Category: Campus Life

The University of Abuja (UNIABUJA) has been shut indefinitely, following a students’ demonstration over non-accreditation of some courses. OLIVIA USHIE writes that students may not return until the courses are accredited.

For the University of Abuja (UNIABUJA), crises seem to have become second nature. Since its establishment, it has been embroiled in one crisis or the other. It has been rocked by another crisis, which led to its closure a few weeks ago. At the centre of the crisis is the non-accreditation of Engineering courses.

Engineering students went on the rampage as they demonstrated over the non-accreditation of their courses. They destroyed properties and defaced the Vice-Chancellor’s portrait which they removed from the administrative building and took to the boys’ hostel. The school has been shut indefinitely.

The incident happened when the institution was preparing for the second semester examination.

The students, it was learnt, held a peaceful protest the first day but changed tactic following the deployment of armed Fulani herdsmen, who allegedly arrived in campus shuttle vehicles to chase the protesters out of the campus.

CAMPUSLIFE gathered that the inability of the UNIABUJA management to secure the accreditation of the National Universities Commission (NUC) for courses in four faculties – Engineering, Medicine, Agricultural and Veterinary Medicine – after six months deadline by the Minister of Education, Prof Ruqayyatu Rufa’i, was led to the protest.

The university established the four faculties seven years ago but without adequate facilities. The Faculty has Mechanical Engineering, Civil, Chemical and Electrical and Electronics Engineering departments.

Our correspondent learnt that in May, student-demonstrators besieged the Federal Ministry of Education to draw the minister’s attention to their plight. When she was informed of their presence, Prof Rufa’i was said to have invited the students for a meeting in her office.

At the meeting, CAMPUSLIFE gathered that the minster gave the students the options of either leaving the school or enrolling for other accredited courses. But when she noticed that the student did not buy the idea, the minister was said to have given the UNIABUJA management six months to get full accreditation for its medical, agricultural and engineering courses.

To ensure a successful exercise, it was gathered that N4 billion was given to the university to upgrade its facilities before the accreditation team arrived.

A protester said: “We kept ourselves abreast of the movement of the money from the ministry to the school’s bank account. We thought the money would be used judiciously but, here we are; nothing has been done to upgrade any facility in the Faculty of Engineering.”

Our correspondent learnt that when the NUC team visited last month, the institution was only able to secure interim accreditation for three faculties. Faculty of Engineering was left out because the team discovered that the facilities being used for teaching were outdated.

This prompted Engineering students to gather their colleagues to protest the outcome of the accreditation.

They accused the management of insensitivity, saying the interim accreditation it secured for the other faculties was not reliable.

The students complained that since 2005 when the faculties were established, no student has either graduated or gone on national youth service.

The Faculty of Engineering has two graduate sets already but none of them has been mobilised for service. There is also the complaint that Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) has yet to accredit the institution’s four engineering courses.

In medical college, there are students, who have spent eight years without moving to the next level. Five sets with different matriculation numbers are said to be in 200-Level without writing the MBBS professional exam that will get them to the next level.

A 2010 Engineering graduate said: “When the faculties were instituted in 2005, we learnt that NUC advised the management not to operate the four faculties at the same time because of the facilities on ground at the time.

“But the school went ahead, ignoring the warning. But since the programmes began, none has been accredited. When I was in school, all the engineering practical classes we did as undergraduates were conducted at the Federal University of Technology, Minna (FUT MINNA) because UNIABUJA did not have the facilities. Even in Medicine, different sets have been lumped together because of the accreditation crisis.”

Tunde Adeosun, Civil Engineering student, said: “The protest was prompted by the deceit of the Vice Chancellor, Prof Sunday Adelabu, after six months of promising us to get our courses accredited by NUC and COREN.

“The commission’s accreditation team came for third exercise last month after which we can now talk about proper accreditation. But nobody knows the outcome of the verification exercise and yet they want us to keep quite while our future hangs in the balance.

“We will make sure no student returns to the campus until the accreditation is secured.”

