Wednesday, April 6, 2011

I aspire to be among the best – Professor Ker


Professor David Iyornongu Ker is one of the few academics who have been fortunate to serve as Vice Chancellor in more than one university. He’s also someone known for excellence wherever he goes. In this interview with Tahav Agerzua, he speaks about his vision for Veritas University where he assumed duties in December 2010, the uniqueness of the institution, challenges, his experiences as well as success strategy. Excerpts:
There are a few Vice Chancellors for whom lightening has struck twice. You are one of those few; it happened at the Benue State University, and now it’s happening at Veritas, how has this been possible?
By the grace of God I guess that if you’ve done the job well once the chances of your being asked to do it again the second time, are very high. So one is particularly privileged to be asked to run a university again after the first outing at the Benue State University. What it means is that my records must have attracted the attention of my employers because unlike the BSU job I didn’t actually apply for this one. My employers came to search me out. I consider it a very special privilege and I also feel some measure of fulfillment because it means that I must have done a good job in my first outing.
Why is your university called Veritas University and why did it take off in Obehie?
Veritas means truth. We’re in search of truth. This is a university owned by the Catholic Church, it’s owned by the Bishops Conference of Nigeria. The motto is search for truth. In addition to the things that are expected of a university worldwide we’re expected to show the light as people who search for and speak the truth. It is here in Obehie because Obehie is the take off site. When the National Universities Commission granted the license to the Catholic Bishops Conference to start a university they approved this site as a take-off site on the condition that after three years we would move to our permanent site in Bwari, Abuja. We’re here by approval of NUC but we also know that our stay here is temporary, we’ll soon move to the permanent site. In fact we’re expected to do our final year in Abuja.
What can we find at this temporary site in terms of students and staff population, as well as courses?
We have 260 students at the moment. We’re in the third year now and we have 260 students. We used to have an average of about 120 a year but if you recall we had unpleasant circumstances that have reduced the admission this year drastically to just 53 students. We have two colleges, the College of Natural and Applied Sciences and the College of Management Science, Arts and Theological Studies. These two colleges all together offer nine degree programs. The student population is small and also easy for us to manage. They’re receiving very special attention. I recall that I walked into one class one day and I saw this lady teaching just two students and that was the population of this class. I told those young women, I said aren’t you lucky? Where else will you get this type of very personal customized attention than in Veritas? We have a staff strength at the moment of a little over 20 academic staff of high caliber. Since I came in December I’ve attracted a Professor of Accounting to our Management Science College, I’ve attracted a Professor of Economics, and I’ve attracted an Associate Professor in Political Science. So we’re also very proud of the early academic staff that we’re recruiting.
What’s the vision of the founders of Veritas University and yours which you hope to pursue during your tenure?
Their vision is to create an institution that would have a Catholic tradition, a tradition based on the values of the search for truth, integrity, discipline; all these are part and parcel of what is expected of us. I’m determined to fulfill their vision. In the next five years it’s obvious that at the rate we’re going the Nigerian educational system will reckon with Veritas University. When I first came here I told them that I intend to place Veritas among the top ten universities in the country at the end of my tenure and I mean it very seriously. We have everything on the ground that takes to make that kind of thing possible. I can say without any fear of contradiction that in ICT for instance, we’re at the head of most institutions in this country now. All our students and staff can virtually, if you like, talk to each other e-wise and that is a great thing to an institution. At the moment we’re working on this temporary site. First and foremost, because we’ve just reached 300 hundred level we must expect a visit from NUC and my immediate plan now is to ensure that when the NUC visits us all the nine programs that are due for accreditation get full accreditation. That is my plan for now. When we literarily get this accreditation accomplished we’re going to move into the permanent site in Abuja and at the permanent site we have a lot of development potential. We want to engage with the community in which we’re located. We want to have massive agricultural linkages with what we do and what the community does. There’s a lot that is happening in that community that if we enter into intensive agriculture, livestock development, farming, whatever, we would have helped the Abuja community. So our College of Agriculture which would be opened as soon as we move there will definitely aim at showcasing what we have to show that a new university worth its name has arrived in the town. But there are so many other colleges that are in the offing in addition to agriculture; of course there is also Veterinary Medicine, but these are things that will happen in the second phase. In this phase we want to ensure full accreditation for all the basic science courses and the humanities programs that we’ve started. As soon as we get there we’ll go full steam.
What have you found to be the similarities and differences between running a state-owned public university and a privately-owned Catholic one?
