By Sebastine Ebhuomhan
Chief Daniel Osikheme Orbih is a household name in the contemporary politics of Edo State and Nigeria. From being a founding member of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), he rose to become the Chairman of Edo State Chapter of PDP from which position he was elected and re-elected the National Vice Chairman (South-South) of the PDP at the Zonal Congress in Calabar, Cross River State, last month. But before then, however, the All Progressives Congress (APC)-elected Edo State Governor, Senator Monday Okpebholo, appointed Orbih as the Chairman of the Governing Council of Ambrose Alli University (AAU), Ekpoma. A worthy acknowledgement of the starring role the Legacy Group, the largest foundational caucus or pressure group of Edo PDP under Orbih’s leadership, played in supporting Okpebholo to ensure his governorship election victory after the PDP-elected ex-Governor Godwin Obaseki had stripped the group members of all political rights and privileges, suspended its leaders, sacked its elected office holders, and demoted its appointed officials while restricting them from the party’s recognition. For a higher institution that moulded many great and influential citizens like the founder of United Bank for Africa Plc, Mr. Tony Elumelu and the Minister of Aviation, Mr. Festus Keyamo, SAN, the AAU unarguably lost its glory and respect under Obaseki’s destructive politics. In this interview, Orbih commended Governor Okpebholo for good decisions. He spoke on issues impacting on university education, impacting on governance and impacting on politics in Edo State after Sebastine Ebhuomhan caught up with him at Irruah last week during the preparations for AAU’s first official Governing Council meeting. Enjoy the excerpts.
Congratulations on your appointment and your re-election. My observation shows that your Governing Council has quickly got down to work after swearing-in by Mr. Governor. What is the state of rots at AAU?
I will prefer not to call it rots. I will rather say what are the challenges we met? It is one university in the past eight years that has been totally neglected by the government in power. And you know, education is one thing that you cannot ignore. It is a key to the future. There is no decent society that can downplay the importance of ensuring that our youths are able to get good education so that they can manage future responsibilities. Under the government of Godwin Obaseki, he reduced the subvention to the institution drastically to about N41 million a month. There were a lot of crises. The management of the university were unable to meet up with their responsibilities. They were unable to pay staff salaries as at when due; they were unable to provide basic things you need in a conducive learning environment. So, they were going through all that. Again, the approach or attitude of the then government did not help matters. They went ahead to bring something unknown to the articles setting up the university. They called it SIT: Special Intervention Team. They carried on in a manner that showed a total disconnect between the management (or what many people called an aberration) and stakeholders. There was a disconnection between that body Obaseki set up and the university community, the academic staff, and workers of the university. A lot of people were sacked… Well, I don’t want us to dwell too much in the past. The current governor of the state, Senator Monday Okpebholo has a different approach on how to bring the university back to what it used to be.
First, instead of SIT, which is unknown to the university system, he has been able to constitute a Governing Council within a very short time that he assumed office. He has charged us to do all that we can to ensure that the university is back to its good old days. And that is exactly what we have been doing. My immediate task after the swearing-in of the new Governing Council was to pay a visit to the institution. We held several meetings with members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, management staff, the Non-Academic Staff Union, Students Union and others. We have met with all the critical stakeholders of the university. We have taken time to listen to them. We have taken time to listen to what they considered as the problems facing the institution. We have listened to their suggestions, too. We have also ensured that they were able to conduct credible election to nominate the non-academic members of the Council: representing the Senate; representing the Congregation; representing all the various unions and organs, who by the enabling Act setting up the Council are supposed to be represented in the Governing Council. The reason is that these representatives of the various bodies are there to give us inside information about some of the things that will come before the Council for consideration. And it is important to have them on board early. We have been able to put that together. Tomorrow, we are going to have the first official Council meeting. We have also decided that a day to the first meeting, we would come to the university again and visit all the infrastructure in the university for an on-the-spot assessment of the state of infrastructure in the school so that when we are going to receive memos in the Council asking for certain things, either rehabilitation of the dilapidating facilities in the institution or other things that require urgent Council consideration, we will have the mental pictures of what those papers are talking about. We started that today at about 10 am and we rounded off a few minutes ago at about 6 pm. We even went to the old site where the university started at Idumebo. We visited there because that is where they have their part-time students and take their lectures. We went there to inspect the facilities there and assess what we need to do so that the students can have a conducive environment to learn. It has been very informative, what we have seen today. We visited almost all the faculties, lecture theatres, medical school, etc, where we were able to see for ourselves some of the challenges facing the students. By the time we meet tomorrow, we are going to put in place measures to address some of the problems. I think one of the things we are going to seriously look at how to put in place is self-sustaining programmes for the university, where they can on their own, generate revenues to run their academic programmes so that if we have another Obaseki tomorrow, the university will run smoothly without depending on what the government of the day will have to give for them to be able to function.
Since your Governing Council was sworn-in, we have seen two major activities that should point at more challenges. Last month, 128 medical students were inducted after a long delay. Then, there is a directive from the government that all external learning centres should be collapsed and brought into the school’s main campus. These are two obvious inherited challenges. What are the other challenges we do not know about?
