We’ve Made Progress, but We’re Not Where We Want to Be — Ogunsola

After three years as vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos, Professor Folasade Ogunsola speaks with UNILAG Sun on her administration’s achievements, challenges, and plans for the future. In this exclusive interview, Daniel Nnamani and Barakat Lawal engage the VC on issues confronting the university.

Ma, it’s been three years since you became the vice-chancellor of the university. What would you say are your biggest achievements so far, and what are the challenges, Ma? 

Okay, let me say when I came in, there were some things I felt were important as outlined in the future-ready agenda, but you could really distil it into four major areas: the first one is about finances, the second is infrastructure, the third is reputation, and the last one is manpower development for both students and staff. There are many things that we have able to achieve.  When I came in, we were coming out of strikes, COVID, and so on, and because the university does not shut down, irrespective of whether we are running school or not, we’re generally spending, we will spend on electricity, we’ll spend on water, we will take care of trash, because people also live on the campus. The university is a local government area; it’s not an office, we’re bigger than some cities in Europe, so we came in with debt, we also had a student cost, which was subsidised 20 years ago. We divided into five scenarios, the last two scenarios would bring us to really what would cover all our costs and give us a little extra to plan for the future, so we decided to choose a certain amount that would make us break even, we sent that to the ministry of education and they said, ah, we can’t charge at the break even scenario, so they cut it and brought us to, I think it was the second one, which would give us a little lee way to develop slowly over time, but we would still be in deficit, but the deficit would keep getting smaller.  Anyway, that’s a long story, but we got it through, and that was a very difficult decision, because it’s not like we don’t see what’s going on around. You see, students are only thinking of their own pocket. How does the university run, how do we pay bills, so the university is in the same position you are in, a lot to do, no money, so we had to balance it, and but you are the consumers, so if you are going to get this education, you have to pay something, you cannot pay as if you’re in 1960s, because the money does not mean the same, so we had to do that and it was sorted out. 

Before we did that, at least six universities had increased, and their costs were higher than us, other universities were waiting for us to do, so that they could do their own, and it’s true, the day we brought it out, we were the first university that brought it up, and we thought that our costs were the highest, because everywhere just went crazy, I knew it was coming, I didn’t appreciate how bad it would be, but I also knew that I had no choice, really, and the noise was not just from outside, it wasn’t just from our students, even from our staff, because they are looking at their pockets. Some will say ‘I have four children in university,’ but unfortunately you cannot hold down something and devalue it, because you don’t have money in your pockets, what you do is, how do we support those who cannot afford it, you cannot benchmark everything at poverty level, and want good qualities, you are trying to eat your cake and have it and I’m serious. We all want a university like Harvard, but we don’t want to pay Harvard fees; it’s not going to happen. It’s not magic. So the question is, are there ways that we can do this? How do we get governments to give us money? I believe the increment is a major achievement. There were two mistakes we have made, one of which is keeping the cost abysmally low, because it backfired, not just on the institution, you people who post on social media, ‘see the dormitory, look at the beds, see our toilets, you can’t eat your cake and have it. Other things happened; we could not build, because there were also policies that didn’t allow us to build hostels, and these things have to be maintained, and students don’t use these things well. If we repair today, somebody will stuff something inside it, somebody has to repair it, and those things cost money; every repair is money. We’re not where we should be, even now, we’re managing, but we are better off. Now we can even plan, and one of the things we also did was to give more money to the departments and faculties, in terms of lab fees. Now, if we had plenty of money, we would give them enough to just change labs overnight, but we can’t. The lab fees you pay go to studio fees; they go to your departments. The idea is that you can hold them accountable. 

We also started certificate courses for corporate areas, because they bring in money that forms our IGR.  We also allowed some departments and units to do more public-private, so that more funding can come in,  so we start having small bits of funding that keep coming into the university, and hopefully, over time, improve the models. If it works well, we scale up everywhere, and of course, we tighten the finances to reduce waste, and we’ve started to see some of those benefits. Not all of them will you see at the student level, but we’ve added more to what we can do for research for staff, and we worked on infrastructure. We made a conscious decision that yes, we can build, but how do we maintain, at least pull them out of the gutter?  It’s not totally where we want to be. The hostels that existed already, now some students will say, ‘ah is that all that they did?’, but that all that they did is in hundreds of millions, because these are big spaces, and some of them were in really terrible states, so we try to improve, and then over time, we can then do more, because if you wait till you can do everything, you will not do anything. 