The one that comes to mind immediately as one who has been in this system for a long time is the issue of numbers. It’s much easier to control the numbers in a private institution. First and foremost, whereas in a public institution you go out literarily begging the NUC to increase your carrying capacity, if NUC says 3, 160 for instance, BSU sometimes ends up with about 5, 000 and yet there are still people waiting. Here our carrying capacity is 500 per session, mind you, we’ve not be able to fill that yet. The pressure that a Vice Chancellor in a public university experiences during admissions is minimized. Other things such as funding are similar in the sense that you can never really get enough money. The Catholic Bishops Conference too has done a good deal of work to ensure that the funds they require to get this thing going are made available. But what is available to them may not be quite the same as what comes from the federation account into the purse of the federal government and states. So obviously there is that gap. But I must say that for me as a management leader, so to speak, I find out that it’s easier for me to do this work than to do the one that was in Makurdi. This is because the demands as I said are much less. If you run a state university for instance, because it’s in your home town so to speak, you seem to be connected with one person or the other so it’s very difficult to say no. And they tend to also come as qualified students. The decision to decide to take 2, 100 and throw away about 18, 000 is not a funny one. So I think that I feel a bit more relieved now that I don’t have the kind of pressure I used to have when I was the Vice Chancellor of the Benue State University.  Even if it’s just the burden of admissions’ requests alone, I think I’m a happier person.
One of the marked differences is in the regime of fees. Can you compare or justify the kind of fees paid at the Benue State University for instance, and the Veritas University?
 Well education is a service, but over time it has become obvious to various governments that education is not something that government can do alone. When you now give opportunity for private people and bodies to run a university it must have a way of sustaining itself so you must charge economic fees. You must charge fees that at least will enable you to take care of some of the operational costs of the university that is why the fees are much higher than there are in the public system. Because in the public system of course the government picks the bill for salaries, picks the bill for capital development, picks the bill for almost everything. It hardly even goes to the institution asking for what you have done with your internally generated revenue. Here, the employers, our proprietors expect us to be able to generate sufficient funds not just from fees and other charges alone, but to be able to have a university that can sustain itself. Now you were talking about vision not too long ago that is also my own vision.  By the time I leave here, I don’t want a situation where each time a quarter is about to start I have to go cap in hand back to the Bishops for funding. We should be able to explore ways of getting the kind of funds we need to run this institution without going back to the proprietor. I think that is also part of my vision, and it’s not easy but you have to keep looking for innovative ways of making funds. If for instance, we’re leading the way in ICT there must be a way we can generate funds from what we are able to give to people.
As it is now, it seems you are not running any course in ICT; you’re just using it. Do you have any plans to run a course so that you can deploy ICT too as a revenue generation tool?
Yes, definitely, computer science/mathematics is on the cards. It’s just that we don’t really have the manpower and indeed even the students to start now, especially mathematics. But definitely in the forth coming session or let’s say in the next two sessions we will be able to run courses in computer science.
 How much does a student pay per session here including accommodation and everything?
Three hundred and fifty thousand naira (N350, 000).
Do you have any plans to increase this?
Not immediately, but we can’t rule it out. You know when we move to Abuja we are going to be more heavily involved in capital intensive things. We may need to make the parents bear some of the cost of these expenses. But I’m not going to pronounce on that, after all come to think of it, it’s not even within my authority to talk of increasing fees.
What are the special challenges you face at this temporary site at the moment?
Security; as you know the incidences that occurred between July and December last year were very, very threatening even to the life of this institution. My predecessor was kidnapped, our Bursar was kidnapped, three students were kidnapped, and even the registrar was actually attacked and to some extent whisked away for quite some time. So that is our major worry in this temporary site. Otherwise as you can see it’s a serene environment, this campus; it’s one of the most beautiful campuses that you can think of certainly in this country. It’s neat, it’s serene, and it’s manageable because it’s not too big. So we are okay even for infrastructure, classrooms and so on but we have a problem of security. Because we have a problem of security, we also have a problem of accommodation. For students we insist that all students should be in the hostel but we don’t have staff quarters and because the security situation is not good enough some people are simply just scared. They wouldn’t want to think of residence in a place where they may be whisked away at night or even during the day. So that is really our main challenge here now, security.
Is this why you plan to move to Abuja within the year?
No, no, no. As I explained earlier, the license to stay in Obehie expires this year. NUC allowed us to run this university on this take-off site for three years and we began in 2008 so we are due to leave. By the license that we were given, the conditions were that we must take off at our permanent site in our fourth year. So it’s not because of security that we are going, it’s because we are compelled by the laws binding the establishment of universities to stay where the license was approved for us which is Abuja.
 You talk about this security situation and yet you are so confident going about your duties here, aren’t you scared that one day it might be your turn?
