Folasade Tolulope Ogunsola is the first female Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos . The Professor of Medical Microbiology, who at various times, was Provost of College of Medicine and Acting Vice Chancellor of the university, in this interview with IYABO LAWAL, spoke on her plans to reposition the insitution, why federal universities must charge fees and the need to reform the education sector to meet global trends. It is a lot of work to be done but it is not an ‘undoable’ thing.
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 not rewarding intellectuals or knowledge, and if we don’t do that, we will never grow. There is no country that has underfunded its university that has developed. Those who have made it made education acceptable and gave it the latitude to fly.
There have been discordant tunes on whether or not to charge fees in universities, with ASUU insisting that fees payment would deprive indigent students from accessing university education, what’s your take on this? Are we really concerned about education? You know everybody wants it free. The government honestly and truly, no matter what we say, even if every penny we spend is well spent, we are too big for them to be able to do free education, and very few people can do free education at tertiary level, it is not sustainable.
A lot of people in the private sector are within the upper middle class, while those in the public sector are between middle and lower working class, so there’s a class thing. All those things play up at the workplace because there is a certain thing employers are looking for beyond your degree. So, we at the university have to recognise that and start to put in place things around etiquette that we are not teaching because before, students coming in would have learnt it in secondary school.
The first thing to interrogate is how many people cannot pay? And how many of the people would be able to pay if we give them a way to pay because when you benchmark at poverty, it means you have totally discountenanced the need for equipment, reagents, good housing, bringing in fresh minds and brilliant people from outside your space. Somebody did an analysis about three or four years ago of what UNILAG needs to run effectively, it was almost N30 billion.
How much did your parent pay for your University education? Are the fee that Nigeria universities not charging that make non-competitive and irrelevant?
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