We will build, but let’s first take care of the ones that are going down the drain, and we started with Mariere. We had to get special permission to use our funding to do that, and then we spoke to TETFUND to permit us to spend our allocation for building, to renovate, we were the first people to do that, and we did, and we still have more to renovate, we haven’t finished, but what then happened was, when we did that, TETFUND then saw it and said all schools should do renovation, nobody should build, which was good.  

We spent a lot more time on our international capabilities, and also for industry. It was how do we make our students better ready for the industry? So we brought in the industry to co-create curriculum, we started with a CMAS, and our own 30% was to the industry or your end users, who must come in and add to whatever it is that you are doing here because there’s no point of training students for jobs, and the people out there don’t need what we are training you on. Those things take time, they sound very good on paper, but it’s very difficult, change is always difficult, even the people who say it, when you start the change process, it’s very uncomfortable, so you’re going to get lots of people fighting you about it, some will comply, others, you have to sort of move them, but we started to see the change, and then with our international collaborators, is how many of our students can you take, so that we can send more students, and you’ll see that a lot more students are going out and coming in. We’re also talking with the industry to streamline what we once did in silos. We now have an app that can tell you the industries within a radius of the students to choose from, so we’re using technology a lot more for a lot of these things. The unbundling of faculties, which has had a lot of issues, has now been resolved.  It is nice to say in words, but it’s much more difficult to do in human terms. 

You will see that we’re also working on beautifying the campus. One thing I do find is that in an academic area, people need to sit around.  You’ll see some places where students can sit and talk. We’re just trying to do those spaces. We have a beautification committee that’s going around to work on those spaces. You’ll see new buildings; you have the UBA building that’s coming up and will be finished and commissioned by January. We also got them to finish the UBA park. These things are intentional because you cannot have a university with no green spaces or places where people can congregate.  Earlier on, we did the extension to the library for a more reading room. We are also working with somebody now who’s upgrading some of the computers, and new computers will come in. 

We’re linking our scholarship with what the country needs, so we’re very focused now on engineering because no country can develop without engineers, and our engineering needs to improve. 

The other thing we’re doing is research. In terms of research, we’ve created a fund for young lecturers, so that they can get early funding for research, but they must be mentored by somebody abroad and somebody here. The idea is to improve their capability.  We’ve also been talking with the industry to give us their problems, so that even student projects would be linked to problems. The idea that nobody wants our research is because we’ve done it the wrong way. We sit here, decide what you want to do, and then hope to sell it. No, the other way is better. What are the problems? Let’s research the solution. What else, they’re quite a lot actually, buildings, processes, then we’re digitising the whole campus, which has started, and when I say digitising, all our processes are going online.

One of the challenges we’ve had has been transcripts. So, in the last one year, the records department has been doing a manual reorganisation of all student files and broadsheets. They brought out everything; they’ve been working every weekend for a year now, and we’ve had to build new shelves, and they have reorganised everything by year and programme. They have brought out everything and arranged it. They should be done by March. Part of the digitisation is also the human resource department that’s been digitised, but everything is going to be digitised; that’s one, two, there’s the University of Akoka campus, which will be connected to Idi-Arabab by cable. It’ll also be connected to radiography. We’re also renovating the buildings in radiography and the auditorium, and we’re building new hostels there and also in Idi-Araba. We are also repairing some of the hostels in Idi-Araba 

There have been repeated concerns from students regarding delayed communication from the university, especially around key academic activities such as resumption dates and hostel allocations. What accounts for this delay, and are there measures in place to improve timely communication moving forward? 

First of all, every student has an academic calendar that outlines when they’re supposed to resume. So whether we remind you or not, the calendar is there. We do that every year, but this year, we had a slight challenge. Just before the resumption was to start, NELFund called us. Not just us. Everybody. And we had to change the way we did the funding. Now, what does that mean? The university takes what you pay on the portal. Usually it just goes to the university central. All of you pay fees at the faculty and department level. And NELFund said that because they are funding some students, they want everything on the portal. Now, that has two challenges. It means the ordinary students who are not on NELFund will now have to pay more upfront than before. So, what we then did was we got all departments and faculties to sit down. How much do you charge so that it can go onto the portal? Now, for it to go onto the portal, it’s a computer programme. It meant somebody had to rewrite our computer programme close to resumption. They thought they had done it. But whenever you write a new computer programme, glitches can occur.

And it is only when people start to use it that you’d see that. Because it’s tested in a small group.

