•Says Nigeria must prioritise technical skills over paper qualifications •Speaks on tenure at OSCOTECH
Dr. Samson A. O. Adegoke is the outgoing Rector of Osun State College of Science and Technology, Esa Oke (OSCOTECH), and is also the Chairman of Committee of Rectors of State-owned Polytechnics. In this interview by SAM NWAOKO and SAHEED SALAWU, he speaks on his experiences in the institution and on issues relating to technical education in Nigeria.
What has been your experience as the chairman committee of rectors of state polytechnics considering the fact that polytechnics are now considered as endangered species in Nigeria?
One major thing I have noticed from my privileged position is that most state governments establish polytechnics but they are subsequently not keen in their funding. That is the common thing to all the state rectors. That issue brought us together to see how we can enhance the funding and how we can access more support from TETFund out of the fact that we have no other option in terms of physical infrastructure. Then, unfortunately for us, polytechnics generally are capital-intensive. This is one thing that most people don’t know, even the people in government. They think the university deserves more money. Even the TETFund formula for sharing is 2-1-1, this means that 50 percent of all TETFund money goes to universities. The remaining 50 percent is shared between the polytechnics and colleges of education. And because there are more polytechnics than there are colleges of education, the colleges of education receive more money individually from TETFund than the polytechnics. So, we come together and have been debating it and have been making recommendations to the government. We have also been presenting our common positions through the Committee of Heads of Polytechnics in Nigeria (COHPN), which is the parent body. COHEN has two arms, namely Committee of Federal Polytechnic Rectors (COFPAR) and the Committee of State Polytechnic Rectors (COSREC) which I am the chairman. So, that is the way through which we come together and share our burdens. We have some that are even worse than our own case because they do not even pay their salaries.
In your own case, does the state government pay your salaries?
The state government pays our salary. In some states, they don’t even pay their salaries. They have to do it from their IGR. We realised this when we compared notes. However, some in that category, like the older polytechnics, maybe first or second generation polytechnics, like Kwara Polytechnic, do not feel it because of their population. But if that happens to those in our category, we might run for a quarter of the year before we ground. This is because the IGR cannot carry us too far. Our own is in the middle, the best extreme is the Lagos State Polytechnic and Rufus Giwa Polytechnic, Owo (Ondo State). Apart from paying their salary, they give them capital grants. Unfortunately, Lagos Polytechnic has now been converted to a university of technology.
So, in-between the continuum, we have some in the middle that are struggling. For instance, Ogun State has the highest number of polytechnics, they have up to six. There are so many like that and many of them are just surviving and that affects a lot of things.
We are also aware of a law being proposed by the National Assembly to the effect that polytechnics that do not have up to N500million funding within three years by their state governments will no longer access money from TETFund. What do you think?
We also learnt of it and we approached the National Assembly’s TETFund and Education committee. We discussed it at a meeting and we let them know the implication for education, particularly technical education in Nigeria. More so, we are all clamouring for skills now and we all know that nobody goes to the university to acquire skills. Globally, skills are acquired at two levels: Technical colleges and polytechnics. So, if you do that, the federal polytechnics might survive it but state polytechnics, many of them might not. In fact, it will reduce the quality of education in the polytechnic if that law comes to life because of equipment. Unfortunately for us, we need more equipment. I can say boldly that if you visit my school, we have more technological equipment and laboratory workshops than many frontline universities in Nigeria. This is because you can do a university that doesn’t deal with engineering and medicine and would not need equipment. But all the courses in a polytechnic except for the faculties of business and management studies, need equipment and consumables. Then, when you talk of ICT, the technology changes so fast that the equipment you bought three to four years ago might need to be changed. So, this is a burden the polytechnic is carrying and nobody seems to appreciate it. It is not like the conventional universities. No. If we are serious about our technological breakthrough in this nation, the emphasis would be on polytechnic education. Because of the discrimination, we noticed that no matter what name you call the degree, people still prefer to go to the university.
