How we are dealing with randy lecturers at UNIZIK – Prof. Charles Esimone

 

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Maduako Igbokwe I Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023

 

AWKA, Anambra, Nigeria – Prof Charles Esimone is the Vice Chancellor of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka Anambra State. In this interview with selected media houses, he spoke on sexual harassment and extortion in the university. He also aired his views on security and his  plans to have a peaceful transition of power  to another  vice chancellor

 

Your tenure is coming to an end, and many professors are gearing up for the position, how do you intend to make it rancour-free?

There are laid down procedures for the selection and appointment of a Vice Chancellor in the institution. I have been telling my colleagues in the senate and the university community that every professor is a potential Vice Chancellor, but 

we must follow laid down procedures. The National Universities Commission( NUC) has over ten years ago stated the guidelines, steps and qualifications that should be met for one to qualify to be a vice-chancellor.

We have to religiously follow that guideline, there is no anointed candidate. Anointing any person is not one of the processes for the selection of the vice-chancellor of the university. People must pass through the due process of the interview. If one emerges victorious and is found appointable he is appointed as a vice-chancellor. I want to assure the public that due process must be observed and followed, no shortcut.

What we don’t want is the people turning the university into a conventional political party system where there will be a campaign of calumny to ascend to the position. The position of vice chancellor is a sensitive position that demands every sense of responsibility. Those who must ascend to the position of vice chancellor must have been said to be disciplined. They must have what it takes, academic excellence is very important and community service is very crucial. 

All these are the demands for the position of vice chancellor of a university. We are going to follow the rules closely. Whosoever that emerges must follow the laid down process. I have also been telling our people that in terms of leadership, it is only God who chooses leaders. I have a firm belief in God’s words and promises. You see people who are in the eyes of men very qualified and for one reason or the other, God may choose another person. 

Let us watch the process closely and not necessarily heat the polity. I said that a university is a place where the administrative acumen should be exposed at all times, coupled with the academic excellence the university is supposed to showcase. Then, if that is not demonstrated, it is not proper. We must follow things accordingly because the template is very clear and everybody can see that. It is not something that is hidden. The template for the appointment of the vice-chancellor of a university is clear and it has not been changed. I am assuring you that every step and stage will be transparently done.

 

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Recently, a professor hurriedly obtained a PhD to qualify for the position, what is the length of a PhD before one can be vice chancellor?

When you said hurriedly obtained a Ph.D it is not correct. PhD is not obtained hurriedly. PhD is a process that lasts a minimum of three years. For one to qualify for a PhD, he must have spent at least a minimum of three years, some times it could last for four, five years or more years. His PhD this time may be a coincidence. It was possible he could have finished last year and maybe because of the strike, the programme was delayed till this year.

Once you have PhD, whether one year or more and you are a professor, you are qualified. The criteria do not stipulate the length of years of Ph.D. What it stipulates is the length of time you have been a professor.

In the medical field, if you are a Fellow, you are equivalent to a PhD holder and you are qualified to be Vice-chancellor. In our commission, it is enshrined that with a Fellowship, you are assumed to be a PhD holder.

But, recently, because of evolution in the National Universities Commission NUC which is our parent/regulatory body, there are moves that before you are made a professor, you should have a PhD. It is not yet uniform, with different universities, different establishments and formats.

Even here at Unizik, we are still operating the same system because our condition of service has not changed. Here at Unizik if you have a fellowship, you can be promoted up to a professor in the medical field without a Ph.D.

 

As the vice-chancellor of the university, are there some professors you think cannot succeed you?

 

Yes, of course. Just like I told you,  we have laid down procedures. I know that professors who are not up to ten years old cannot be vice chancellor for now, because we shall follow the laid down rules strictly.

The rules say that for you to be a vice-chancellor, you must be a professor for at least ten years. That was what raised the issue during the selection of my predecessor. That was responsible for the rancour. The NUC template says at least ten were being tampered with by the council because some were fronting a particular candidate who had about seven years as a professor. We said no, it was not that NUC gave as procedures for selection of vice-chancellor.

I know for sure any professor who is not up to ten years old can not succeed me.

We also know that some have gross academic deficiencies. A vice-chancellor must have a certain level of academic excellence. Some of the professors since they were made professors went to sleep. You are not supervising PhD students and not publishing. Why are you looking for the position of vice chancellor, just manage the position the management gave to you and go and rest. These people are the people I can say clearly, that they can not meet the criteria to be vice chancellor of this university.

Apart from the length of professorship and poor academic performance, honestly, every other professor is a potential vice-chancellor.  

 

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When you assumed office as VC, you promised to take the university to greater heights, making it the best in Nigeria and 200 in the world, have you been able to do that?

