The Founder/Chancellor Afe Babalola University Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD) Aare Afe Babalola is pushing for the establishment of a Centarl Examination Body (CEB) to conduct examinations for final year engineering students and their counterparts in other disciplines. The Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) believes a uniform final examination will ensure standard and quality. In his lecture at the maiden edition of Ademola Olorunfemi annual public lecture at the Dome in Akure, Ondo State, Aare Babalola describes the move as a wake-up call to first generation varsities and a belt-up challenge to up-coming institutions.
The topic of this maiden Ademola Olorunfemi annual public lecture is: “Funding of engineering education and training for reliance”. For a proper understanding of the subject matter, it is of critical importance to appreciate from the start that quality education, whether in engineering, law, medicine, the sciences or humanities, is a very expensive enterprise which government alone cannot fund having regard to several competing areas of need. Ladies and gentlemen, when education is not properly funded, institutions of learning will be ill-equipped in terms of teaching facilities and staff while the products of such poorly funded institutions are bound to be poor materials that will find it difficult to meet the need for self-reliance and national development.
Definition of engineering
Like in many other disciplines, engineering has been defined in different ways. Some schools of thought defined engineering as “a three-legged stool that relies on Science, Mathematics and Techne”, with the word ‘techne’ taken as the creative abilities that distinguish an engineer from a scientist to design, to make, to conceive and to actually bring to fruition. Also, engineering has been defined as “a science involving designing, building and usage of machines, engines and structures”.
These definitions of engineering clearly underscore the place and import of engineering as not a mere understanding of the rudiments of science. On the contrary, it is a subject which depends on the sound understanding of scientific principles as well as appropriate Mathematics facility, modelling language and vital communication. These definitions also emphasize the fact that Engineering Education is the practical solution to almost any kind of problem which has the capacity to settle, prevent and preview any practical anomaly in an object.
The beauty of engineering lays in its capacity and ability to open up avenues in diverse domains with good remuneration because it deals with the various degrees of comfort that technology brings the way of man through the house he lives in, the various means of transportation, electricity and water among others.
I cannot imagine what life would be without electricity, bicycles, motorcycles, motor vehicles, aircrafts, boats, ships, farm and building equipment of all shapes, radio, television, telephone as well as the various forms of cooling system. It would have been close to the life of the early man in the virgin forest!
Its origin
The origin of engineering is discernibly traceable to two different roots; the first is the trade apprenticeship education whereby trainees of a local trade learn the trade with the aim of advancing their understanding of practical and theoretical knowledge of various trades. This was amply demonstrated during the era preceding and afterwards of the industrial revolution in Europe and accompanying spread throughout the modern world. A second root of engineering is traceable to colleges, universities and polytechnics. Engineering has an impactful bearing on humanity hence the need for a thoroughness required for its learning as a ‘three legged stool’ that relies on science, mathematics and technique.
Science, mathematics and techniques are necessary because of the ingenuity, creative ability and the imagination required of an engineer to translate his/her imagination to reality. This is the pivotal difference between engineering as a vocational subject which requires a sound understanding and appreciation of scientific principles as well as appropriate mathematics facility.
Needless, for me to assert the obvious that even developed economies such as the European and America economies have recognised the study of engineering as an indispensable resource and bedrock and bulwark of its virile economies. This is so because of its connection to all aspects of human activity.
I know for certain, having been involved as an educationist, entrepreneur, farmer, lawyer, pro chancellor, chancellor and Nigeria Institute of Arbitrators President, that no sector is of greater importance than quality and functional education, especially when it is well funded. It could take a backwater country to the moon within a decade. What made the difference between the United States of America (U.S.A) and the defunct Soviet Union was, in my observation, the application of education. For me, education is life. I have devoted my entire being to the search for the fruit of education and today, that fruit is perceivable in the establishment of Afe Babalola University (ABUAD) which is acknowledged by the National University Commission (NUC) as ‘the pride of education in Nigeria’.
