CRUTECH; Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow.

What do you do when you inherit a university that is “less than a secondary school...”? Two things really: you throw your hands in the air in surrender and watch the monsters of sorting, misappropriation, and good old sleaze peck your school to the ground. Or you throw your hat in the ring, roll your sleeves and beat the malaise till the parlour of reproach fades into beauty admired by all.

Professor Anthony Owan Enoh, Vice-Chancellor of Cross River University of Technology, chose to fight. And fight he did. In this interview with MACOSA DIGEST editors Ukana Omon and Ojoi Essien, he tells all about CRUTECH: where he met it, what it is now, and where he is taking it. Excerpts

… Hope of dignified learning in serene, well-equipped environs, with staff who take dignity in labour. Why do strikes persist at the university? Has ‘Professor No Sorting’ gone soft of academic malpractice? Why is there little business investment at CRUTECH when it needs so much money?

MD:        Professor Julius Okojie (Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission), identified lack of innovation and development, infrastructural decadence and laxity, I think, as some of the problems confronting Nigerian universities today. How are you dealing with these problems in CRUTECH?

VC:         I'll take them as they come. One of the problems is infrastructural decay; that can only be handled by the proprietors of the university. If we have decay of infrastructure, two things are responsible; either the proprietors have not accurately funded the institution or there's misappropriation after the funding has been made. As it applies to CRUTECH, I think over the years, we've been a bit marginal in terms of access to fund and so we have had that as a challenge.

On the issue of capacity, again I understand that's a problem in most Nigerian universities and can be traced to the training most people in the university actually received. I say very boldly: in our country today, we have watered down the quality of our educational system to the point that many persons who don't deserve to find themselves in the university have found themselves in the university and a very pedestrian adage goes 'you don’t give what you don't have'. And so if a lecturer or a staff found a way to earn a PhD but doesn’t deserve it, when he comes to school, he is of course given a job as a lecturer and the obvious will happen.

Why it’s so obvious in the country is because most universities in Nigeria never recruit following due process. And what is due process? You advertise for staff, people apply in their thousands; you put in place a mechanism to get the best, without considering such factors as ethnicity, geography, gender or family background, or connections; you don’t recruit people because somebody important somewhere in society sends a note … so that person who found his way through whatever means gets the job while the person who really deserves to be here is not here … It follows from that to the third one - lack of innovation.

Innovation is the highest level of intelligence. If you don’t have the capacity, you cannot be innovative. If you don’t have the capacity, you’d be very routine. It’s what you were taught in your own days that you’ll be giving ten years later.  In fact some people repeat the same notes when the world has gone beyond those notes. If you don’t have capacity, you can’t be innovative because those two factors are linked. It’s like the hierarchy of achievement: it’s because you are good at a certain level that you venture into things above that level. If you don’t have the basics, you can’t have the ultimate. People who don’t have the capacity can’t be innovative and that’s the problem with Nigerian universities. So yes, I accept with him (Prof. Okojie).

MD:        From all indications, you are putting the money from the Needs Assessment Intervention to good use. Some would say you didn’t have to do that, because the culture in Nigeria is that chief executives tend to embezzle. Why do you seem so passionate about developing CRUTECH with that money? Are you under pressure or is it because of your moral fibre?

VC:         No. I wouldn’t talk about the issue of moral fibre because that would be trying to give to myself more than I deserve; I should allow other people call that judgement. I didn’t believe in CRUTECH; I have spent 5 years in an institution where I did far more than I’m doing in CRUTECH today. Let me tell you one thing: we are in a country where most persons make a decision between themselves and society. Let me take it to a wider level: [suppose] you’re meant to construct a road [but] because you’re in government that money is misappropriated.

Whatever amount of money was meant to construct that road, the number of persons who are going to suffer from that misdeed are in their multiples. So when we say the West is developed, it’s because people place society over themselves. I am not under any pressure [and] have never been in my whole life. I may call what I’m doing in CRUTECH my own passion or my own style. I’ve gone beyond what TETFUND has given me, to do other things which I shouldn’t have done, because I feel it’s important they [get] done … because they add value to the system.

MD:        A recurring issue in CRUTECH is that of staff welfare. Hardly one full academic session passes without the threat of a strike -  that is if a strike is embarked on outright. Why do you think this persists?

VC:         It persists because in simple law of economics … the laws of demand and supply … where they don’t meet, there’s always that stress in the system. We are in a university where our wage bill is about N205-210 million and government gives us N169 million. We are compelled to generate the balance and make up for a shortfall from nowhere other than our IGR [internally generated revenue]. From that same IGR we are supposed to upgrade our facilities to make this place look like a university. If you focus on staff welfare, which is not even there, the infrastructure of the university suffers, if you focus on infrastructure, staff welfare suffers.

