‘Nigeria’s greatest challenge is that citizens don’t talk about positives’

In journalism parlance, Prof. Folasade Ogunsola, the 13th Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akoka, perfectly fits into the description – an interviewer’s delight. Humble, elegant, warm and very eloquent, the former Provost of the College of Medicine, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Development Services) and Acting Vice Chancellor of the institution, who is the first female Vice Chancellor of UNILAG since its establishment 60 years ago, held no bars in the over one hour she faced The Guardian’s ONYEDIKA AGBEDO and LAOLU ADEYEMI in her cozy office, taking about her emergence, gender equity in Nigeria’s education and political sectors, her vision for the university and sundry issues in Nigeria’s tertiary education sub-sector. The Professor of Medical Microbiology provided deep insights into these issues and proffered workable solutions. Excerpts:

Congratulations on your emergence as the first female Vice Chancellor of UNILAG. How did you feel when your appointment was announced?
I was humbled in many ways; I didn’t know that I was going to get it. I mean, I believed that I had a good chance, but it wasn’t a done deal because all the other people going in are not stupid people and they have antecedents; and you are going to have an interview. So, you don’t know what everybody is bringing to the table. But I knew I had a good chance. Whether that would translate at the end I wasn’t sure.

I was the first person to be interviewed and it was one of those very different interviews. We were interviewed on all sorts of new things and we had a short time. So, by the time we finished, if you had any confidence before, the level would drop, because you don’t know how the others performed. I was the first to be interviewed, but I didn’t hear till around 8.00pm. Before then, I was half dead, half numb, very hungry and then I heard.

I think I was initially numb. It was hard to take in. I was thankful. I became excited. But within a week, I’m not even sure it was up to a week, reality dawned on me.

Over time, as I was developing my ambition, I was thinking of how to move forward on it. But suddenly, it dawned on me that now the hard work is going to start.

I also recognised that being the first female, there are those who are asking: Can she do it? Can a woman do it at UNILAG? I recall that when I was either Deputy Vice Chancellor (DVC) or Provost, somebody said to me, ‘oh, you will make a good VC, but not for UNILAG; we will look for one small university for you soon’. That was said a long time ago. I would love to see the person that said it.

After the era of Prof. Grace Alele Williams as the Vice Chancellor of the University of Benin, it took decades before women started returning to the topmost position in the universities and the country has many female vice chancellors now. What do you think is triggering the wave?
Sometimes, I think women are becoming more vocal. Sometimes, it is also that there are many more of us at lower levels that will come up. And we are taking positions such as Dean and so on. So, gradually, whether people like it or not, we are moving into more senior positions.

But I think we, as women, are our own greatest enemies because many women don’t see themselves as becoming vice chancellors, partly because the role models are few. And in this environment, at the top, it is still really a man’s world. There are not many females up there. We are getting more, but you don’t find too many. If you think about it, of the oldest five universities, I’m the only female. So, I’m hoping that maybe the older ones will follow suit soon, because those ones are really strict in tradition and can be a bit more patriarchal.

Do you think that what is playing out in the universities is similar to what is happening in the political circle, where the percentage of women in governance has remained minute and has dropped even further after the recently concluded general election?
I think the political sector is a little more difficult. Here, you rise to the top based on your competencies and the work you are ready to do. In the political system, it is a little bit more about ‘man know man,’ your networks and all of that. Again, how many women do you see being helped up? The men would see a younger colleague and help him up; not many are helping women up.

In the Nigerian system currently, you also see a lot of money politics. A lot of the deals are made outside where a woman is likely to be. But it will happen! We all saw the scenario in Adamawa governorship election. The woman must be strong to have gotten to that height. She must be highly intelligent. And really, for a woman to get to such a position, you have to be many, many times better than the men, because they will pull you down. The Old Boys will meet at the clubs. Will we be there? No, we will be in our houses. So, a lot of things are determined outside the environment and many women are not there. Unfortunately, the political scene is even worse.

But as more women come into positions like this, I believe that if we support each other, there will be an acceleration of women in top positions. Breaking the political one will be a little more challenging because you are going to need a lot of people behind you and you might not find them.
But there has been a National Gender Policy since 2006, which provides that 35 per cent of political positions be reserved for women, now popularly known as affirmative action…
(Cuts in) Have they not had it for a long time? How have they followed it? It’s followed more in the breach.