Other students, who spoke to CAMPUSLIFE, said they would fight on until the courses are accreditated.

Efforts to reach the Registrar, Mallam Mohammed Moddibo, failed as calls to his mobile phone was not available.

Two days after I wrote my piece on “When runs become the norm on campuses” (November 29, 2012), I got a call from an anonymous student caller who simply referred to himself as an undergraduate in one of the ‘big’ universities in the south west. In the almost one hour we spent on the phone-at the expense of my caller- discussing issues on campuses I learnt quite a lot and I wept for this country. My caller told me that the student union officials I quoted in the column were right in their assertions and I should not struggle with the issue of percentage. He said he is a pimp and he’s not apologetic about it; along the line he said: “Pimps are the most successful businessmen on campuses” which I’m using as the title for the column today.

In that piece, I had written that: “One of them told me ‘authoritatively’ that about 80 per cent of students in tertiary institutions in Nigeria engage in one form of ‘runs’ or the other. “Runs,’ according to him “cuts across prostitution, peddling leaked examination question papers, drug trafficking, cultism, writing exams on behalf of other students, acting as middle men for Juju priests, acting as ‘leg men’ between dubious lecturers and student etc. I told him that 80% is quite a high percentage to categorise students, but he stood his ground claiming he’s right with his assertion.”

After our discussion I “filed” the key points I could remember somewhere on my laptop hoping to revisit it sometime only to read the report by Gilbert Alasa, a student of University of Benin, Benin City. The report compelled me to address the issue while it is still hot. My caller gave me insights into how the “business” operates and why some of them that are “bold” go into it. He claims to be a 300 level Economics undergraduate and discovered the business “by chance”. “I gained admission into the university in 2009” he told me “but things were really tough for me initially because I come from a very poor background, for most of my first year and the first semester of my 200 level, I eat only once a day. But what I lacked through poverty, I gained by being forceful and bold, that boldness brought me into the business”.

Giving me a bird’s eye view of the “business” he said there are different categories of pimps, there are high and lower cadre. The high cadres are those that play on the international scene, those handling clients that need the service of girls abroad. “When you work for clients of this nature you select girls with international passport who must have travelled out of Nigeria at least once. This is the best part of the business I love because the clients and middle men are polished, polite and you are paid up front, so it has a lot to do with trust and carriage.”

This cadre is usually interested in Nigerian girls that can grace their parties or other functions abroad; he recounted a story where he organized thirty girls from three campuses for a former Governor for a party in the Caribbean. The girls, he claims, were flown out on a chartered flight and when they came back “they were fully loaded with gifts of all nature, I got my first Blackberry from one of the girls”. Since it may be sometime difficult to find thirty willing girls from the same institution, he said they usually encroach into another pimp’s territory, but they have to settle the pimp depending on the number of girls recruited.

The second category, according to my caller, is those that play on the Nigerian scene. They are basically interested in one night stands or overnight parties. This is the category where politicians and business moguls play. But he stated that these people work with people they can trust and ensure that they seize all Blackberry or camera phones from the girls before bringing them over because of fear for their reputation. The girls, he says, understand this part of the deal and believe that a night without calls will do them no harm.

As a student of Economics, my caller said his future is already guaranteed as the forces of demand and supply will ensure that he is in business from both his clients and the girls. He said he’s already a millionaire at 23 years old without stealing, cheating, engaging in drugs or cultism. “Sir, I’m a very serious student, I don’t joke with my studies and my lecturers know that. You know there is unemployment in the country and if as a student I am gainfully employed, should I be worried when I graduate? I have even employed two bright boys on campus working for me, when I leave I’d be overseeing them from off campus”.

As our discussion progressed, he told me he reads Ngozi- my late wife’s column weekly and mine since I took over after her death- but feels we are naïve moralists who fail to see that times have changed, that in our era things were not as tough as they are now. At a point I asked if he ever thought about the girls he recruits for his clients and whether he would recruit his sister for one of them? The line went silent at the other end for a while, then he answered that some of the girls use the money to pay their fees and take care of their needs. I was patient enough to drive home my point, which I believed he understood but was blinded by the gains of the business to answer.

