Sex-for-marks: How we’re dealing with our erring lecturers

• We’re moving COOU from analogue to digital institution

From Obinna Odogwu, Awka

Vice-Chancellor of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Igbariam, Prof. Kate Omenugha, has said that her staff members who violate the university’s rules and regulations are punished.

Omenugha, who gave a few examples of cases being handled by the management, said that the citadel of learning under her watch takes issues of discipline very seriously and that no one is above the law.

How is the climate campaign which you launched about a year ago going?

We have a five-year strategic plan, which is what we are following. You plant trees. This is a very harsh condition. If you go down there, you will see some of the trees in what we call the Vice-Chancellor’s Orchard. Tomorrow we are planting diplomatic trees. The diplomats will come and plant some trees here. The one in front here was planted by Cardinal Arinze. So, we are still on course because we have our strategic plan really. When you plant trees, they die; you plant another one. We have an MOU with an NGO called GRENCHI. Their target is to plant 5,000 trees. They call it restoration because when this university started, people foolishly brought down all the trees here. Foolishly I will say because it doesn’t make sense. So the NGO is now helping us. So when it dies, you plant again. You keep planting. Again, some people have set our trees on fire. I nearly killed one of them. I was so angry. So, we have to replace some of them. We are working. The truth is that I won’t be the one to enjoy the trees. It’s my successors; and that’s the beauty of what you call an authentic leader. An authentic leader doesn’t think of an immediate gain. They think about the future. In three, four years time I won’t be here but those trees would have grown. And they will be giving shade and fruits to the people. So yes, we are still on course. And we are very serious about our climate action.

How do you address the issue of indiscipline in this university, especially among staff members?

If you read our newsletters you will see their names because we do what we call ‘naming and shaming’. That’s what we do now. When I told my PRO about the plan, he objected but I told him that it had to be done. We have to ‘name and shame’ so that we’ll begin to know whether people will be more careful. So, it’s there. There are some who have sold textbooks without going through our bookshop. There’s one who made every student pay for the textbooks and he didn’t get enough for all of them to get the book; and he still went and used that book to set exams. It’s crazy. It was a parent that wrote to us. We encourage students to write but it’s the parent that was so angry. The child failed the course. He didn’t get the book yet he paid for the textbook. The lecturer came to the panel and agreed to what he did. So we suspended him. There was one lady who moved from non-academic to academic but she thought we came here to sell books. She started selling books and we have disciplined her. Some of them, we even withhold their salaries for say two years. Or we send them on suspension. We have the cases of people who didn’t teach their courses. Some of them are even waiting for expulsion. As soon as we have council in place, they will be expelled because we can’t suspend people for more than 36 months. So it is only the council that can decide to expel the person when you present their case. So, that is what we do. We have the one that we are looking at now. He sexually abused a student; even took money from her. I think he promised her 2:1 eventually she got 2:2 and therefore she decided to write. Probably, if she got a 2:1 she wouldn’t say anything. So now we are investigating the case. So, there are so many funny cases like that; and I tell people that this management can take hard decisions. Some of them may be our friends but there is no friendship in this thing. If you are our friend, please keep to the rules. I really mean it when I say that I will rise up and defend my students. I really mean it. It’s not a joke. They know me in UNIZIK when I was the Head of Mass Communication Department. I defended my students. There were those that were sacked and they said that it was Kate Omenugha that sacked them. How did I sack them? Those people decided to sack themselves. So, we are really doing something. It’s not easy. But the problem we have is that the students refused to speak until it is late. I have told my students that nobody will victimise them. If you speak we will protect you.

Does this university have any plan of exploring other revenue sources with a view to reducing school fees?