Engineering education in Nigeria
It is on record that Yaba College of Engineering was established as the first higher engineering education institute in Nigeria. This was followed with many federal and state-owned polytechnics until 1977, when two Monotechnics – the Nautical College of Engineering (now Maritime Academy of Nigeria), Oron, Akwa Ibom State and the College of Aviation, Kaduna, were established by the Federal Government. Nigeria was, however, without a Federal University of Technology until 1980s when four Federal Universities of Technology – the Federal University of Technology, Minna, the Federal University of Technology, Akure and the Federal University of Technology, Yola, as well as the Federal University of Technology, Owerri – were established by the Federal Government.
Setback
But, in recent past, engineering education, like any other form of education, has experienced a major setback in Nigeria due to what the Maritime Academy of Nigeria, Oron, described as poor funding, lack of functional policy framework, lack of adequate attention to research findings in engineering, inadequate functional workshop facilities, unstable engineering road maps, poor curriculum and decay in educational infrastructure as well as non-implementation of educational budgets.
Quality of engineering education
Despite the fact that Nigeria has embarked on engineering education as far back as 1932 when the Yaba College of Technology was established, it can be said without any fear of contradiction that Nigeria still has a long way to go in terms of its engineering education.
This is largely because Nigerian tertiary institutions are faced with enormous challenges in terms of general conduct of engineering education programmes which have failed to equip students with the necessary skills that will adequately prepare them to cope with the challenges of the modern day society, a phenomenon that will generally lead to a setback in the Engineering education of such a country.
According to Uwaifo, “a country is said to have a setback in engineering education when the products from (its) engineering institutions cannot produce capital goods such as tractors, lathe machine, electrical & electronics devices, drilling machines, cars, iron and steel, train and other earth moving equipment as well as being unable to provide the engineering skills and expertise to undertake the exploitation of her natural resources”.
The picture Uwaifo painted here matches Nigeria perfectly well as it would appear that we have deliberately elected to fold our arms and allow our God-given resources to be frittered away before our very eyes because of our slothfulness.
The challenges facing our engineering education in Nigeria today include, but are not limited to, obsolete curricula, lack of students exposure to Industrial practice, quality of teaching staff and paucity of requisite experience, lack of coordination between research institutes and production enterprise, poor funding of education, poorly equipped laboratories and infrastructural challenges as well as discontinuance of Technical education among several others. Because of the centrality of these points to the matter in issue, I will now proceed to address these issues one after the other.
The challenges
- Poor funding
I have spoken at length on funding of education in Nigeria at different fora. Suffice it to say that African governments, Nigeria inclusive, have not been paying the deserved and required attention to education, including engineering education. It remains incontrovertible that apart from the late Premier of Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who devoted 57 per cent of the resources of Western Region to funding education, no government in this country, federal or state, has come anything close to that feat. As a matter of verifiable fact, every successive government in Nigeria since 1966, has been devoting about 6-7 per cent of its annual budget to education against the 26 per cent recommended by UNESCO. In 2018/2019 budget, the amount earmarked for education is only seven per cent of the total budget.
As I have said repeatedly, education is too important an enterprise to be left in the hands of politicians and governments who cannot adequately finance it in the face of many competing areas of need and that is why it has become incumbent on well-to-do COREN and NSE members and indeed members of the public to rise up to rescue our engineering education from the abyss of failure. The table below is vividly illustrative of my narration.
- Obsolete curricular
All of us here today, without any exception, do appreciate that the society is dynamic while we are in an ever changing world. But, it is doubtful whether we are changing with times. Today, the whole engineering curriculum in Nigeria remains what was bequeathed to us at independence without any effort to modify the colonial curriculum. I am in a position to know this from my experience as a former Pro Chancellor and Chairman of Council of the University of Lagos between 2000 and 2007 and particularly because of my position as the founder of the leading private university in Nigeria today.
