Why we want to feed ABU students - Vice-Chancellor Garba
There have been publications about poor sanitary facilities in the hostels. Has the issue been tackled?
Students come into the university with a lot of expectations and sometimes with lack of preparations on the challenges they are likely to meet. Some of them find the university environment completely different from their homes. Some come from urban areas with lots of social amenities and others from rural areas with very little infrastructure and modern amenities.
So, they may either be amazed with the environment or disappointed. ABU is the largest university in Sub-Saharan Africa with a population of about 40,000. Students’ welfare comes in a number of ways but, of course, the cleanliness of their hostels, classrooms, libraries, religious places and leisure areas is important to us. If you take the hostels for example, they were built decades ago and we never expected that our population will explode. We never projected that in the nearest future our population is going to explode so that every infrastructure must commensurately expand.
The infrastructure is shrinking and some students had to rent houses outside the university campus. Most universities are beginning to think of ways out and as we talk, we have received a number of proposals from private investors to come in and build hostels on either public-private partnership or build, operate and transfer agreements. Each one of these has its peculiar challenges; the public- private partnership requires the university to give money and we don’t have enough money. If you are building a hostel of a billion naira, for example, and the developers are putting in 75%, the university would have to give 25%. The university may not have that money.
The build, operate and transfer entails the developers building hostels and maintaining them for a number of years until they recoup their monies before they transfer them to the university. That translates to high rental fee for the students. So, for fear of creating segregated environment in the university where the children of the rich can afford these new houses and other students left out, we had to abandon the idea.
We are now going to prioritize our projects and build additional hostels based on the little support we are getting from TETFund at the cost of about N300 million. We are also going to rehabilitate the existing hostels during the long vacation. We are going to start with a female hostel, Amina Hall, and that will take about 3 months. There is overcrowding and where you allocate four students to a room you will later realize that they increase to about eight students. The eight students will use the same facilities meant for four students. So, no matter how much money The Vice-Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, Professor Ibrahim Garba expresses regret in this interview that many students skip breakfast because they can’t afford it and speaks of plans to introduce subsidized feeding programme, among other issues you spend in renovation, you won’t get the best.
There were reports that you are planning to start feeding your students.... (Cuts in)
I am not going to tell you the secret but I want you to know that every higher institution in the world has some form of catering that ensures students have balanced diet at an affordable price. That was whatý we enjoyed during our own time and somehow it stopped, over the years. Does it mean that what we enjoyed during our own time, we deprive our own children? The students now hardly get balanced diet. I teach students and see most of them sleep in the morning during the first lesson because they haven’t taken breakfast. They do not concentrate; and in learning if you miss the morning period, you miss a lot. Many students cannot afford breakfast which they see as luxury. They call it 0-1-0 which means they will skip breakfast and dinner. Some do not eat enough dinner and in the morning they skip breakfast. How do you expect a child at that age to persevere and learn? Even during our time, it was not that the country had unlimited amount of money, but government found it very important to offer subsidy for students’ meals. Now, they said the population has increased but the resources have also increased tremendously. If you do the calculations, in the 1970s and early ‘80s it took 50 kobo per day to feed a student which was equivalent to a dollar. Today, the dollar is about N200 which you can use to feed a student. If the student go to any eatery with N200, it might not be sufficient for him. If you require N200 to feed a student per meal, you don’t need N200 times ten to feed ten students. It is an idea we just abandoned, nobody was thinking about it at all. Our dining halls are there locked up. The people you invited to do catering jobs in the university were not subjected to any regulation because you can’t do that. So, what we are saying is that we must think about students’ feeding and in which ever form it comes, there must be subsidy. ABU has graduated nearly 800,000 people in Nigeria and they constitute the alumni of the university. People who studied abroad will tell you that every year; you must contribute to your university. The ABU alumni association is starting an online project to meet all the alumnus to contribute to a N50 billion fund. If you translate how much each alumnus will contribute, it isn’t too much and people are willing. There is sufficient number of philanthropists in the society that would want to contribute to feeding students out of public good. We all go on Hajj and we see the Arabs feeding millions of people. So, we are going to tap into the alumni fund to feed the students.
The idea came during a meeting with the alumni association where they recounted their good old days and some of the students were listening. I raised the issue there and many people indicated their willingness to contribute. We are going to start with breakfast and we are working on it.
There were a number of TETFund projects that were abandoned: why?
You know ABU is a very large institution and there were many intervention projects, including TETFund. The projects are on construction and rehabilitations while substantial part of TETFund projects is on training as well as on conference and research. But because building projects are more visible, those that were abandoned along the way can easily be seen. However, not all the projects were stopped; about 20 per cent out of 100. TETFund has a number of ways of providing interventions. There is what they call the regular intervention in which they share resources to universities every year on equal basis, and then you access your money and do projects. There is also Special Intervention Projects (SIP). TETFund carryout SIPs through individuals. These types of interventions come with certain challenges, and in special intervention many things must be treated in a special way. You may get a contractor that has the sympathy of the person bringing the intervention. Most of the projects that get stalled along the line were SIPs. The projects can only be delayed but can never be abused. TETFund interventions are such that if you don’t fulfill certain obligations, you cannot access the next batch of money. So, any project that is stalled is not likely that you have collected the money but you are not able to accomplish certain milestone and it’s until you do that before you get more money. In the last couple of months we have recovered and readjusted some of these projects and made the contractors resume worký. I am not an investigative person to know whether there is fraud in the project or not and if you don’t have evidence, you can’t take a person to court.
What efforts are you making to improve the links between your research institutions and the industries to ensure smooth
transfer of knowledge?
One of our greatest challenges in the university generally is our inability to have desirable linkage with industries and it’s not our fault because industrial development does not come at once. You are also aware that industrial development had been stalled for a long time. It is actually the industries that need the universities to solve their problems and not the other way round. Universities create knowledge; whether or not that knowledge is useful to industry. The industries will find out the extent to which they can benefit from it and come and support it. We are not able to curtail the importation of goods and services, including some of the basic things that we ought to generate. So, the industries don’t have incentives to look inward. You can attain growth if you put a lot of money into development. We easily buy things from other countries. Look at mobile phones for example. If the industries have no incentives to produce, the universities won’t get support to generate ideas. Universities transfer knowledge in favorable environment.
There were reports that you want to introduce the college system in ABU…
Most of the largest universities in the world operate the college system because it helps in decentralizing administration. My degree was awarded by the University of London Senate which has over 30 colleges and universities under it mostly with their vice chancellors or rectors. Each has its own growth pattern and if Nigeria had adopted that pattern, we wouldn’t need many universities. One faculty in this university is bigger than many universities in this country. In faculty of science, there are nine departments and two of them award three degrees each. Another faculty has only three departments. You can’t call all of them faculties. You can put some of them together to constitute a college to reduce administrative bureaucracy. We are looking at the feasibility of having colleges.
Many students cannot afford breakfast which
they see as luxury. They call it 0-1-0 which means they will skip breakfast and dinner.
Some do not eat enough dinner and in the morning they skip breakfast. How do you expect a child at that age to persevere and
learn?
Have you been able to address pending disciplinary cases in the university?
We must address all pending cases. We have committees for all the disciplinary matters that gather evidence and interview parties before making recommendations.
Is it fair to prolong disciplinary matters?
It is not. We are not keeping cases for long but for fear of miscarriage of justice, you don’t start a case and rush it. Sometimes the cases drag for long because of appeal. We just set up a committee to look into one case in the Faculty of Law.