What advise do you have for women towards achieving their goals?
If you can think it, you can do it. Being in the public glare can be messy. Your mistakes are there publicly; the press will talk about it. Many women don’t like that, so you have to make your peace with that, recognising that you will make mistakes; people will talk about it, lies will be told about you and your thoughts will be misconstrued. You were brought up to be nice, to have a good reputation. So, when you are in this kind of position, the likelihood that you will be misunderstood is there. And the more political it is, the more likely, especially if somebody wants your position. Anything that goes wrong, somebody is going to really rip into you. Many of us are not ready for it.

So, it is an area you have to make your peace with to learn that it will happen and I think I made my peace with that years back when I was going in for Provost. But it is not an easy thing to happen and you keep praying that it doesn’t happen. But if it does, I have come to realise that at the end of the day, it is not what everybody thinks about you that matters; it is what the people who know you think about you. A lot of people who say things don’t even know you. What can you do about that? But once those who know you can still see you in you long after the story is no longer a story, they are the people that matter.

So, it’s really to learn not to worry too much. Just do your best so that you can be comfortable by yourself. Will you make mistakes? Yes. Will you do some things that will turn out to be wrong? It can happen. But the thing is whatever the consequence, be ready to take it. If you are not ready to take it, don’t go there.

There is a high wave of emigration by Nigerian youths to other countries, which has become known as japa syndrome. You are heading an institution where a lot of youths are undertaking different programmes. What advise do you have for them in this regard?
Right now, it is hard and one can only tell them that it is not as rosy as they think out there. But I can’t tell them not to go. Sometimes, you need to go, make the mistake and come back. So, if you must go, go with the plan to come back. It is better to go with the vision of what you are going to get and how you are going to reintegrate. You will never be a first class citizen in many of those countries no matter what you achieve. So, come back.

We have to make our country work. We cannot go there and try to enjoy other people’s labours. That’s parasitism and they will see you as a parasite. And once things go wrong, they will face the people who came in, no matter how important you are. So, if you are going, know why you are going. Have a plan and put it in your head.

Nigeria is still a great place. Our greatest challenge is that we don’t talk about the positives. Nigeria is in a much better place in many ways than it was years ago. It was saner; there is a lot of crime, but we are a lot of people. But there are a lot of very good people in Nigeria. It’s easy to focus on those who are not doing well. But as we sit in this room, how many of us are criminals? But let one person commit a crime; they won’t talk about the rest of us, they will focus on that and hype it.

So, my take is let us be kind to ourselves. Let’s celebrate small achievements. We will be taking steps forward.

Look at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The Commission introduced the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) in the conduct of the last general election. If they had continued with the old method, we wouldn’t be talking. But even putting that BVAS there and making sure that we cannot do over voting is a major leap forward. But we are more concerned about the challenges. There is no new technology or any new thing you bring in that will not have challenges.

The other part of it is that we are very quick to assume that when things go wrong it is of criminal intent. I keep saying that’s part of our need for decolonisation, because the worst thing about colonisation is that they make you feel that you are not good enough. I believe we are good enough; I think we are more than good enough; and we must not forget that people can see that Nigerians are not pushovers and there are many who would rather we continue to feel that we are not good enough. We are more than good enough. The corruption is there but it is localised. You can tell where it is but please let’s stop this sweeping statement, ‘Nigerians are …’

I keep asking, why don’t the Americans say Americans are mass murderers? That’s where it is happening. Have you ever heard them say that? They would rather say ‘God bless America.’ There is no corruption you have here that you don’t find in other African countries, but it’s only in Nigeria that we keep talking and de-marketing our country.

To all the young ones, I want to say that we have a rich history. We are a people to be proud of; we are resilient; we are kind, we are warm. Yes, there is corruption but sometimes corruption comes because there is lack of access and there are bottlenecks. If we fix a lot of our bureaucracies, a lot of the corruption will go away. When we fixed the telecoms industry, the NITEL corruption disappeared. Where is corruption around telephone lines now? So, we need to liberalise so that a lot of our challenges will leave.

Back to your new assignment, how has it been in the past five months?
Hot! Actually, it has been eye opening. I mean, I have been in administration, but I don’t think you fully appreciate the work to become the vice chancellor. I have been Deputy Vice Chancellor. I served as Acting Vice Chancellor, but to actually take up that seat is a lot of work to be done. But it’s not undoable!

So, in the last five months, I think what I have been trying to do is to put systems in place and then streamline some things so that they will work for me. I have started doing that, so I’m getting comfortable.

So what is the focus of your administration?
I have what we call a FUTURE READY agenda. The idea is to recognise that the world is changing very rapidly and anybody who is standing still will soon become irrelevant; it is the same for education. What we recognise is that at the rate at which knowledge is churned out, what we want to do is train minds to be able to use information, because by the time any student leaves here, half of what they learnt would be obsolete. So, it means that they must have nimble minds, ready to take in. They must have the kind of minds that ask questions. They must have the kind of minds that do not want to maintain the status quo and are ready to push boundaries.