The school fees were increased to about N150,000. That’s ridiculous. Even to do a PhD in Medicine. They were paying one ridiculous amount. N150,000. We increased it to N600,000 and it was later reduced to N400,000. I mean, that is ridiculous. This university has not increased their fees in the last 10 years for our undergraduate students. And you cannot expect that we cannot increase school fees. You cannot expect it. The costs of things are increasing in the market. And with all these demands going on about changes, about innovation, about ICT which we are building…

At the moment we are archiving 55,000 transcripts. This was a very analogue university. In fact, the NUC has put it down for me in black and white. They said that it’s an analogue university. And what we are trying to do is to change this thing from analogue to digital. That’s why we set up the committee headed by a guru in ICT. And we want to change the university from analogue to digital. We started training our staff. You cannot believe that some deputy directors and deputy registrars here do not even know how to use computers. I mean, it was not their fault. It wasn’t there. So we started training and retraining. We did the first training in December and we gave them a condition that for you to move to the next level, you must have to show us a little evidence of computer literacy. And I want to thank the university community because many of us tried so much to even go beyond what they can. For example, when I came in, the inaugural lecture was only on the 7th or 8th. Now we are on the 29th and the 30th person will be sometime next week. And you know that it’s inaugural lecture that announces you as a professor. That’s where you also have intellectual ideas. And the beauty of it is that some of them use the opportunity to donate something to the university. And these are people who are not even so well paid; yet they know that as good citizens they will have to give back to the university. I am so proud of my university here because it’s unusual to have somebody giving you money. As part of our corporate social responsibility, we also have indigent funds. We don’t have money there a lot yet but I have got one or two people to donate money there. The idea is that if there is an excruciating circumstance where somebody cannot pay fees and the person is very indigent, we can also help out. But I always tell students about NELFund. NELFund is there for the students to take money. It is a loan which will only be repaid when you get a job. Take the loan first; when you get the job you can start paying back. So, no student can ever say that they don’t have money to pay school fees.

The school offers entrepreneurial courses. Are there plans to have executive programmes and professional short courses like MBA and others?

We are starting a business school very soon. We have got to an advanced stage. The challenge we have is that we cannot do it in Igbariam here. We have to find somewhere in Awka that is also our campus, to make sure that it is happening there. So we have already reached an advanced stage. We are doing a whole lot of things because I know that people are clamouring for that. And the kind of business school we will run will not be the normal one where you just say I want to have an MBA. We want to do practical things; bring people who have something to offer. We may even bring the governor to be our lecturer. Secondly, we have set up a whole lot of centres. It was a process we went through. We have about 200 professors here. And what we are trying to do here is to challenge them. So, it was the process we went through. Thanks to my SA on Strategy. We set up these things very well, discussed it at Senate, had the buy in of senate, and gave them some list of centres which we borrowed, if you like, from other universities. And many of them indicated interest in about 32. And we set up these centres. Now, one of the centres interestingly, even when I was coming up I saw the director for one of the centres telling me that the bursar had signed something for them, some money is coming in from somewhere for this university. Normally, centres don’t own the money; there is a sharing formula. So, we are talking about how we can make money. Centres will give us money if you’re able to get people who are interested to drive it and challenge themselves. So, one of the centres now, Centre for Enterprise and Business, has got someone that will erect a building for us. The man said that the problem we have is that ‘we have so much job to give people in the private sector but we don’t have people to be given the job.’ I said ‘how.’ He said ‘they don’t have the skills; emotional intelligence.’ These are soft skills that are important. People don’t have communication skills. And people don’t know how they can organise somebody. He said ‘I want to have that centre. This is enterprise and business. I want to be able to help and train people who will have those soft skills we need in the job market.’

Where would you want to leave this university in terms of ranking by the time you must have completed your tenure as the VC?

The legacy I want to leave in this university is very clear. I want to build a university that can stand. We already have our five-year strategic plan. We are presenting that to Mr Governor at our upcoming convocation. We have already started running the five-year strategic plan starting from the 2024 to 2028. So, it’s there. We have created a roadmap for this university. For the first time, we have a clearly defined master plan of this university which anybody can use to know where to locate what and where to build what. This is some of the things we have done. Again we have our strategic plan clearly defined which we are going to present to Mr Governor to show him the plans we have for the university. Before I leave, I want this university to be among the 10 best public universities in Nigeria; and begin to get ranked among the first 1,000 universities in the world. And it is doable.