Let me tell you what I haven’t told anyone before now; when I came to CRUTECH, March 17, 2014, what I found in this place was less than a secondary school in terms of infrastructure, the physical environment, and the morale of Staff because neither the students nor staff of the university could tell the society proudly that they were from CRUTECH, because anyone who comes here has a very low opinion of the environment.

That was one of the challenges and I decided to do the unusual. We are today where we are. I think it is a matter of lack of funds to run the system that has brought us to where we are. It is quite unfortunate.

MD:        Of recent, some out-gone students of the university protested their non-mobilization for NYSC. What led to this and what are the measures put in place to remedy the situation?

VC:         We call a school a system and that means what affect one part affects the whole. CRUTECH's problems are intertwined. Because of inadequate funding, staff will go on strike, when that happens, many things go wrong, that’s on the one hand. On the other hand when staff aren’t paid salaries as at when due, it becomes morally difficult to instil discipline in the system.

You ask a staff to do his job, he has a right to tell you “I have not been paid, that’s why I can’t come to school”. That’s why he has no transport to come to work where he's supposed to be to compile results. He doesn’t come to mark the scripts, and you are not justified to do anything. And now to your question therefore, you would recall that three weeks to (NYSC) mobilization time, staff were on hunger strike; that was the period staff would have submitted results for vetting … all that was gone. So CRUTECH only had about two to three days to submit results, key them in and follow the processes before sending the list to Abuja and definitely we got caught up somewhere, but it wasn’t deliberate.

Last year, I left my father in the mortuary in Ikom and came to Calabar, to I solve over a thousand students’ problems, because the results were there. I personally made my way to Abuja, went to the NYSC Secretariat and explained to them the problem of CRUTECH, and they gave me about a week. I came here and mobilized all the staff and over a thousand students were mobilized after deadline.

That couldn’t happen this year because NYSC had a ceiling - at 12 midnight on a particular day the portal would be closed, and at midnight that day, the portal was closed. … If we had three weeks, definitely everything would have been done and all the students would have gone for youth service. That wouldn’t have been a problem. So, lack of funds will affect the entire system … If lecturers are not paid, they would not come for lectures; if they don’t come for lectures, students will not be taught; if students aren’t taught, they won’t do well. It’s a terrible thing.

MD:        One of the major challenges facing CRUTECH is funds, obviously. But there are allegations that the proprietors of the school are not doing enough to help the school. How would you respond to that?

VC:         Not doing enough is a relative issue; it depends on the sum he has as the Visitor, relative to other needs which of course the state must address. I’ll always say this: education is always given low priority by any government the world over, whether it’s in Britain, America or China - they never get what they need at any given time. It is not peculiar to CRUTECH. That’s, on a general level. If you give CRUTECH 10 billion naira, we will demand for 12 billion. I can tell you that if you give me N10 billion today, I’ll use all the money and ask for more, because I have ideas on how to use the money to scale up our services. So with education, we can never have it enough.

MD: That’s true, but one understands that there’s a bit of friction between CRUTECH and the state government, and it has to do with Governor Ayade saying that CRUTECH isn’t doing enough to generate funds to support government’s allocation to the school.

VC:         Let me say something about revenue generation: revenue generation comes from investment. You don’t invest, if you haven’t got the basics. A man who will invest in shares is a man who has got enough to build a house. A man who will invest in shares is a man who has got enough to wear a clean shirt. So as it applies to CRUTECH, when we don’t have enough to pay our salaries, when the issue of salaries every month is an achievement for a vice-chancellor, obviously you can’t think of investment in any way to generate funds. You see money attracts money; if you give me N5 million, I’d have a better chance of making N10 million than if you give me 500 thousand and expect me to generate 2 million. Those who have money get more money because they meet the basics and have the opportunity of investing much more.

MD:        When you were coming to CRUTECH, everyone was relieved and said malpractice was going to be drastically reduced here going by your record at College of Education, Akamkpa. You however seem relaxed over the same issue here. Why?

VC:         No. Far from it. In C.O.E I had a virgin college to start up with, students were virgin and had no senior students to indoctrinate them. I was given an option to pick the lecturers I wanted so I was fully in charge and besides, it’s a one campus college. CRUTECH presents a different scenario in the sense that I had to first establish myself and I had to get accreditation. I came in March last year and was to face accreditation  by November last year and CRUTECH was just not ready in anyway, from the environment, to the library, to books, to the workshops etc, so all my energy - from March last year till Sunday when they (accreditation team) come, and a week after they leave - has been focused on CRUTECH achieving accreditation. When that is done, there are very many ways you can sanitize the system. I have my ears on the ground and know those who are collecting whatever. But the students are not helping matters also.