What intrigued me about my anonymous caller was his level of coherence in defending what he believed in. Even though we play on two diametrically opposing camps, I sensed a leader that can be mentored to channel his intellect toward something he can be proud of. I tried the best I could to let him know that any form of success predicated on the debasement of another human being is not true success. Agreed, he may have three cars on campus and a room to himself, that in itself does not amount to success. If he’s reading this today, we can still talk.

After he hung up I reflected deeply on the strange call. What I could deduce was a young man who was already feeling guilty for his actions and is trying to look for a vent to pour out his heart and maybe in the process be “commended” for being enterprising. But I believe it never crossed his mind that he is putting the future of some girls in jeopardy by providing a platform for promiscuity. I looked at the other side of the coin as well, which is poverty and I asked myself if he had money would he have gone into the business? When I asked him that question he was silent and honest enough to say he does not know. Throughout our discussion, never for once did my caller falter, he spoke impeccable English, unlike some undergraduates these days which led me to believe the aspect of his being a serious student.

Alasa’s report published as our cover story last week corroborates what my caller told me. According to the report, many undergraduates are smiling to the bank, courtesy of a booming business called “pimping” on campus. They (pimps) cruise about in posh cars while their colleagues cramp into rickety campus shuttles. They live large on campus even though the source of their wealth cannot be openly discussed. From the comfort of their off-campus hostels, they negotiate high-profile deals with powerful personalities while their mates sweat it out in stuffy libraries in school.

While we debate the falling standard of education, infrastructural decay, incessant ASUU strike, skyrocketing fees and the myriad of problems confronting tertiary education in Nigeria, we now know that we have a bigger social issue to contend with in a society that has gone haywire.

How can Nigerians become prosperous? It is by allowing them to pursue their dreams in a peaceful environment according to participants at the yearly Leadership Retreat of the African Liberty Organisation in Lagos.

Corps members and students from some institutions, including the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB), University of Ibadan (UI) and Moshood Abiola Polytechnic (MAPOLY), Abeokuta, attended the three-day seminar, with the theme Promoting liberty and freedom on campuses.

The Director of Outreach of the organisation, Mr Dayo Thomas, charged the participants to engender discourse that would change Nigeria’s destiny for good. The nation, he said, needed the capitalistic economic model to move out of its fiscal quagmire it.

Thomas said African Liberty believed in freedom of the citizenry to pursue free and fair trade rather than donation of free gifts to people as espoused by socialist ideology, which he said had ruined many countries in recent times. He cited prosperity achieved by countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and Japan as product of keeping faith in free trade model, which he said remained the crux of capitalism.

“That majority of the people living in Nigeria today live below $2 per day is no news again. But how do we move out of this developmental crisis? African Liberty believes that every human being is gifted with skill and resources, which other people in society may need to continue the symbiotic relationship of exchange. But government itself constitutes the biggest hurdle against realisation of free trade, which has the potential to make the most wretched human to achieve prosperity in the shortest possible period,” Thomas noted.

He said Nigerian leaders must know that the only way to reduce poverty to its barest minimum was to give people the freedom to exchange resources without the government control. He added that Nigeria would achieve meaningful growth only if the government could hand off the lever of economy to the free marketers.

“Libertarians don’t sleep about; they read and engage people in discussion about salient developmental issues affecting the wellbeing of people in the society,” Thomas charged the participants, who were left to engage in intellectual discourse after the seminar session.

To ensure the ideals of free market and capitalism are properly propagated, the participants went on an outreach campaign to meet people one-on-one on why they must be prosperous. From Oshodi to Lekki, the libertarians engaged commuters in discussion about free trade and capitalism, giving out compact disc labeled “Ideas for a Free Society” to the willing people.

They outreach was ended at Elegushi private beach on the Lekki axis of Lagos, where the participants went to relax after the day activities.