This condition is both tragic and a call to duty. A tragedy because what is the worth of an education that cannot meet contemporary challenge or why should one be trained with obsolete knowledge that makes a mockery of learning. Because of these frightful realities, in ABUAD, we deliberately meet these challenges by introducing five new programmes since 2010 – namely Mechatronics, Social Justice, Human Biology, Intelligence and Security Studies as well as Tourism & Events Management.
I make bold to proclaim here today that except that the time is long overdue to review curriculum. Our curriculum in engineering is obsolete and as such, cannot birth our expectation for greatness of our country. We cannot continue to deny this fact. The constant re-training of graduates of engineering by the private sector reaffirms this lacuna.
If we claim that engineering is truly an indispensable tool or avenue for economic greatness as witnessed in the West, then for it to support our quest for economic revival then, there should be made ready provisions for the change of tools that is used in solving the problem as the problem is equally changing periodically. This implies that engineering education curriculum should be flexible in nature, examined frequently and modified in order to accommodate certain societal needs. Students of engineering cannot be shortchanged for no fault of theirs. The time to remedy the situation is now. The Federal Government should declare an emergency in this area of knowledge and use models such as Student’s Industrial Work Experience Scheme (SIWES) as an avenue to start a deliberate correction of this malady by exposing the students to present day machines.
- Adequate, modern infrastructure
Equally distressing for comfort is the dilapidation of laboratories and the obsolete and lack of equipment for training and re-training in Nigeria. Most of these equipment have grown obsolete and many are lacking because of none disbursement of funds or mismanagement and in several instances, diversion of funds. The quality of facilities is simply inadequate to meet the challenges before them and to compound matters, many of the laboratories are facing acute shortage of supplies of these equipment. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to the Society of Engineers when they visited ABUAD where they saw 37 laboratories lavishly populated with modern engineering equipment. They did not hesitate to describe our engineering college as “a template for engineering education in Nigeria and that 40 per cent of the equipment are not available in anywhere in Nigerian university”.
- Industries and universities
There is an urgent need for collaboration between Faculties teaching engineering and industries, which are vital and indispensable for the purposes of stimulating and sustaining the economy through hiring of students, sponsorship of research, graduates, consultancies, grants and stakeholders of industries are made advisory board members in a number of universities and contracts. The areas of collaboration are limitless and it rebounds back on both the society and economy. This is why hitherto struggling underdeveloped countries such as Japan, The Asian Tigers and even here in South Africa with the biggest economy in the continent, encourage research with stupendous researches and government in turn gives rebate when and where necessary.
- Poor quality of teaching staff and paucity of requisite experience
Everywhere in our contemporary world, teaching is an art and a calling that is meant for those who are not only interested in being teachers, but, who are adequately trained and prepared for it. But, what do we have in Nigeria today? Teaching has become the last bus stop for those who could not secure any other form of employment. And what happens in that type of situation, you start to bring in people who are not qualified to teach what circumstances have imposed on them to teach.
Today, in engineering as indeed in all other disciplines, we have inadequate number of senior lecturers with Ph. D degrees. Many universities are fraught with lecturers without Ph. D. In fact, the trend now is that the moment a student rounds off with his Master’s Degree, he jumps into lecturing.
I must, however, emphasize that there is nothing wrong with that provided such a student registers for his/her Ph. D and becomes a mentee under a reputable professor who will groom and mentor him into a star. But, the NUC and the various professional bodies in engineering should make it mandatory that unless a candidate has a Ph. D and the requisite professional qualifications, he/she cannot rise beyond certain specified limits within the profession. This, it is hoped, will ginger more of our engineers to make deliberate efforts to sharpen their professional teeth and become more relevant to the growth and advancement of the country.
Furthermore, the time has come when all teachers must have a diploma or a certificate in teaching. It is because of the importance we attach to teaching as a vocation that annually, ABUAD holds a one-week workshop on teaching method at the beginning of each academic session.