But when the pressure hit, all sorts of things started to show up. With hindsight, we didn’t anticipate it. If we had, we should have said something earlier. But one of the things that we realised, and that I can say, we recognised that we should have said something earlier. But we also did not appreciate how much delay. We thought we would make it because they said they had finished it. 

The second thing that happened was that admissions for undergrads were supposed to end at a certain time. And we had targeted that. Then, JAMB increased the delay. All this was close to our resumption date. What we’re trying to do is get back to a normal academic calendar. So you can have long vacations. The value of long vacations, which many of you have no idea about, is that it’s when you can travel abroad and do a two-month course. Or people can come here for summer school. And we can run some courses that are not normal university courses, but with international partners who will come. So we’ve achieved that, actually. So those two things just threw us off kilter. We found that people could not register. So we were working tirelessly around the clock to make sure that the portal worked. Those two things really affected our resumption.

Maybe we could have done the communication better. I think it caught us slightly off guard. Now, the issue of hostels, we have never had enough bedspaces. That’s why. No university in the world, except when you’ve just started, can house all its students. Even in my time, all students could get hostels on campus. It’s not possible. Our job is not hostel giving. Hostels are to help. But this year has been particularly more severe. And I think it’s because transportation costs have become a major issue. So everybody is coming in. Now, a hostel solution cannot happen overnight. It’s a long-term plan. And we’ve been planning. And we have started building. But it’s not going to happen overnight. And we can never have 35,000 spaces. We don’t have that kind of land. And we don’t have that kind of capability.

The public hostels we have on campus are not enough. The amount you guys pay cannot maintain them at all.  

Gbajabiamila was built for us. But by the time we were taking it over, certain things had to be redone. By the time we got it, we had to redo the boreholes. We bought a transformer, did the electricity and that came with a cost.  So when you look at what they charge, the difference is not that they’re necessarily overcharging. Nigeria is tough, and Nigeria is expensive. But that we are so undercharging, which also now comes to why we have an illegal market. When you have such a disparity, crooks will come, and unfortunately, most of the crooks are students. And there are two ways to do that. You chase the crooks, or you increase the prices, so that the disparity is not so much. So any student we catch selling bed space will be thrown out. Whether you’ve paid or not, we’ll throw you out, and we will blacklist you. No more accommodation on campus. We’re also going to do another thing, which we’re still working on, so that even those who bought it illegally will be thrown out.  Yes, we allowed squatting last year, but that was for a very short period. The whole period was three weeks. That’s not the norm. And I’ll tell you why we don’t like squatting. One, the persistent overcrowding is a health hazard. Two, the pressure on facilities. Toilets are meant for so many people. Five times, six are using it. Three, the possibility of crime. We don’t know who is living there. So sometimes, people who are not even university students might be there. We’ve been working, the unfortunate thing, and it’s not just students, with human beings, is that when you’re trying to stop it, those who are benefiting from a bad system will be making noise. And they will not say it’s because they’re benefiting. They’ll just be complaining. And people will think that there’s a problem. We’ll probably be adding another 7,500 bed spaces. Presently, we have about 10,599 bed spaces. 8,211 are public. The female bed spaces are 5,123. And male bed spaces are 3,088. For the private, we have 1,711. Female, 1,140. And male, 571 bed spaces. Then we have the postgraduate posters, 677, that are mixed gender. And we have many coming up. Some have already started building. There are 210 bed spaces going to CMUL, being built by TETFUND. One is giving us 2,088 bed spaces. Another one is giving us 2,220 bed spaces. Those have started. We have one giving us 750. They’ve started. One will start soon, 1,368 bed spaces. And then another one, which is the government and TETFUND, with 1,200 bed spaces. That’s going to be close to Honours Hostel, opposite the Women’s Society. We’re also renovating and increasing bed spaces for Honours Hostel. So that will start probably in the middle of this year. So where other universities can build easily, ours is times five the cost for the same bed spaces. So we have that. Everything is piled because we’re near water. So it’s very expensive. We’ve been trying to do PPP hostels since 2013, 2014. We’ve only just been able to do it. They would come, then they won’t find funding because it’s expensive to build here. And let me also mention that people may complain, yes, but Gbajabiamila was built for us, and somebody has to manage it; otherwise, everything will break down. And what we’ve realised is that we cannot manage these hostels. And if you want it in good condition, the amount of money that goes into maintaining hostels is beyond the 80,000 that people pay. So it’s easy to sit down somewhere and criticise until you are asked to come and do it. You have to find the money to do it. We don’t have that funding. Because the ones we’re doing, we’re subsidising. We can’t subsidise all these hostels. We can’t. It’s not possible. If we run it and we ask you to pay what it takes to do it, you can’t. So we have to get people to run it. We’re not changing the ones we’re running. But I do not see how those costs will not increase with time. Because we cannot run them at a loss. We cannot use money from other areas to run hostels. I say it. People don’t like to hear it. But truly, we’re not duty-bound to give accommodation. It is not a requisite part of university education. It’s a nice part. But it’s not a mandatory part. But in Lagos, because of the situation, one can understand. But we can never, ever have enough bed spaces for everybody. It’s not possible. That’s not our job. Can we find better ways of allocation? We could. But even the ones that we’re giving, the students that get it, sell it. So you sit down here, and you wonder, why are we doing it? Because really, I think it’s that you need to call out these students who do it because they stop other people who need it from getting it cheap. That’s not the university’s fault. We can only try to block it. But wherever there is criminality, because it is criminal, they will find a way. You can stop it at great cost, because it always costs to find out who did it. And then the students who bought it are not going to tell you. We’re not saying that they are not compliant. There are some staff members, as I said, some potters. Somebody should report them. But you see, if you don’t report, there’s no way the vice-chancellor will know who is collecting money. Because I’m not part of that transaction.  

