I Want To Lead AAU To Produce More Elumelus, Keyamos, Others —Orbih

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. 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 in Irrua two weeks ago during the preparations for AAU’s first official Governing Council meeting. Excerpts:......CONTINUE READING THE ARTICLE FROM THE SOURCE>>>>>

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 extent of the rot 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 and 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.

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, whom 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. The…..CONTINUE READING THE FULL ARTICLE