- Lack of coordination between research institutes and production enterprise:
Everywhere in the more advanced world, there is this unbreakable nexus between the universities and industrial concerns. This is largely because the academia work hand-in-hand with the industries in that the universities do the research while the industries translate the research ideas/findings of the universities into visible machines, tools and services for the use of all. I doubt if that is what obtains in Nigeria today and for as long as there is that gap between the academia and the industries, inventions and discoveries will not be translated into goods, tools and services while skilled engineering workers, engineers, scientists, technicians and managerial personnel will continually be in short supply.
It was in our effort to fill this void that our university turned the sod of its 121-unit Industrial Research Park on January 25, 2018. The park is designed to translate into viable products the research efforts of the university through the establishment of various industries in a dedicated park with provision for all necessary infrastructural facilities such as energy, staff housing and security among others. It will take off with a 5.67 Megawatts of gas turbine-driven power plant which will be provided by ABUAD Plant Limited, a Joint Venture (JV) between ABUAD and CADMIUM.
It will also provide a veritable platform for staff, undergraduate and graduate training and general technical empowerment.
Upon take off, the Industrial Research Park will provide functional and self-sustaining link between the university and industry, launch Nigeria and other emerging economies in Africa into the modern age through innovative and research driven industrialisation and entrepreneurship, promote investments in high-tech industries and encourage the establishment of Small, Medium and Large Scale Industries ranging from manufacturing, oil & gas, plastic, blocks and building, woods, electrical and iron, automobile, food processing, hair products and recycling of plastic products as well as refining of crude oil, among other several value adding others totalling over 120 industries.
It will also promote innovative research and developmental programmes of the university through commercialisation, encourage university-industry linkages which will facilitate mutual research, student and staff training, promote entrepreneurship in ABUAD students and staff through development of incubation units which will concretise their budding ideas and provide avenues to the immediate communities for employment, vocational and professional training as well as provide a platform for patronage of industries, research institutes, governmental organisations and other corporate bodies in project, product and technological innovations and development.
As the first university in West Africa to run a programme in Mechatronics, the take-off of the Research Industrial Park will enable the university move to the next stage, i.e. F.A.C.T, whereby it will make a foray into the world of Robotics. Above all, the park will give verve and further signification to ABUAD’s drive to produce well-rounded young graduates who will be employers of labour instead of pounding the streets of our state capitals shopping for white collar jobs that are fast disappearing.
This will no doubt be a convincing boost to its drive to institutionalise quality and functional education in Nigeria with the ultimate aim of ensuring that the nation recovers its lost glory in education.
Conclusion
In the face of the enumerated challenges, the question I ask myself is: What can we do to have quality and functional engineering education? My suggestions are as follows:
Funding
It is a notorious fact that engineering education, like others, is not well funded either by federal or state governments. This is in large measure due to the attitude of the government and its people to education. The government since 1948 has made people to believe unwittingly that it can provide free education whereas education is a very expensive enterprise.
If the government expects its citizens to be honest, the government must also be honest in its dealings. It should be honest enough to inform citizens that quality and functional education is very expensive. It should be honest enough to review its policy on funding of education at all levels. The politicians must refrain from campaigning for votes based on impossible promises of ‘free education’.
The government should encourage philanthropists and well-to-do Nigerians to establish private universities. All over the world, the most successful universities were established by private people. Examples are Stanford, Yale, Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge among others. In Japan, more than 60 per cent of all the universities are private universities.
The government should support private universities which have reached post-graduate level by giving them subsidies that would enable them improve on their infrastructure and carry out researches. Founders of good private universities and huge donors to universities should be acknowledged by government and given highest honour as against political appointees.
All Nigerians should be encouraged to endow professorial chairs and make generous donations to universities. The alumni association of each university must be made to appreciate the need to give back to their universities. The money TETFund collects from private citizens should be available to post-graduate private universities for research and development.
