Professor Vincent Ado Tenebe is the Vice-Chancellor of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). In this interview with TONY AKOWE, he speaks on the institution’s mandate and his achievements in the past four years. Excerpts:
Many are of the view that graduates of the National Open University of Nigeria will not be accepted for the National Youths Service Corps (NYSC). How true is this?
The National Open University of Nigeria, like any other university in Nigeria, is a federal university accredited by the National Universities Commission (NUC). We have programmes approved for students to study for their degree in various disciplines up to Ph.D.
The university has various schools comprising a Post-graduate School, School of Social Sciences, Education, Law and the School of Science and Technology. We have just added the School of Agriculture and School of Health Sciences.
When you visit our website, you will see other courses like Mass Communications, Economics and English Studies, among others.
There are various courses that one can study at the Open University. For the reason that open and distance learning system of education is new in Nigeria, people assume that it is another part-time programme.
Programmes offered at the Open University are not part-time. They are offered on full time basis. One of the things we are trying to push forward is to make Nigerians realise what we are talking about.
On the issue of eligibility for NYSC, there is no reason to exclude graduates of NOUN who are within the age bracket from the NYSC programme because they have gone through the same curriculum with their counterparts in the conventional universities.
The only reason for the seeming challenge is that, when the NYSC started in 1973, the Open University system was not in place. At the moment, the NYSC is issuing exemption certificates to all our graduates. But that is not good enough. I foresee a situation where our graduates who are still within the age bracket will be allowed to participate in NYSC after going through a programme of four or five years.
As for our degrees or certificates, holders of our certificates compete favourably with their counterparts from the conventional universities. Compare our graduates with their counterparts from the conventional universities and you will realise that they are among the best in the country today.
We are not marketing our graduates for nothing, but we are confident that they are the best. In the next few years, the public will confirm that products of the Open University are the best. So acceptability is not a question at all.
At the moment, what is the student population of the university?
When I assumed duty in 2010, the student population of the National Open University of Nigeria had dropped from 32,000 to 16,000. We had to go back to the drawing board and we were able to raise the student population to 53,000 within one semester.
However, by my last assessment recently, student population stands at 308,000.
We have just started semester registration and already, 65,000 students have registered. I am confident that the number of students will increase because Nigerians will always wait until they know that examination is around the corner before they start looking for who to beg to allow them register.
We are still not happy because I set a target for myself that before I leave office next year, God willing, I want to see that the student population of the university hits 500,000. But the target set for this university is that it has 1.5 million students in its enrollment.
We are the only university in Nigeria that matriculates twice a year. We have students’ registration every semester. We are the only university that democratises education. We allow you to register this semester and next semester you might disappear only to appear in another semester and we will not question you because we have given you that liberty.
One of the major problems in the world today is cyber crime. Considering that most of your activities are carried out online, what are you doing to ensure that this does not affect your operations?
It is true that some of our activities like admission, registration and even accessing some of our materials are done online. Since we are aware that we have some technological challenges, we often use the media to reach out to our students. Sometimes, we have network challenges. We do experience that sometimes and we have to cope with it. We are not different from other organisations that have their operations on online. The banks, security, even the mass media, sometimes have network failure. As regards cyber fraud, we have not experienced that yet because we have put in place strategies to deal with it.
Nigerians believe that the present administration is not doing enough to improve the education sector. What is your view on this?
As an active participant in the educational sector in Nigeria, I can tell you that we are doing our best to ensure that we keep pace with other parts of the world. I do not agree with those who keep saying that the standard of educational in Nigeria has fallen.
Educational standard has fallen all over the world, not only in Nigeria. The only way to ascertain whether educational standard has fallen in Nigeria or not is to bring together students or graduates from Nigeria and their counterparts from other parts of the world. Give them a test and if the Nigerian graduates perform below average, then it will be established that standard of education has really fallen.
How many graduates from Nigerian universities have gone abroad for post-graduate studies and are withdrawn because of poor performance? But the story we hear is that they always beat their counterpart abroad because we learn through the hard way and when they go to where there is technology, it becomes so easy for them.
So, it is not right to give negative information that will portray us in bad light. There are more good things happening in this country. Our educational system is not bad, it is good. I don’t believe that we are not doing well.
What is the way out of the present educational situation?
Somebody once asked me why we are still producing graduates when there are no jobs? The primary aim of acquiring education is not for you to get a job. Being educated is to develop your mind. It is to expose you so that you can become an individual that can find your way in life. It is to equip you; and once you are equipped, you can find your way in life.
The world over, there is no country that does not have unemployment issues. My advice is for the government to encourage open and distance learning because through it, you produce an individual that is creative, who can study on his own, an individual that is self made and an individual that requires minimal supervision. Once that person graduates, he is not going into the streets looking for an employer. He is going to become an employer himself. That is why in the Open University, one of our recent developments is to create an advancement office, through which we are going to encourage entrepreneurship.
The Open University has been able to acquire a micro-finance bank to ensure that all the students we are to enroll into Open University and are not working are thought how to utilise products offered by our bank to be self-reliant. This will be done in collaboration with our entrepreneurship centre.
Since our motto is work and learn, once an individual gets admission, we empower that individual to enable him or her to carry out business either in hair salon, photography, or whatever business. Once that individual does business for the period of five years and is paying back the loan given to him or her on schedule, by the time the individual graduates, he is not going for a N50, 000 monthly jobs, because he would have become an employer.
So, through the Open University system, government can create jobs for unemployed Nigerians.