 

You know when I started with Project 200, the project was to make Unizik among the best 200 universities in the world, the first ten in Sub Saharan Africa and first in Nigeria. That was the mission, the vision and the overall goal. We anticipated that within five years, I would serve as a vice chancellor, which is accomplishable. As we speak, we are moving up. We are fourth in Nigeria today, we are moving closer to sub-Saharan Africa, we are number 13th and in the world, we have moved from 4494 to around 1200. 

There are a lot of issues responsible for this visibility. Some of these issues create challenges, the first is the digital update, the world is digital and whatever you want to do to be visible you must be able to go digital. Our system has changed, the method of administration, academic delivery, and method of interaction have even changed, they are digital now. I see that as one of the things that helped us to move the institution up.Right now, our appraisals are done digitally. One of the things I did was to make sure that all staff and students have their signature email, bearing  Unizik identity.

You see before now, the principal officer was having Yahoo mail or Gmail and I said, no we need to rebrand our university.

We now have Unizik.edu.ng in our emails, we were able to streamline that for everybody. I made sure we had our institution’s name in our emails and other digital devices. If you are talking about international visibility and they can not identify you with your emails, that is already a minus.

 That was a major thing we did. However, it was difficult to change the psyche of both the staff and students to that because they were already used to their Yahoo and Gmail. I insisted on institutional email because it is a brand we needed to sell our university.

Our appraisals today are now done digitally. When we wanted to start it, it was a big issue, people did not want it, they wanted to remain the old way, the analogue. You know that digital traffic is a major factor in our visibility. Right now, our external assessors will not carry big bags of documents. The digital revolution is where I saw we made much improvement, but then, we have a lot of challenges. I can see that student clearance is no longer a problem, our transcripts have also gone digital. For a student to do clearance, we want to launch something within the next few months. After the launch, students don’t need to queue up to due their transcripts. Once it is launched, you can do your clearance and transcripts in the comfort of your rooms, hostels or anywhere. That is an area we want to focus on now, that will also enhance our university visibility..

The key one, apart from the academics, is infrastructure. If you visit any institution where the infrastructure is planned it will be seamless. What I want my successor to focus on is to plan the infrastructural development, not just building structures rather he should plan them before building. If it is a classroom, he should make sure that it is connected to the solar system. Maintenance of the structure is a big problem in our university, we just have structures that are not maintained and are decaying because we did not plan them well. I want to advise him, that anything he wants to build let him plan it very well. He should connect them to power and water reticulation and put them into the standard. 

I am trying to do that now, but I hope I will be able to complete them. We want our system to be synchronised and connected. When I came to the university, I did not know that there was no power network and if something went wrong, it was difficult to detect. It was also a big problem and that is the reason we now have solar systems and we wanted the solar to be loaded and shared. Maybe that is the reason when we have a power problem in the hostel or classroom it takes us one and a half years to ratify. We had to bring in a consultant, who told us that the university right from inception had no networks and everything was done in an ad-hoc approach. No electricity network and that is what we are correcting now. We want to build the network so that if anything happens we can go to the system and find the fault. That is how it is done aboard but in our case, we do trial and error for over six weeks. The same thing with our internet connectivity.

We are now mainstreaming it and clearing it and once that is done any building that is constructed will just be added to the network. We will also check if it will add to the overload. We don’t need all these generators here and there again in the university.

We have also come to realise that getting funding to run the university is becoming increasingly difficult, so we need to focus on two things Endowment and Alumni. We are strengthening the alumni. Alumni is a big financial base, I have checks everywhere. We are talking about school fee increments, it can not even solve the problem of funding in the universities. Endowment and Alumni are bigger than all these school fees and other things we talking about. We are strengthening our alumni to make sure that anybody who has passed through the university will contribute, even if they contribute N100 each, the base will solve the university administration problem.

I discovered this very late in my administration, but we are working on it. I would like my successor to focus on it and if he does that, there will be a lot of funds for him to run the institution.

Whether you like it or not, university funding is dwindling and without funds nobody can run a university. I got a lot of endowments, and many things I did in the university were from endowments. Almost all the major structures, you see in the university are through an endowment. The endowment is either from the government, national assembly, private organisation or individuals, however, we have not been able to tap fully into the alumni. If we succeed in the alumni, it will help in the sustenance and building of the university. Getting every alumni is our priority and we are creating a website where we showcase our alumni of the week, month and of the Year. They will see where their money is being channelled into. I have interacted with the vice-chancellor of Oxford University London and others, they said that their major sources of funding are the alumni, not even what the  British government gives.

