Dr Olufunmilayo Olujinmi is the Provost, Federal College of Animal Health and Production Technology., Ibadan, Oyo State. In this interview with ‘WALE OLAPADE, she speaks on how JAMB contributed to low number of students admitted to the college, insufficient funding and innovations recorded in recent times.
Do you have the capacity to accommodate increasing number of intake?
Yes the college has the capacity to take even more than the students that were recently matriculated today. Actually the grand matriculation was delayed and they were given a very short period to registered their interest and within a short time they close the website and that was why we were having very small number of students. The college has all the facility to take care of more student than what we have now.
Three years down the line, what innovation has the college added to its credit?
One thing is that I would rather prefer people accessing me than I doing it, but well I will say to God be the glory because I know that we have gone far better than we met the college. For instance, in the past few years we have organised vocational training, we have train many participants in different areas. The first years I think we trained 300, the following years was 400 making it 700 in poultry while for fishery production, we have trained 200.
Apart from that we have gotten additional facilities in terms of farm equipment, laboratory facilities as well as face lift in the college facilities. our lecture theatre have been improved, like last year we built the breeder-layer house, horse stable, the college medical centre was refurbished to meet up standard, we were also given NHIS accreditation as an official visit by the National Health Insurance Scheme. Then apart from that, this year, we are already building a 400 capacity lecture theatre for student, which in actual fact will give them more conducive learning environment than they using the college auditorium which at time events and school activities clashes with their lectures. we are also building additional offices for lectures, which comprise of three Head of Departments and four lectures offices and a store yet to be completed.
Do you have any areas of constrain in the management of the college?
Our constrains, has been majorly finance, the problem have been fund, for example, our overhead usually come late, like for this year, we are just receiving the overhead, so we have to make sure that we get money from the little ways we can generate fund from the college to see that keeps thing running, but it has not been so easy because we have to take care of electricity. We were recently switched from post to pre paid meter which is too expensive to run. Then the numbers of workers (cleaners, security personnel) are not sufficient to handle operation in the college, but we are trying to manage the little resources to see that everything works.
Again managing it is not the best because for instance at the ongoing build site needs security operatives to be there on 24 hours surveillance by the time we complete it, but with what we have and with the little stipends we are just getting, it is becoming difficult to manage the system without government giving us the overhead at the right time.
They should release the overhead at the right time to enable us meet the college needs as at when due. Another area of concern is that, unfortunately the government have been decreasing the fund we get from the federal yearly and even the fund is not sufficient by the time you pay electricity bill, cleaners, security guards, daily rated staffs we also want the appointment of the daily rated staffs to be regularised and all these will cost the college money and we need the cooperation of the Federal Government.
How many candidates did you admit for matriculation this year and is it an improvement with what we have in the past?
Like I said, last years we have more students than what we have this year. We have on our matriculation list this year a total of 631 against 700 in previous year; in fact a department has maybe about 10 students, which is really bad.
What contributed to this shortfall in this year’s admission?
Joint Admission and Matriculation Examination (JAME) is the problem for this year’s admission because of the way the JAME was conducted. You know they just gave a uniform admission cutoff mark (180) to university and mono-technique, so the students that fall below the cutoff could neither go to the universities nor come to here or other institution that would have admitted them.
Do you think this will have an adverse effect on government ongoing plans to diversify the economy from oil to agriculture?
It is very important for the government to create an enabling environment for student to come in to polytechnic or middle level man-power system rather than roaming the street, so the admission cut-off should be lowered compared to what we have in the universities because colleges of education is meddle level man-power and it is majorly practical training that we give to them so that by the time they finish their training in this college, they can go to the farm, train and even established and own farms for people that are interested in going into large scale farming.
Government needs to do a lot of adjustment in that wise.