And we changed the balloting system a bit, too. Why? Because people were hacking it. And then for one person, there’d be 50 people trying to ballot, and they shut down the system. So you want to ballot, you call your friends in America, and you tell them to be balloting for the same person. And shut it down. So what we did was register. Then the computer will do a randomisation. 

You’ll see there are still some empty spaces because we haven’t finished with freshers. Some of them have challenges. But we will. By the fall of registration, all of them will be allocated.

In our last interview, Ma, you said that the report on the formation of the student union body has been submitted, and a leadership academy was being put together to train ULSU  leaders. It’s been one year now, but ULSU is not yet a reality. What is the current state of things, ma? 

It’s been done. And then there’s an academy that is being worked on, which will train students in leadership. The situation report is that the ULSU thing has been finalised. It’s gone through all the places, and everybody has approved it. So it’s gone to DSA. I’m actually waiting for the plan to kick-start it. So I’m sure January-ish we should have it. Then secondly, once they’ve gone through that, there’s going to be a leadership training for that. The student experience centre is coming up near the amphitheatre. There’s a building. It’s for the student’s unit. It’s wrapped around the amphitheatre so that from the amphitheatre, you can get into the building to be covered over so that you can still have that amphitheatre, but the building will wrap it. I think it’s going to be ready in 2026 for the SUG to start to use it. 

Ma, the Lagoon front seems to have lost its glory. Are there plans to renovate and remodel it? 

There’s quite a lot. I think we will see that in this session. We actually got students of the Faculty of Architecture to give us a design. One of the things that we want to ensure is that the Lagoon front remains somewhere that everybody can go and have a relaxed, serene moment. After you’ve read, you go and sit in front of the water. You might decide to do a painting, even if you’re an engineer; you must come. Just feel good. We want it to be designed. We had designs from the students, but one of the things that we found was that no one design was the one we wanted. That’s one. Two, we still want the Lagoon front to have lots of green. A lot of those designs were overbuilt so that we lost the green. We don’t want it overdesigned. We want it to have serenity. We want it to be a free space. We have a lot of people who are talking to us about what they can do in the Lagoon front and bring in some fun and things. Fine. We don’t mind that, but we want the area to remain serene.

We didn’t prioritise it because we wanted it to be done well and not in a hurry, but we did not totally take our eyes off it. It’s one of the things that will be done this year for sure. Quite a number of people are also interested in working with us to design it.

For students who are currently unable to afford the tuition fees, is the University considering an extension of the course registration deadline to allow sufficient time for NELFUND disbursement, given the approaching closure of the course registration deadline? 

Let me say this. We’re working with NELFund to synchronise. The university cannot continue to extend things. What a lot of students who are waiting for the fund do is to pay, and we repay them when the NELfund comes. Because the university has to run. We cannot keep opening portals. You may not appreciate all the things it disrupts back end. Because we use it to plan. For those who applied for NELFund but paid before it arrived, we refunded them all. Just so that I give it very clearly, at this present time, we’re not thinking of extending registration. It has not come before us. When we get to that, we will then make a decision based on all the parameters.