A former Registrar of Ekiti State University, and former Chairman, Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU), Dr Omojola Awosusi, has called on Nigerian universities to embrace and invest in digital technology, saying a university aiming to have dedicated personnel who will add value on a continuous basis must itself add value to its estate through investment in digital technology.
The former Registrar also said for Nigerian universities to be ranked among the best in the world, it is imperative for universities management to hire only potentially value- adding university administrators.
Awosusi who stated this in Elizade University, during the 5th Annual Registry Lecture series titled “Pathway to Overcoming Challenges on the Nigerian University System in the 21st Century: University Administrators and the Imperative of Value Addition.”
Awosusi who identified problems confronting university education to include, gross underfunding, proliferation of universities, puncture in quality due to dearth of funds, poor quality of governance, instability of academic calendar due to regular strike actions and lack of adequate staff training, said embracing digital technology would go a long way to solve some of these problems
But said the provision of access to computers and computing facilities, high bandwidth for internet services, intranet connectivity, instructional and audio-visual technologies in lecture theatres, wireless access in all areas on campus among others will help to save time and money.
He said: “The most wonderful advantage is that fire, flood, earthquake or any other natural disasters cannot obliterate institutional records especially when they are saved in the cloud.
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“The subsisting evil of giving temporary appointments to people on the face value without interviews and without background checks should stop forthwith. It takes rigorous due process to determine potential good administrators.
“The bulk of funds for training being spent today in universities virtually go into academic staff training and development. The universities should see the administration as a key sector where staff require training and retraining”
He stressed the need for adequate utilization of avaliable human resources in the university system, saying the idea of administration are to be seen and not heard is obsolete and not supported by any university law.
He, however, urged Nigerian universities to emulate the banking industry where a person is given multiple job roles to maximize personal utilisation
“I do not believe that a modern university should be bifurcated such that more than 60 per cent of its personnel will not be involved in the actual production, teaching and knowledge application.
“Excess staff should be re-trained for re-use in more critical areas of the system. The earlier this is done the better because certain jobs will soon become extinct when all system are fully digitalised,” he said.
The Registrar of the Elizade University, Omololu Adegbenro, who described the Registry as the heartbeat of the university system said the annual lecture which started six years ago has become a vehicle of knowledge acquisition process and has become an essential part of the university.
He said “the series of Registry Annual Lecture from the very beginning, we can comfortably say that the foundational vision of getting our minds renewed professionally through recurrent series of Annual Registry Lecture as a form of knowledge acquisition process has, indeed, been sustained and has become an essential part of the University.
“Since the maiden edition of the Lecture Series was flagged off on June 13, 2016, with the theme: “University Administration in an Emerging Democracy,” the yearly edition had been sustained on a yearly basis till the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 when stringent restrictions were placed on gatherings of this nature.
“The testimonies from all the past lecture series are so enormous and encouraging that it has stimulated the need to resume the series having successfully survived the troubling period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We are, therefore, so very pleased that the little mustard seed that was planted six years ago has grown to become a big tree. I appreciate God Almighty for His grace through which all these have been made possible.”
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