Some of the things we want to do is to bring out that kind of mind rather than giving students information and they are supposed to regurgitate. So, we are pushing to do away with that concept in our minds that we have taught. The question to ask is: Have they learned?
To do that, we are pursuing much more vigorously the town and gown combination. So, we are speaking to industries. We recently started working on our curriculum and we have invited industries to come and prepare the curriculum with us. So, there is a lot of that going on now and maybe in the next one-month or so, the Senate will sit to look into this new curriculum. And part of that also is that we are bringing in more people from the industry to teach more of the practical aspect.

FUTURE READY is actually an acronym for Financial Re-engineering for Multiple Streams of Income, Unlocking Human Capital, Technology Driven Processes, Unrelenting Internalisation, Research for Development, Entrepreneurship and Innovation (FUTURE); Ranking with the Best, Enhancing Students and Staff Experience, Alumni Repositioning, Decolonising our Education and Celebrating our History and Culture and Yielding Inquiring Minds (READY). Everything that is in the FUTURE READY agenda can be encapsulated in four pillars, which include financing.

We are poorly funded. The amount of money that universities have at their disposal has been dropping every year. We don’t charge fees. We talk about mandatory charges to at least allow us to do a few things around the campus but we don’t charge tuition fees. And everywhere in the world the greatest area for spending is getting personnel. It goes beyond the government paying our staff; it means that we should be able to attract brilliant minds from anywhere at any time. That’s how universities function; it’s knowledge, human beings. We don’t have funds. We have aging infrastructure.

So, we are looking at ways to improve our funding structures to find new ways of having funds. The easiest is always tuition fees because the person who is getting the goods should pay for the goods truly. There has been a shift away from that in Nigeria and it was okay when we were having a few universities that the government was taking care of; it was okay when the population was very low and if you check anywhere they are doing free education, the population is small. We have a huge population; something will give if you don’t have more funds injected into it. The quality goes. And sooner or later we are going to ask ourselves that difficult question: Who pays for the education? But I can see that there are lots of thoughts in that direction. So, they are thinking of different ways. In the university, we are also looking at all our processes in terms of which other ways can we find funds to buy equipment and do things.

Government has put in place TETFUND, which does quite a bit, but obviously, it cannot meet all our needs. It does more in the area of capital rather than recurrent expenditure where we need a lot of money as well. How do we buy reagents for the labs? Nobody is going to ask you: Do you pay fees? Is it free education? Come and collect anything free. You still have to pay. When we pay for light, there is no subsidy for the universities. Here, we pay about N143 million every month for electricity because the university must be powered.

So, funds is a place we are looking at and we have been restructuring and looking at new ways to do that. We are rejigging our processes and businesses. We are also looking at new areas and one area that I’m particular about is the mind.

Everything is targeted at the mind. It’s the decolonisation of our mind-set and it goes beyond just talking about it. Anywhere you go and you find Nigerians talk about Nigeria, it’s usually negative. A lot of our young people do not know the history; they do not know what is good about Nigeria. Part of what we want to do is to bring back our culture and values and I have been talking to people in the private sector. So, there are certain things we are going to do.

For instance, next Saturday, April 29, we will be having a play at Terra Culture, which is called ‘UNILAG in Town’. It is the beginning of a number of things like that, which our students are performing to showcase the capacity of the brilliant minds we have here. That way we will be telling our stories without it becoming a sermon.

So, that’s sort of it in a nutshell but at the end of the day, we want to be a university that is forward looking, futuristic and pushing boundaries. It will be tough but that’s where we are going.

Looking at your submissions, do you see university autonomy as an idea this country should pursue at this time?
Anywhere you don’t have university autonomy, it means that you have imprisoned the minds. University cannot afford to be under politics. University must be merit based. You cannot over bureaucratise university; it has to be nimble. As I said, the strength of university is manpower and you can’t do turn by turn with university. The very core of university is merit. When you start to try to always be politically correct, you lose that value. You can’t force people to be innovative; they have to have it. In recent times, what we have seen is an incursion of civil service into the university so we cannot be competitive.

So, in a nutshell, autonomy is an imperative if we are going to have world-class universities. Even where the government is involved in universities, they are not involved to the extent where they are controlling the universities from outside; where they are telling you how to employ and who to employ. You are supposed to find the best minds and bring them in. You cannot say that you can only employ in October because those best minds move.

