‘We will help varsities produce world-class graduates’

Prof Olusola Oyewole

The Vice-Chancellor, Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta (FUNAAB), Ogun State, Prof Olusola Oyewole, was elected President of the Association of African Universities (AAU) for four years during its 13th General Conference in Libreville, Gabon, last Friday.  In this interview, he tells KOFOWOROLA BELO-OSAGIE how the association will help solve graduate unemployment 

Why do you want to serve African universities?

Within the past 10 years, apart from teaching in the university, I have been involved with high education issues in Africa. It will interest you to know that I have worked as a staff members of the Association of African Universities in Accra for about four years between 2006 and 2009. While there I coordinated the World Bank project on quality assurance for African universities and I have also moved from here to the African Union Commission in Ethiopia/Addis Ababa where I was the senior expert on higher education; so am familiar with universities. I have served in the university of agriculture Abeokuta for 28 years and now have been the vice chancellor for the past one year and one week.

So, what are you hoping to do in these four years?

One I am aware of the trend of things in higher education. In the past we have been producing graduates to service the one: the colonial masters, the civil servants who service but now the civil service is saturated. Our demand today is to produce graduates who will drive the development of Africa. We are in a knowledge economy were it is what you know that matters. It is not your oil, it is not your petroleum; it is what you can do with the knowledge that you know and our intention now is to ensure that graduates of today should have skills that can make them employable, skills that can make them to create jobs and skills that are relevant to our African development.

How are you going to achieve this?

We are going to deal with universities; we are going to deal with higher education institutions. We are going to educate or interact with the leaders that will drive activities in this university to know that there’s a need to have a paradigm shift in our curriculum. We can no longer continue with this theoretical curriculum that does not build up the human beings that can help our development. If we can modify or improve the curriculum to meet our needs as Africans then the graduates that will come out from there will help. We have also emphasized a value chain process whereby the input and the process is very important in the outcome. In terms of the input we know that the quality of primary school graduates who are admitted into secondary school reflects on the quality of our secondary school products and that translates to the university. Our intention is to promote total teacher development right away from the primary school to the university level, so that the quality of those who we now produce from the university will be great. We will promote dialogue among institutions. We will promote mobility of staff and students. We will promote opportunities to develop the leaders of our institution themselves and we also promote some capacity building programmes for institutions.

So, there will be a lot of training for all these professors?

Yes they will be training for them.

So, by the time you are leaving office, where do you hope to see AAU?

Well, by the time am leaving office, we would have got our universities to be committed to the quality of products that come out from them. I expect that graduates of African universities would be committed to Africa, issues about brain drain would have been reduced to the minimies.

What is your take on the role of international agencies and how Africans should relate to them?

I know that up till now, development agencies have been contributing to our development in the universities. It is time for our own government, our own people, to also see that they need to support development in the universities. I believe that there is a synergy; all of us should work together, indeed, a graduate of today should not see himself as a graduate of his or her own country. We are producing graduates for the world.

Source: The Nation