However, there is a very interesting trend now that everybody must have noticed. Get to an average family, you will find two or three unemployed university graduates. These graduates will now go back to be learning trades such as catering, sewing, fashion and so on which are available as programmes in the polytechnic. So, after wasting about five years in the university and still serve the nation, then they will now be going to a fashion institute. This is the irony of things in this country because it is degree that we recognise. But the global trend has left degrees and we are now on skills. What can you bring to the table? Many frontline tech companies and even other multi-nationals are now training their own staff and they no longer require them to have a degree to come up for training, and you can get to any level. Certification is the issue now. Even if you have a degree and so on, you must have certification in micro-credentials. When you have four or five certifications in micro credentials, they will rate you above a degree holder. But Nigeria still sticks to the old tradition of going to the university and if a child says they want to go to the polytechnic, their parents will not be happy.
The 50 percent of TETFund money that goes to the universities is one issue. But could this 2-1-1 sharing formula you explained be as result of the fact that it was university lecturers (ASUU) that saw to the founding of TETFund?
Both factors are responsible. It was ASUU that fought for it and you do not expect ASUU that fought for it and proposal the formula to do something that will not favour them. Secondly, even if ASUU did not propose the formula, the general rating and funding, universities in Nigeria are placed higher. Even when you see a state that has a polytechnic and a university, they give more attention to the university than the polytechnic. So, generally that is in tandem with our societal priorities. Where we are a bit unfortunate is that they gave us the same rating as the colleges of education. Those ones are even more endangered than us, they are virtually dead. Many of them are only surviving today on affiliation, part-time degrees from other universities. But then, they have solved their own problem because by September this year, they will be out of the woods because they now have “dual mandate”. Every college of education in Nigeria can now award degrees and NCE. With that they will bounce back. They are the least expensive to fund whereas the polytechnics are the most expensive to fund.
Will you recommend the same formula for polytechnics?
We are already on that. The Executive Secretary of the National Board for Technical Education (NABTEB) is in the vanguard of that. He is very supportive of that idea. If not for the change of the education minister, Alhaji Sununu, the Minister of State for Education had been to some countries to study their models where the polytechnics run parallel with the university. Like in Singapore, all their polytechnics award diplomas and degrees up to PhD level – Btech, MTech and PhD. So, they run parallel, not conventional degrees. It is the same thing in Germany. It is only the UK that converted its polytechnics to universities. But that dual mandate is what the polytechnics in Singapore, Malaysia, and South Africa are doing. That is why in those places, the skill gap that we are experiencing in Nigeria is not there because when the university is doing the conventional degree, they are rolling out skilled people. That is what we are canvassing for Nigeria, particularly to solve the perennial problem of discrimination against HND programme. You are aware of the discrimination; HND is equivalent to degree but nobody will say degree is equivalent to HND. That means automatically one is inferior to the other. It has been a long battle. I was part of the people that agitated that they should not be doing different entrance examinations. That has been corrected but not totally. They should have the same cut-off, the same admission requirement. Then you can say it is equal. What we have now, even a brilliant student that finishes from a polytechnic suffers for it. They don’t recognise his intellect, his IQ or his capability. It is annoying. Part of the problem is also that polytechnic lecturers cannot become professors but in Ghana here, they become professors. After PhD, there is no academic qualification again. It is promotion from where you are working that will make you a professor. My own students that I trained are professors now. If we were in the university together, probably some of them would not be professors before me. But my own route didn’t go that way, that is also part of the problem.
You are rounding off your tenure as the Rector of OSCOTECH, Esa Oke very soon. How would you describe your years as the rector there?
First, I thank God for the privilege because my becoming a Rector in Esa Oke is a miracle I never imagined. By the condition in which I joined the school, I never wanted to get involved with administration because I am a core practitioner. I am a registered estate surveyor and valuer, I am a registered town planner. I am a fellow of the two institutions and I practise. I did master plans for more than seven private universities in Nigeria. I also consult for frontline banks in their mortgage valuation. Esa Oke needed a qualified person to get accredited for Estate Management. Baba Oluyi, who knew me at Ibadan Poly, invited me. That was how I joined Esa Oke. I told him that I didn’t want to be bogged down with administrative responsibilities and he agreed. But after he left, others did not respect that agreement. That was how I found myself as HOD, as Dean up to the rectorship.