Well, I’m human but because I’m human I also know that it’s God that made me and I know that because He made me, He has a destiny for me and if He so wishes that that’s the way my life should go, I don’t think I have much to do about it. But I came here with the fear of God in mind. I came here as a courageous citizen of this country who owes a responsibility to people who have confidence in what I can do. I owe them a duty. I was trained by the Catholic Church right from my primary school, secondary school, and higher school. If the Bishops of the Catholic Church come to me and say David, come and run a university for us it doesn’t seem to me to sound right to tell them that well I don’t think that security situation is right for me. So I accepted the challenge because I believe that it is something that God wants me to do. But there is nothing I can do if my destiny is to fall in the hands of criminals, I pray not, and I’m sure that the Bishops, yourself and everybody prays for me so that I can do this job to the best of my ability as I always try to do, and walk away in one piece.      
 At the Benue State University, we remember that you called the bluff of cultists and other criminals yet nothing happened to you. Does your confidence stem from this belief?
First and foremost, yes. God is always the one that leads me and I don’t even want to boast about it. I know that if it wasn’t for Him, the almighty, there’s no way with bare hands I would have been able to confront young men who were carrying guns. But he allowed me to do it and I did it very well and come to think of it even the ones I expelled still treat me with a lot of respect. So I have faith in the God that made me and I think that the courage he gave me to run that institution for a little over five years is the same courage that is allowing me to work here.
There must be something that your university offers that we can’t find anywhere; what uniqueness do you intend to bring to your university that one can’t find anywhere else?
Every institution has a tradition and even though we say we talk about excellence, we talk about integrity, we talk about truth, we talk about a lot of these things; it is how you go about trying to accomplish these ideas that makes you different. And I believe that working for an institution that is 2000 plus years old, I already have a tradition, a strong tradition behind me, the Catholic tradition. That is the tradition that brands itself in my consciousness and that tradition is what I believe has made me who I am. And it is my job to ensure that I make sure I translate this long 2000 year old tradition into reality so that what I’m doing should be different from what other people are doing. Mind you a university is a university in the sense that the ideals of teaching, research and community service are all there. What is it about you that is going to make you stand out? And that is the belief in the people that I’m working for that I’m talking about. I know they expect me to be better than others. If there are other faith based universities in Nigeria, they want me to be number one. If there are faith based universities and public universities, they want me also to be number one because that church, the Catholic Church, is number one and anything we try our hands at we try to excel. For instance this is one university where we have 24-hour electricity supply. How did we do it? We have used solar energy very effectively, so we use solar, we use NEPA, we use our generator. So throughout the day, 24 hours if you come to this campus you won’t have a problem charging your instruments, you won’t have a problem accessing any information because we are constantly linked to power. Isn’t that unique? Because I don’t think that any institution that you know, where I came from, sometimes they could say maybe they’ve stolen the battery of the generator or something but here even if the battery has been stolen there is a backup. So I’m already finding ways of showing people that things can be done differently. But more essentially, it’s the human capital that develops an institution and I’m in the business of recruiting the best brains I can for this university. I believe that when I do that the thing they will be able to produce will shine and I’ve already started doing that. There are not many professors of accounting in our country, in three months I’ve poached one and brought here already. So I think there are several ways as we begin to settle down at the permanent site and begin to exercise point by point the vision that we have for this great Catholic institution, we would have arrived where we want to be.
Can you talk about your library?
Yes. It’s a very sophisticated e-library and I’m sure if you had a discussion with the librarian, he would have told you much more but we are proud of it. We don’t have enough volumes in terms of the hard copies of books, but we can literally get at anything we want electronically, that is our joy.
Some think that a Catholic university would be similar to a seminary, is it so here?
It is not. A seminary as you know is an institution whose sole purpose is the vocation of training of priests and the religious. In the end they do get degrees but the degree is not the main product because they are being trained as missionaries. Here we are running a proper comprehensive universal university in the sense that we are doing what all universities do. We’re offering degree programs in as many disciplines as we can. Let me just give you a simple example. If it was a seminary it had to be headed by a priest but the proprietors recognized that this is not a seminary so they did me the favor even though I’m not a priest to run the university. There is a lot of difference between a university and a seminary.
I spoke with a student and surprisingly the student told me that they have to take permission to go off campus and to come back and I found it strange that a student from a university would take permission to go out and come in. Do you operate like this?
We do.
Why?
First of all for security, even in spite of that three of them were still kidnapped. So it’s obviously for the sake of discipline and for security. We want to be able to account for each of our students, their parents have put them in our care in this environment and we should not just fold our hands and wait until there’s a disaster so we insist that if they are going out, at least the dean of students should give them approval.
Do you have any specification for the ages of students you admit here or is it an all comers affair?
Well, it’s the same law that binds admissions in Nigeria, you need to be 18, I think now 16 since they changed it from the old system. No we don’t have any specific age except the one that is approved by law.