The situation we have in the country now is that the best minds are leaving in droves, which means we are making this place uncomfortable for best minds or we are not rewarding intellectuals/knowledge. And if we don’t reward knowledge, we will never grow; we will never develop. There is no country that has underfunded its universities that has developed. Those who have made it made education a centre point and they gave it the latitude to fly. In Nigeria we are caging it. You cannot charge fees so you have all sorts of people who don’t really want to be here but had to come because it’s free. If it is free, then somebody must pay.

University education is extremely expensive. We cannot as a nation keep saying that we don’t want to pay; then we will continue to buy costume jewellery in place of gold. Both shine but the difference is clear. What we now have is costume jewellery.

University is not just about classrooms; it’s about equipment. It’s about being able to go to conferences. It’s about continuous pollination of minds from different places. When you have a lot of academics that cannot travel because they cannot afford it, how is this possible? People say they should be doing research. Research is extremely expensive and there is no guarantee that you will find what you want at the end of a particular research. It’s not like a business where you ask: Where is the profit? It’s a continuous thing but because you have a goal ahead, it’s also about how do you fail and get up again. You learn from those failures, so there is no shortcut to research and it is extremely expensive.

Right now we compete with other countries for international grants but every country funds its people. We do have some funding from TETFUND but it is not enough. Let me give you an example. The National Institute of Health in the U.S. is the largest research funding body. They have various levels of funding for the career scientist; so as you are coming in you will be competing with your type. They have specific ones, the one for their people and the one they throw internationally. They employ scientists to answer research questions. The Institute does not say ‘oh, what do you feel like studying’. They look at national priorities and get people who are thinking to research on them, which is something we can do with our Academy of Science and so on, who think through the challenges of our country and then come up with questions they throw out for scientists to compete to answer so that the whole research is targeted.

All these things cost a lot of money. In the U.S. you can get a research grant as much as $600,000 spread over five years and they are giving international people like us. I mean see what you can do with that.

So, you can see that research is not just about us doing research; it’s also about bringing in funds to the universities to run. The universities charge the students. It is from that charge that they use to pay salaries. I looked at a lot of balance sheets and saw that the amount they make from the students is quite poor, because it is extremely expensive to run universities. We are not yet spending money on our universities and we want them to perform magic. We keep saying they are not doing well. How?

Those against university autonomy argue that it will make university education very expensive and consequently an exclusive preserve of the rich. What is your take?
Let me put it this way. Primary and secondary education is what is absolutely necessary. Tertiary education is not the university alone. Our challenge in the country is that we have thrown away polytechnics and made them second-class. Education at the university level is a more theoretical kind of thing.

If you go to the U.S. and say you want to study music, you will go to the Juliet School of Music, New York. It is as prestigious as any university. It is the most prestigious kind of place for you as a musician. What is Christian Dior? He is a tailor but there are tailors and there are tailors. The challenge we have is that we have devalued those who are good with their hands and it is part of our problem of non-development.

Recently, China converted 600 universities back to polytechnics. They said don’t need so many universities, that they need those who can translate the theory to the practical. We don’t have them. Where is the technical strength? Our problem is that we do not adequately reward them and we stigmatise them to make them feel second hand. They are not!

You did mention that your university is working on incorporating entrepreneurship into the curriculum. How will you advise the government on supporting the youth, particularly graduates, to be more entrepreneurial?
You know it is beyond just the training. It is a huge ecosystem. It goes beyond the universities. We can give you skills but there is a gap between what you can do and how you are funded. That’s not my job outside there. We don’t have the machinery. You want to do business, how easy is it for you as a young person to get a loan, to get support. So, it goes beyond the university. Even if we give you all the skills, how do you set up? What is the situation out there? What is our belief system? What kinds of loans are there? And it can’t just be the Bank of Industry. It has to be a very broad policy across all banks. How do we make sure that loans are easy to obtain? That gap is there.

So, it is not just a university problem. We have a lot of talented people who are doing little things. The problem of most entrepreneurs is how to survive.

So if you are asked to succinctly propose a model on this, what will it look like?
I can propose models for here; I cannot claim to be an expert on everything beyond my area of competence. From where I am now, the focus is to get the minds that are not thinking of ‘where would they employ me when I graduate’.

Let me digress a bit. One of the greatest problems is a tendency for people to think that someone is going to solve their problems for them. You see it at work all the time. Because they are used to having a stool in a particular position and they walk beside it, the day you move it they are going to stand. It does not occur to them to jump over it. It does not occur to them to backtrack. When you give someone an assignment, he/she is more concerned with process rather than role achievement. So, we need to get people who realise that the job is not over until you have achieved the set goals.