Peter Obi once told me, that he just put up a small structure in Oxford and that he pays his alumni fee regularly. He said somebody is calling him every time to pay. This is a big financial base we are losing. I met some of our alumni in the Diaspora, and they told me that I should just call them, the only thing they complained about was that they needed an organisation. We are going to have a better alumni and powerful website. The money from that source alone can be more than what students are paying as school fees.

 

Do you mean that  could remedy the hike in school fees in Nigeria?

 

Yes, that will be a remedy, and with that, we don’t need a hike in school fees. If we organise it well the revenue base of this university will be massive.

 

There is one issue reoccurring in the University about one Afam Ezeoku sexually harassing students. There have been various committees that indicted him. You also set up a committee that indicted him, he has just been suspended for three months, what is happening?

 

I did not set up Prof Obi Oguejiofor’s committee that looked into the case. The case of Afam Ezeoku never came up under me as a vice chancellor, it was not under my tenure and I won’t be able to say much about it.  It may be possible under any of my predecessors, but I cannot say exactly. 

But on Afam, what I saw was a social media report about his sexual harassment to students and, suspending him is the way to go. Due process is important in handling such an issue. The first is to suspend the person and investigate. What we are doing now is the investigation and once it is complete and he is indicted by the committee, it will then go to the joint council senate disciplinary committee and that is the committee that whatever it says will be presented to the council for the final decision.

 If we do otherwise, he will go to court, even if it stays ten years and that is what we have had. The previous VCs did that and those who had come back, we are paying heavily because due process was not followed. Once you suspect a person, we investigate properly. There are no emotions, no sentiment about it, if you use emotion and dismiss the person, no problem, one year later, he will approach the court for damages. We have paid N75 million and N80 million for something we knew happened but we did not follow due process. We are following due process in the case, once he is found culpable, he will leave the university, there are no two ways about it.

 

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You are planning to install CCTV cameras in the staff offices and classrooms and this is generating issues, how are you going to do them?

The CCTV is a phase thing. It is to save the students. When you see that some people are just so careless about some of these key issues,  sexual harassment, extortion and sorting to pass exams. We are starting with classrooms. We are still deliberating on offices. They have given their reasons why CCTV will not be installed in their offices but I told them that the office is not a private apartment of anybody. However, some people have one or two reasons but then we will look into those reasons. We will sit down again and look into their reasons. In modern offices, they use what is called open offices. I was telling some of them that the project was to help them because some of them didn’t want to hold themselves in one way or the other. We don’t want to heat  up the system because of that.

Meanwhile, we have installed CCTV in many classrooms. Also, students are messing up the system, it is two things, it is not just lecturers and staff. I don’t like to impose anything on the staff, we will sit down and talk. They also need to understand. We are not happy with the social media reports about the university. This administration needs to do something to show we are intolerant of negative activities.

We had a town hall meeting with students, with all the student unions in the university. We encouraged and asked them to speak out. We are going to launch Operation Speak if you are oppressed. The majority of the students are afraid of speaking out because some of the lectures are threatening them.

Some of the students have spoken out and I have set up a committee to investigate them. We are investigating them, if any is found guilty, at least we start from those. We have five or six cases of harassment, we are investigating. I told the students that what we were doing was to protect them. I assured them that nobody would harass or intimidate them under my administration and go free. All along this had been happening, only that students didn’t come out to speak. I have said that, once I see the case I will follow it up. I have zero tolerance for sexual harassment, even in my faculty, the faculty of pharmacy I sacked my boy. I brought him into the university from a company and nobody believed I could sack him. He did not even believe I could sack him. Everybody knew he was my boy. We followed due process, investigated him and found him guilty, I have to sack him. If you like to be my brother, my wife or anybody once you are found in that position, you are gone.

I told the students that they should be rest assured that if they give information it must be followed to a logical conclusion. Once any person’s name is dropped in any of these issues, he will be investigated and if found guilty, the person will go.

I also urged the students to come forward and give evidence because without evidence we cannot do anything. We must have evidence to do our investigations. I also told them not to be afraid of giving evidence, and that the university will protect them. We are embarking on a total cleansing of the university.

 

Recently, there have been a lot of security challenges on campus, even the EEDC cable was vandalised in your institution, what is happening?

Honestly, when I saw that I was happy on the one hand, the issue of security has become a great challenge for two reasons. For now, security is outsourced. The government said you can outsource. The people who are being outsourced to do the job are not there because of the same problems of funding.

The agency that handles the security, we have been having problems with them for some time. We owe them. It is a big shame, but that is the reality. Because of these issues, their service cannot be covered everywhere in the university. We have made some arrangements in the last two months to engage causal security. There are also some volunteer staff who want to work in the safety unit. We have trained them, though some of them have not been deployed. When they are all deployed, they will cover the whole of the campus. When security was mainstream in our salary, we had about 600 security personnel, today we can not afford that number.