Sincerely speaking, the two issues you referred to, we must give the current government of the state the credit. In fact, those decisions were taken before the Council was inaugurated. For example, in Governor Okpebholo’s inaugural speech during the inauguration, he made reference to recalling some of the staff that were unjustly dismissed. As he was speaking, there was no Council at that time. He directed that the university should recall them. The second issue you mentioned about the campuses, he also gave the directive before our Council came on board. I think the area of concern to the government was that the report coming from the school was very clear that most of the existing infrastructure was neglected and totally abandoned. You will go to a lecture theatre with a capacity of 1,000 seats, you will instead find out that some of the halls don’t have seats, the roofs are leaking etc. Here we are. The previous governor, instead of addressing and ensuring that these things were renovated and made conducive for students to learn, he was busy trying to set up satellite campuses. He was busy putting up a structure opposite the University of Benin, for example, saying he was going to move the Engineering Department there. What efforts were they putting in place to ensure that the existing structures within the university were renovated? So, that was why the government had to take that decision. Let us address the infrastructural decay within the university before talking about building satellite campuses.
You raised a germane issue about the university’s revenue generation, which has been a major problem in the past. How will you allay the fears of AAU students that your Council, in looking at areas of revenue generation, will not influence the management to increase the school fees of students?
No. Already, there is something to show that the Council is not looking in that direction. For example, we went round the hostels today. We discovered that most of the students were no longer staying in the hostels because the school management increased the fee for hostel space from N40,000 to N80,000. The management has now gotten instruction to return the accommodation back to the old fee. It is now for the students to take advantage of this because the accommodation fees outside the campus are very high. They pay so much for accommodation and pay so much for transport to get to the school from wherever they stay. In the school hostels, there is water and there is electricity. They have every reason to move back to the school hostels. Because of the increased fee, most of the hostels, we were told, were under 50 per cent occupied. The students were now going outside the school to look for accommodation, where they usually crowd themselves into rooms just to be able to save some money. So, we are going to have a lot of things to look at.
Should we agree that the scenario you just painted now, how students crowd themselves into rooms outside the campus as well as the dangers of having too many people with different characters living together without regulation, contributes to the high rate of cultism in AAU nowadays?
I think we will also start to engage with the various bodies especially where parents and students are involved. I must confess that we went to the College of Medicine and some other places and we saw hostels being built by parents of students collaborating with the university to build hostels for medical students. That is quite commendable. If we have more of such initiatives, it will help to address the problem you are talking about. I believe that parents should get more involved with the education of their children. The institution can provide lecturers to do academic aspect of learning. But education is not just learning about the subject. It is all-embracing. Parents should get more involved in their children’s upbringing and education. In our time, for example, I can’t go to school and I see a very fine shirt of my friend and I’ll take it. Even if I express the fact to my friend, that I like the shirt you are putting on (and some of them would be so generous and say, if you like it, have it), I won’t be able to take it because if I put on the shirt, and I go home, my parents would say, “I didn’t buy this shirt for you. Where did you get it from?” That is discipline. That is parents’ involvement in what their children are doing. It helps to check a child’s excesses because if you put on something and your parents are able to say, “no, I didn’t buy this for you. You’re a student. Where did you get the money? Where did you get this shirt?” The mere fact that you are scared that your parents are going to ask questions, you won’t even take that offer from a friend.
Is your Governing Council going to get parents involved in a way?
I think we are going to start making appeals to parents to be more involved in the upbringing of their children. Know the friends they keep. As parents, it’s important to know the friends your children are keeping. They must not keep bad companies because overtime those ones will influence their characters. And that will affect their education. So, they should not leave the education of their children and their upbringing totally to lecturers. Lecturers can teach. But they will only deal with the aspects of imparting knowledge. They will not be involved in looking at what these children are doing in their extra time.
What is your assessment of the first 100 days of the Monday Okpebholo administration?
I want to say this (on record). For me, it will be too early to push out an assessment. He has over three years and several months in this first tenure to stay in the office. Hundred days are just there as foundation to what he intends to do. So far, from what we have seen in 100 days, if he is able to sustain and maintain the momentum, he is certainly going to do very well. While one may say it is rather too early to use 100 days to assess an administration that has four years to stay in office, one can also safely say that the signs we are seeing from his first 100 days are enough to prove that if he can sustain the current momentum, he will do well.
Lastly, as the Chairman of the Governing Council of AAU, what is your dream for AAU? I mean, when you are no longer in the office, what would you want to be remembered for?
First, I will say trust me. By the time I am done as the Pro-Chancellor of the university, I will be leaving the university far better than the way we met it. We want AAU to be able to compete with other universities in the world. Knowledge is a global thing all over the world. Our students should be able to compete and we will be proud to see our students excel in their various fields after leaving the school. Today, we can talk about Mr. Tony Elumelu, the Minister of Aviation, Festus Keyamo and others. They are past students of the university. I believe with our vision for the institution, we are going to turn out many more Tony Elumelus, others like Festus Keyamo and many others who passed through this institution, who everybody is proud of. So, all we need to do is to put together a system that will work. I have observed that virtually all the management staff are acting. We have an acting Vice Chancellor, an acting Bursar, an acting Registrar etc. They are all acting. The only office not acting since we took over is the Governing Council. Because as at that time, the school had no Governing Council. But all the principal officers of the university are in acting capacities. All that must change. We want to have people in positions that should be able to take responsibilities for the offices they occupy.
Mr. Sebastine EBHUOMHAN is an award-winning journalist and media consultant from Edo State. He can be reached on: usie007@yahoo.com and 08037204620.