So, the idea is let’s start having those kinds of minds that don’t accept defeat. A mind that does not accept defeat will find a way. That is what we want to do here, to cultivate an entrepreneurial mind so that whether he is in employment or he is on his own, he will find a way. And that means that we have to teach those set skills. But you can’t just teach it. You have to do it. And so those are the areas we are developing.

We started a few years ago and we are still working. So, it is a process. If you go round the campus, you will find a lot of innovation hubs around, where students are doing wonderfully well. The idea is to make sure that in every area, the practical is also accentuated, not just theory.

How do we encourage those who are better with their hands in Nigeria? The first thing is to de-stigmatise polytechnics. How do you do that? I can give examples I have seen. I was in Finland and they have two types of universities – the normal universities like the University of Lagos and then the universities of applied science; essentially they are polytechnics where they learn vocational skills and they only get up to Masters level. But they also believe that there is no dead end to education. So, if you go to a university of applied science and decide to do a PhD, you can have enough credits to cross over to the university. But if you don’t want to, you stop there but all of you are in the university.

I say that because in Nigeria we stigmatised technical colleges and polytechnics. The way we do our reward system in terms of salaries is not helping; we put them on a lower level. So, who wants to go there? The fact that they are doing technical work doesn’t make them less intelligent; it is just a different type of intelligence. It is not everybody that can do theory that can also do the implementation. That is another skill totally. And we need both; otherwise we are not going to move forward.

So, as an institution, we had long recognised that there was a necessity to move from just theory to practical but we merged them. We still need the people who are thinking concepts, who are thinking forward but we also need them to be hands on. So, we are doing a lot more on that in all faculties and all disciplines.

One of the problems discouraging rich parents from sending their children to government owned universities is incessant strikes by teaching and non-teaching staff. You have been in the system for years. What do you see as the lasting solution to this problem?
There will be strike upon strike as long as you don’t have autonomy. What you are seeing is the consequence of the pauperisation of academia. How do you come out of school as one of the best and you are in a job, 10 years later you are earning so less that you can no longer buy a car; you cannot send your children to the kind of schools you want. You cannot afford the rent out there. And it is not just for academics; the other people in the system also suffer the same fate. Then when you open the newspaper everybody is abusing you and you are looking at the sacrifice you are making for this country. People are totally demoralised. People are now tired.

And the only solution in your view is university autonomy?
There has to be some autonomy. It does not have to be full autonomy. People are tired; they have been fighting hence the strikes. They need better conditions of service; they know what they are looking for. And the government is abusing you.

After the last strike what has happened is that almost on a weekly basis, about four people are resigning. People are going; they are not even complaining anymore. They have stopped complaining; they are going.

How can the country address the problem?
It’s about whether we are really concerned about education. Everybody wants it free. But truly, even if every penny the government spends is well spent for them to do free education, very few people can do free education at tertiary level. It’s impossible; it’s not sustainable. It worked when we had only a few universities. I think we have 43 federal universities now; we also have the state universities. It can’t be free and then you want the quality you want. That’s one.

Two, we have to get politics out of the university in terms of the management. We need to protect intellectuals from the politicisation that is occurring in Nigeria. Autonomy is an important step where the university councils will be the governing councils. It is at that stage you decide how many people you need in the university and so on. But it is also important that the composition of that council will be similar to what we have elsewhere. The people who must be there must merit it because it’s meritocracy at the university. The university is still one of the last bastions of meritocracy whether people believe it or not.

So the kind of people in the governing councils must be people who have an idea of what the private sector needs; who have an idea of what people are looking for, which is manpower. You also need people who understand the public sector because if you bring in purely private sector people and want to drive the university with them alone, you will get it wrong. If it’s only public sector people, you will also get it wrong so we need a mixture. What we don’t need are politicians. If you bring in Federal Character into the university, you will kill the system; you will never be able to compete.

So, yes we do need autonomy. We have actually suggested some ways for autonomy to be done but I think a lot of discussions are still going on.

How do you hope to sustain the peace on campus bearing in mind the conflict between the immediate past vice chancellor and then pro-chancellor that rocked the institution?
UNILAG has been peaceful for a long time. We overcame that. That was an unnecessary one too. It was, should I say, externally induced. I think one of the things we have learnt in UNILAG and which has worked is that we are always communicating. There is continuous communication with various groups. The management talks with the unions; we talk with the students. We encourage that kind of communication. And what I have found is that if there is sincerity of purpose, most cases would be resolved amicably. There will always be some skirmishes; you can’t have a community this big and not have skirmishes but as long as we have those communication lines open, these things will be resolved.