Accreditation of programmes
The NUC is empowered to conduct accreditation for programmes vide Section 15 of Education (National Minimum Standard and Establishment of Institutions) Act 1985. They are empowered to examine the resources and facilities in tertiary institutions. The present Executive Secretary, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, must be congratulated in that recently, the accreditation teams withdrew accreditation from many universities, including some first generation universities. Honestly, I have been bothered by accreditations granted to many universities running engineering programmes in view of the obsolete equipment or inadequate facilities in most universities. This is responsible for the poor quality of students that most of our universities turn out. It is therefore no surprise that their products are rejected by industries and international organisations.
I sincerely believe that there is no justification for NUC and professional bodies in carrying out accreditation exercises at different times to the same university. I believe that there should be a synergy between the NUC and professional bodies. I urge both bodies to carry out joint accreditation and visitation at the same time.
There is no doubt that such an exercise will endure to the benefit of the universities and the country at large.
Academic and professional qualifications
The NUC is empowered to approve the establishment of universities in the country. See Section 10 of NUC Education (National Minimum Standards and Establishment of Institutions) Act 1985. It is also empowered to determine the quota for each university. Regrettably however, all the professional bodies like COREN, MDCN and Council for Legal Education, often interfere with these statutory powers of NUC by challenging NUC on the quota given to universities. There is no doubt that there is a world of different between academic degrees and professional certificates. Where a university has all the materials, the infrastructure, teaching materials and necessary equipment, it is the NUC that should and ought to determine the number of students to be admitted.
In ABUAD where 900 students applied to study Medicine, the NUC believes that it is entitled to more students than 50 but the MDNC insists on limiting the number to the barest minimum. This does not augur well for the profession, the country, the parents and the students. It discourages the founders of private universities. Again, this is one more reason why there should be joint meetings between NUC and professional bodies in all cases.
Entry qualification to universities
One major problem facing engineering education is the entry qualification. In Nigeria today, the entry qualification for the study of engineering is Ordinary Level West African Examination Council (WAEC) equivalent of GCE Ordinary Level, whereas in England, the minimum for entry into universities is GCE A’ Level. In many other countries, the entry qualification in Law and Medicine is First Degree.
To make matters worse, the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) last year announced that universities could even admit students with as low as 120/400.
I am of the view that declaration of entry point by JAMB should be scrapped. The entry point for every university is a matter to be decided by the Senate of each university having regard to their quality and acknowledgement by parents of applicants.
Teachers and teachers training certificates
In ABUAD, we hold annual workshop on teaching methods at the beginning of every session. This is because the mere fact that one holds Masters or Ph. D degree does not ipso facto mean that the person is a good teacher. Teaching is a vocation and requires special training. In developed countries, nobody is allowed to teach at any level unless he has the prescribed qualification to teach at that level whether elementary, secondary or university. If we are sincere in our search for quality engineering education, COREN should insist that NUC should insist on Teacher Training Certificate (TTC) or obtain certificate of participation from a Workshop on Teacher Training which ABUAD conducts annually.
Central examination for final year students of all tertiary institutions
When I visited some universities and I saw their structures, facilities and the quality of students admitted to study in those universities, I asked myself what is the quality of graduates that would come out of these universities. Of course when you have local universities, using local materials to teach local students, all you can expect is local graduates.
It is for this reason that I want to suggest and very seriously too that we should have a central examination board for all final year students in engineering and indeed in all disciplines. Students from all universities in all disciplines throughout the country should take the one and only one final examination organised by a central body. This will no doubt ensure that standard and quality are maintained. The older universities will wake up while the young one would belt up and work harder.
I thank you for the opportunity and the attention which you have given me to deliver this lecture. May God grant us the fortitude to take necessary but indispensable remedial steps when we leave this hall today. Permit me to extend an open invitation to you to come and see the ABUAD dream to revolutionise education in Nigeria.