As the Rector, because of my exposure in the private sector, I felt I must make a difference from what my predecessors with some other kind of experiences did. The first thing I did was to design a masterplan for the school. We did a strategic plan covering five years – 2019 to 2023. We called it ‘The Great Aspiration’. We documented what we wanted to achieve within that period and it became our compass. To the glory of God, after a review of our activities, 90 – 95 percent of our target had been achieved. So, to me and my colleagues at OSCOTECH, it was a glorious era. I was the fifth Rector of the college. By the time I came in, the polytechnic was about 26 years old and we had only 16 programmes, including one in which we don’t graduate students: General studies. As of today, we have 32 programmes. We have doubled what we met, and if you look at physical infrastructure we have done far more than double. This is because we harness our entitlements at TETFund and we equally get assistance from other sources. We also ensure that we optimise our IGR to do the little we were able to do.
So, on the privilege given to me to be the Rector I think I can go and sleep and thank God after my tenure, because I have made my own impact. I say this because what I did are more than what my predecessors did in 25 years in my nearly eight years there. We are documenting our efforts so that the incoming administrations can have it for records and also as a means of challenging incoming rectors. If I have my way, I will strongly advise that whoever is coming should do a second strategic plan. I prepared the first one. Before then we were driving without compass. But with the plan, we knew specifically what we wanted to do and we were taking them on one by one to the glory of God.
During this period, what would you say were the major challenges in the administration and community?
The greatest challenge we had was funding. We wanted to do far more than we were able to do but we were limited to TETFund. Our annual capital budget is N60 million which can hardly be enough to erect a single academic building but despite that, we tried our best. So the major challenge we continue to have is funding. That is why we are appealing to the state government to, at least allocate capital grant quarterly or biannually to the school so that we will not rely exclusively on TETFund for infrastructural development.
There was also human attitude as a challenge. That I became Rector was not a thing of joy for some people. That equally came up. A shooting incident, in which my vehicle was shot at, was the most critical period of my tenure as the Rector at Esa Oke. When my first tenure was to be renewed, someone felt that it should not be renewed, that I didn’t have up to four years before leaving service. He was desirous of taking over. But the Council wanted me to continue until I retire. That was when the problem of shooting and suspension came up.
What about the shooting and suspension?
I was suspended when the new governor came on December 5th, 2022. The governor was sworn-in in November and a principal officer went around the party members of the new governor that had just won election. He was telling them that I was APC. Unfortunately for him, when my renewal was in the offing, he had also been around the members of the Council to tell them that I was PDP. And you know that in Nigeria, we talk of APC and PDP but people just move around political parties. They are both here and there. So, when the new governor came in, those who had left APC for the PDP, who happened to be members of the Council told their colleagues to ignore him because when they were there, he was the same person telling us that he was PDP. So, eventually when the executive order came, I was suspended and after their preliminary investigation, the governor reinstated me on 29th of December. However, on the 5th of January, they waylaid me on the road and shot at my vehicle.
You were shot? How did you escape?
It must have been God. I escaped by the grace of God.
Some reports said it was a clash of cult gangs?
No, there was nothing like that. Since I came on board with my boss, the immediate past Rector in 2012, we banished cultists from the college. We didn’t just say we did not want it, we told God we did not want it and we prayed against it. We have a prayer team. If there was a cult clash, it could not have been on our campus. They might happen in the town but not in our school because we were able to eliminate them from the college. It has been like that from 2012 till date. So, there was nothing like cult clash. And, may I state that the insinuations about some powers is also mere speculations. There is no power except the power of God and I believe that it was God that saved my life. If what they planned to do had happened, we would have been saying something else. The assailants behaved like they wanted to overtake my vehicle. When they got to my vehicle they just shot. I thank God that grace was at work.
At the level of Committee of Rectors, do you discuss this cultism issue with your colleagues?
We do. Even at our larger body, we also do, but the issue of cultism vary widely from place to place. It is more intense towards South-South and the South East. In the South West, it is dying down in the schools. Many institutions are making efforts to get them out of the schools. The best way to do that is once you are caught, there is no midpoint; you are gone. With that, many of them are scared of joining them because they would have heard what was done to the people that were caught. So, we have that.
Do you have any advice on how this could be stemmed of completely stamped out?
