
Why?

Lack of electricity.

Let me recall a discussion I once had with a university professor over twelve years ago. He had just come back from his sabbatical in a then new and private university.

So I asked him what he thought about the new private universities.
Were they viable?

He frankly told me that things seemed “slightly difficult now, but in the long run, they would overtake the older universities”.


Today, Covenant University in Sango Ota owned by Bishop David Oyedepo’s Winners Chapel is amongst the top five Universities in Nigeria and electricity runs 24/7 on campus. The University generates it’s own electricity which powers the entire community that includes the Church, businesses and other schools within.


How did they do it? How did they lift themselves out of the dark ages, then rose to the top league?


This is at a time when the credibility of the older universities is gradually diminishing and though the erosion scale seems subtle and hardly noticeable, the end result is to make the older generation universities completely irrelevant.



What is baffling is that the Vice Chancellors are watching with utter helplessness whereas there are very steady steps within their powers to take, not only to save their institutions, but to make the necessary impact that would reverse the rot and bounce them back to reckoning.

There are some steps that I believe the universities can take to build back trust and be in reckoning.


Specifically speaking, this is what the University of Ibadan can do. If Professor Kayode Adebowale the Vice Chancellor can reflect deeply, he’d easily see the groundswell of support that is available to his University. Something he can tap from.


I observed the support that the University College Hospital received from an old student who had made it good and big in the United States of America. The alumnus of the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan (CoMUI), MBBS Class of 1985, Dr Philip Ozuah, donated the sum of $1,000,000 to the new hostel building fund of the college.
Dr Ozuah, who is based in the United States of America, announced the donation at the second anniversary of the current administration of the first female provost of the college, Professor Olayinka Omigbodun.
Dr Ozuah was a medical school classmate of the college provost. So based on interpersonal relationships of old students network, beleaguered UCH got a fresh cash injection of a million dollars, from just one person.


Why won’t the Vice Chancellor tap into this by inaugurating a new University of Ibadan Electricity Venture company, then ask friends of the university to subscribe to it?
Next, invite a fellow professor like Barth Nnaji to come and deliver a Professor Kenneth Dike Memorial Lecture On Power Renewal?


Immediately after the lecture, the Technology Faculty Professors would hold a private reception for Barth Nnaji who would be asked to graphically draw a map on how he lifted Aba City from the dark ages and how the Engineering professors in the University can build a similar thing albeit on a smaller scale and lift University of Ibadan out of darkness, all in the name of Kenneth Dike, UI’s first indigenous African Vice Chancellor?



There would be massive support and UI would light the torch to take other older generation universities out of the rot that they are in.


It needn’t take 20 years like it took Barth Nnaji to build Geometric Electric Power in Aba. Four years would be enough and Professor Kayode Adebowale’s name would go into the Hall of Fame at the NUC (Nigerian Universities Commission) headquarters.
Just imaginative thinking, and they are there. The darkness is too much.


Greg Abolo
gregabolo@gmail.com

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