It takes a student, the giver, to volunteer, to give the lead for the principal to get the person who is involved (in academic malpractice). In Akamkpa I could do what I did because students were willing to corporate. How? For all the lecturers I sent away in Akamkpa, students volunteered cooperation. “That man there is a devil, we are prepared to have him expelled from this college.” “Now, are you prepared to go all out?” “Yes, Sir!”. And the students will cooperate with you through all the stages. But in CRUTECH, the students seem to be comfortable with what is happening, to a large extent, because - to my own understanding - they find it easier through that means to achieve their grades. That I have understood. But like I earlier said, when I’m through with accreditation which is called the foundation of the university, when I must have proved that CRUTECH can stand on its feet, we’ll then face the issues of our integrity, quality and standard. It’s not a difficult thing to do.

MD: Prof, you recently abolished continuous assessments, thus making exams100%. How did you come up with that?

VC: Let me explain; that declaration was made on the spur of the moment, out of frustration that before exams, you find so much [grades] marketing on campus. Weekends – Saturdays and Sundays - lecturers come and administer tests and that’s where the "real business" goes on. I noticed this and that statement came out of [an attempt to stop] it.

Little sorting goes on in a course where you have just 30 students; the courses [where sorting is] endemic are the core courses that have over a thousand students, or a thousand five hundred students. That is where a lecturer just sits down and thinks mathematically ‘if I collect a thousand naira from each student, I make one point something million. If I make it two thousand naira and you multiply it, ...” Those are the courses that are prone to such abuses.

So I told the lecturers: get the quality assurance committee of every department (which is made up of the highest ranking lecturers in the department), go ahead and conduct these assessments. The [academic] unions came and met me and I told them they were being economical with the truth. Some of these lecturers collect as much as N10,000 from these poor students whose parents are poorer than ourselves. But we’ll get out of that.

MD:        Prof, you said the decision was spur of the moment, but I looked at NUC regulations and they state that exams should take not less than 50% in total score. It seems to me you traversed a part of those regulations?

VC: No. Like I’ve said, I withdrew [the instruction] and I told the lecturers to go back, meet the Heads of Department and Deans and make sure that tests are conducted with the supervision of the highest persons in the faculty, no longer by one man, a lecturer alone.

MD: I understand you did all your schooling at the University of Jos. How do you recall your school days.

VC: Great! Great, because I never bought a handout, never cooked any food in my hostel and the university provided my bed sheets and toiletries, so I had the best of times. Everything was provided by the university. From the hostels to the classrooms, we were given free bus rides throughout my four years. So all I needed was my transport fare from Ikom to Jos, and back. I never went outside the school because I had no need to leave the campus to anywhere in town.

Let me let you one incident I had in school. A lecturer asked us to buy some academic material for N2, and I hadn’t the N2. I remember I wept, because I hadn’t N2 to buy that material. That was, I think, in my second year in the university. So with that kind of a background where I couldn’t provide N2 for myself, today I wouldn’t be a professor, and I wouldn’t be a VC. There are many students like that who have the capacity but who do not have the money to pay, and who are actually feeling the pinch. So I can empathize when I find any student who is as indigent as I was in university.

I tell my younger ones: “today you have Professor Owan-Enoh, you have Ransom Owan, you have the Senator [John Owan-Enoh] now, but that’s not how we began. We began from the lowest level, and my father, your father, will give me N100 to go to the University of Jos for a term of three months. That N100 has N50 transport … N2 from my village to Ikom, N3 from Ikom to Ogoja, N18 from Ogoja to Jos … that’s N25, and N25 back. So what I’ll be left with for three months is N50.”

And to me that was OK. It was OK because I was merely surviving. That means I would not have anything extra to live large as a student. I was able to [get a first degree], go back for a Masters degree, go back for a PhD, and today I am where I am. Now if I were to go to school today and had an Owan-Enoh as my father as then, obviously I wouldn’t have been in school. And there are many young men and women like that here. Eighty percent of our students in this university don’t have the means to survive, and let me tell you: they curse people who deprive them of their rights. And those curses are very harmful.

MD:        Your younger brother, Senator John Owan-Enoh, is in the senate; do you think that gives you leverage to attract Government attention to CRUTECH?

VC:         Why should it? That’s family, that’s personal. Whatever he gives to CRUTECH that is not due for CRUTECH is corruption. I have a responsibility and right to go to TETFUND and access funds like every other VC.

So what if today you have a VC who has nobody anywhere … so he will not attract funds? No. As a VC you have to be creative, you have to use your industry to attract funds. You shouldn’t lay back because your brother is a governor or a senator.

MD:        Any final words, Sir?

VC:         I met CRUTECH where I met it. I had the option of going to UniCal (the University of Calabar) when I left the University of Jos, but I chose CRUTECH. My desire is that CRUTECH be the university it ought to be. Every day I pray to God that the reason for choosing CRUTECH, whatever it is, should be fulfilled.