It is no longer possible to stamp cultism out. Cultism is not as new as people think, it is the violent aspect of it that is new and worrisome. There has always been cultism in different shapes and colours, but the idea of this new trend of killing themselves and killing people is a very bad trend that has come into them. The history of cultism that I know, they were like freedom fighters. They championed the cause of students. If any lecturer is trying to cheat a student, they fight for them – not violently, not in the dark. But the subsequent generations of all these people go to different way and now there is nothing that can stop it in the institutions. Even if you want to stop it, the politicians are growing them (like crops) and funding them, because they use them for elections. Today, some of them occupy top political positions and some politicians even use them as their security guards. That has made it attractive. When cultism was still rampant at OSCOTECH, my department was the headquarters. The Department of Estate Management. There were some of my boys that I never knew were that high-ranking until they left the school and we started hearing about them. But by the time we did what we did, we were able to remove them and today, any parent’s mind should be settled that their children in OSCOTECH are safe. We believe that subsequent administrations will sustain it. We don’t only take action, we also pray that God should take over the campus rather than the devil.
What kind of person do you want to succeed you?
Whatever I wish would not affect who succeeds me because it is purely a government decision through the governing council. But my prayer is that somebody who would succeed me will be somebody who would be able to do better than what I did. It has been acknowledged that I tried but I want somebody who will do better than I did. And I pray that whosoever will succeed me will surpass me because I was able to surpass my predecessors. May I also add that if anybody that succeeds me needs my input or advice, I will be available to do that at any time.
As an addendum, I have recommended that the HND programme should be scrapped and that all polytechnics be awarding degrees.
You spoke to the need for the government to prioritise technical education. Yet, we have the drive for the conversion of polytechnics to universities. So, how would you advise the government to bridge the gap and reconcile this?
I no longer see the drive or clamour because the current executive secretary of the National Board for technical Education, Professor Bugaje, takes steps once they convert any polytechnic. He rises against it. Converting these polytechnics is not the right way to go. Go and look at the world universities website, China converted 600 universities to polytechnics. Their deputy minister for education said all the universities were producing the same qualifications that were not useful to them in their factories. And when you look at the global trend, the nations that are in the forefront technological breakthrough are those that never joke with their polytechnic education. Singapore is probably one quarter of Lagos population but they are living like kings and queens. They don’t have resources, it is the efficiency of their administration and their ports that they are living on. Look at the Asian Tigers, they are the ones leading in science and technology. So converting the polytechnics to university is a big mistake. By so doing, Nigeria is moving in the opposite direction of the world. That an average family has unemployed graduates is enough signal that we are doing something wrong. I have insisted that no matter how far you have gone in the wrong direction, I think the only way is to turn back.
Could the quality of teaching at the polytechnics be the problem?
Before you can say a food is bad, you have to taste it. But when the food has been condemned without even tasting it, that is the problem. In terms of the quality of teaching and all that, evidences are there to tell which is better when people are not discriminatory and allow people to do aptitude and quantitative tests to get employment. You find out that so many polytechnic students beat their university counterparts. So, it is just the general societal bias.
You are not a product of polytechnic?
I’m both. I am a product of both polytechnic and university. I did a programme called full professional diploma at the Polytechnic Ibadan. I did a degree at Obafemi Awolowo University when it was University of Ife. Unfortunately, news came that our department, Urban and regional Planning was not accredited and because of that, the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners (NITP) will not register us. Meanwhile when I was working, I learnt of the full professional diploma at the Polytechnic Ibadan. I also learnt that once you do it, you will get registered by the NITP. With a degree, I needed only two years to do it. They actually reserved the course for ND people and I might have been the only degree holder that did it. When I applied they joked that I should rather be on their staff list. I did the programme and I qualified.
At the level of the Committee of Rectors of State-owned Polytechnics, of which you are the chairman, have you advised or sent propositions proposals to the National Assembly on your propositions?
We have done so many. We are a sub-sector of the Committee of Rectors of Polytechnics and Colleges of Technology in Nigeria, so we as a unit do not directly channel our thoughts to the National Assembly. We do it through our parent body. We have met organisations that are relevant to us. We have met JAMB, TETFund and so on. We usually channel our grievances, our observations, our advice, and our recommendations accordingly because we are a major stakeholder in the education sector.
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