Entrepreneurship Education is Compulsory in KadPoly, Says Rector
In this interview with John Shiklam, the Rector of Kaduna Polytechnic Dr. Muhammed Bello Ibrahim explains why entrepreneurship training is compulsory for all students of the institution
You have been in office as rector of the Kaduna Polytechnic for the past three years, how has it been?
It has been interesting for me in the past three years of being the chief executive of a large polytechnic like this at a time. I came at a time it was coming out of crisis created by another person.
There were so many expectations from me. I was a staff of the polytechnic till 2002 when I left and I came back in 2012 as the rector. But by the time I came back in 2012, the situation was really bad. Things were not the way they were and at such a time, we did our best to sustain the peace and to improve on what we saw to make sure things work the way they should and we are making remarkable progress in that regard. We ensure peaceful atmosphere for teaching, learning and what have you.
In specific terms, what would you say are your achievements in the last three years as rector?
Like I said, we inherited problems here and there. There were strikes by the unions. So the first thing we did was to see how we can jointly maintain peace without which no meaningful development can take place. So we began a reconciliation process which we have been able to maintain till this time and that was a big achievement as far as I’m concerned.
We inherited liabilities of allowances to the unions including wrong remittance of deductions and all that. In order to address all these, we had to first see how to address the issue of all the three unions. We came up with reengineering how to address them. We made sure that we carried everybody along. We address problems as they come.
We also embark on improvement of teaching facilities particularly the lecture halls including the ones that were completed under my supervision. There are still other ones that are still ongoing. We are still trying to see how we can go on in our funding. Unfortunately this equal funding by TETFund is seriously telling on us; it funds smaller polytechnics with maybe three departments the same way it funds Kaduna Polytechnic which is about six size of other polytechnics, especially the new ones.
We have visited organisations to ask what type of manpower they need so we can see where to come in since our economy is demand-driven.
In 2013, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) approved about N3.4 billion intervention funding six polytechnics within the six geopolitical zones to upgrade. It was by Sanusi Lamido Sanusi who was the governor of the CBN. But since the approval, the fund has not been released; I really don’t know what went wrong.
I will like to use this medium to call on the new CBN governor to please re-facilitate the work on the polytechnics from the six geopolitical zones. Here in Kaduna Polytechnic, we intend to have a centre of excellence in engineering, which means we need new facilities including ICT and networking in our four campuses. If the CBN has released the money, it would have really transformed the institution for more effective service delivery.
But unfortunately, the new CBN governor is still not fast tracking the whole thing which is contrary to the philosophy of the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari who is interested in technical and vocational training.
The board of CBN had approved the intervention fund and I see no reason why the money will not be released for the purpose it was meant for. I want to plead with him to accelerate the process.Of utmost important to us as an institution is the issue of skills acquisition and entrepreneurial development. When I came in, I said as a technically-oriented institution, any applicant that we are admitting into the institution should register for training.
The idea is that as a technical institution, we are not supposed to be producing graduates who will go out with papers and be looking for jobs. They should be the one that will provide jobs for others. We discussed it extensively and the academic staff approved it and we made it compulsory that final year students must register for skills acquisition programme in addition to the primary programme they are studying.
I went to Brazil and I discovered that the difference between us is that their economy is actually industrial or demand-driven while what we do here is supply-driven, whether the services are needed or not. So we want to restructure all that here. To realise that, we have been interfacing with all industries in Kaduna asking them to collaborate with us.
We have been in touch with places like Hamdal Hotel, NNPC, Peugeot Automobile and so on. They have technical needs which they want our curriculum to capture. This is to enable us produce graduates in accordance with the need of the market.
As a responsible and responsive institution, we have to ensure that and we have already established the synergy that works.
We are working on the establishment of new departments of metallic technology, welding and fabrication technology, petroleum and natural gas.
There were pronouncements to convert Kaduna Polytechnic and Yaba College of Technology to universities of technology; we have not heard anything about it again, what happened?
Yes we are still working seriously on it by putting modality for upgrading in place. When I came in, a committee was set up in that direction. We still have the diploma programmes at lower level to supply the students’ admission requirements for the degree programme and I think it will be a wonderful experience when this is done. And you know we are going to undergo the period of transition though we are trying our best. We hope to get funds to improve on infrastructure. We have efficient, quality staff strength; we just need a little push to have a kind of university we desire.
Our students are competing favourably when it comes to entrepreneurship with other higher institutions in the country. They recently competed with 40 higher institutions in the country and defeated all of them including University of Lagos, University of Ibadan, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and the rest them.
They are going to represent Nigeria in the whole world entrepreneurship competition in South Africa. It was held in Mexico last year where we came second. So this year, we are not expecting anything less than emerging world number one in entrepreneurship and do the country proud. This is a proof of quality of training we offer here. One can now imagine what this school will turn into when it is finally converted into a full-fledged degree awarding institution.
The polytechnic has been battling the encroachment of its land. Do you support moves by Governor Nasir El-Rufai to recover government land illegally taken?
I will like to commend our able governor for his boldness to start the process of land recovery in the state. Somebody will go and build on public land. We all went through school and if there is no provision for us we won’t be where we are today. People out of selfishness went and built on land that is meant for our children forever. So it was actually madness that made the people to go and do that.
Kaduna Polytechnic has similar problem at its campus at bypass. We have one 1,000 acres of land decades ago. We paid compensation, we have the certificate of occupancy and the land was there. Just like ABU, Zaria, the thinking of our founding fathers then was to have a big institution and the vast land was meant for expansion. But as we speak, over 500 acres of that land had been taken away.
We confronted the community members; we took the matter to court but we wanted to settle the matter outside the court so we withdrew the case. We built a fence to demarcate the encroached land but they keep encroaching. Honestly if there is anything that gives me nightmare it is this land encroachment issue. If Nigerian constitution has permitted us, we would have chased those people away by ourselves; unfortunately, we have to go by the law of the land.So we want to use this medium to appeal to our governor to help us to recover our land. We need the land; we want to build new campuses. We want to expand our structures.
What are your challenges in terms of funding?
We have the challenge of being the largest polytechnic in Africa in terms space and all that. We have been putting pressure on the federal government to increase our funding, particularly through TETFund. We are hoping that we will develop other means of getting money to run a big institution like ours