I took a stroll round your campus and I didn’t see sports facilities or if they existed they were not conspicuous for me to notice. Why is that so?
Partly because of the temporal nature of where we are. You know it’s a temporary site and we are a bit wary of certain measures of development. But what we have done is to create playing fields and courts because as they say all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So we have minimal facilities, we have also engaged some coaches on part time basis to be able to assist students and staff to exercise themselves.
You talked about your electricity here, how do you get your water?
Well, it’s the same method, we pump water through the power sources we have. Again with water too, we have 24 hour water supply from our wells or boreholes.
Let’s look at your person. In 1968, you were one of the four who excelled in their West African School Certificate examination in your school, Mt. St. Michael’s Aliade; 1974 you were one of the best in your graduating class at the Ahmadu Bello University such that you were offered so many employment opportunities; in 2004 you came tops as the best Vice Chancellor of state-owned universities in the country. With this streak of coming first, do you have a strategy for always achieving this?
I usually tell myself, it can’t be a strategy. What I always tell people is that I’m a very lucky guy. I think I’m lucky but I have a very quiet competitive style. I always want to be there where the best are. Right from my secondary school days, if you are brighter than me, you must be my friend. I want to be like you and if possible do better than you so I usually ended up with them, so to speak, and in the university too. I have no time for gossip I must belong to where the best are going and fortunately I always believe that’s where I belong. I also turn to be the best among them. But my mind is always competing. I don’t compete in any aggressive negative way. If you are better than me then I will respect you. I also try to respect people for what they do.  I respect you as a well grounded journalist. I can’t take that from you. I think that gives me the peace of mind to also excel in what I’m doing. I don’t begrudge anybody of their own attainments; rather I keep looking for an opportunity to emulate them. What I’ve always done is to check, in school for instance, in St. Michaels, we were very lucky. As soon as you got to school, that was then 1964; the results of people who graduated immediately before we came were displayed on the notice board in this glass board. And so I remember that as a kid you go there and say this guy Jacob Tilley Gyado, he had five distinctions, Ambrose Feese, he had five you know… We looked at these things and I kept saying why can’t I get those five distinctions myself? What is it that makes it possible for these people to get these five distinctions? So there must be some role modeling and then you look at school magazines, it’s amazing that now my boss, so to speak, the Arch Bishop of Abuja he’s the chairman of the governing council, he also went to the same school as I did and he was the best ever. And we used to hear about his stories, how he had distinction in everything; how he was an all rounder and then we read some of his stuff in school magazines and as kids we wanted to either get close to him or beat him. We talked about it among ourselves. So if you mentioned these four that if you like, were the best in the graduating class of 1968, Professor Uvah for instance, Dr. Salawu who is a consultant at the National Hospital, and Chris Ikyaator who resigned recently as a Director in the state ministry. We always talked among ourselves and said we have to try and do better than these people, we have to. So these our models can’t we do better than them? So you must have something to look forward to, that’s my view. When I became a VC too everywhere they were going I always wanted to go, meetings, seminars, whatever and I compared notes. I tell them what I’m doing, they tell me what they are doing and if I noticed that somebody is doing something which is unique and is producing results I do it and vice versa. I remember very well the VC of Ebonyi State University then, he said where did you get money to build those structures, the Association of Local Governments of Nigeria, ALGON, funds. I said I pleaded with the chairmen and they gave me money. He sent people again to come and have a look; he went back to his government and got ALGON to give him money to build projects. He actually invited me to come for the commissioning. So you learn from your peers, you learn from, as long as you don’t look at it as something that is making you green with envy, you learn a lot and I think that’s why I’ve come out, to summarize it, I’m lucky. I think God has been really kind to me. As I keep telling people if I tell you the school where I started my primary school you will be surprised, RCM Agagbe. Up till now fifty years plus on, there is no road to that place. So if somebody can come from that kind of background and be such a well known scholar then, it can’t be his own work; it must be God that is doing it. He’s giving you special favor, and you have taken advantage of the favors He has given you to make you rise from if you like that hinterland to where you have become well known around the world.
 There are many professions but you have chosen academics and are stuck with it; I remember you’ve refused many invitations to go into politics, how did you become an academic and why have you stuck with it?  
 When I was in my undergraduate days, I just simply loved my teachers, I couldn’t imagine any better profession in the world than to teach in a university and you will be surprised sometimes because I’ve always been a book worm. I like books so when these teachers noticed this aspect in me they also were encouraging me. One or two of my lecturers, the Nigerian ones, they used to come and visit me in the hostel with one excuse or the other just to see how I was doing. When I checked their cars from the windows, I saw so many books. How can people like books so much? Is there somebody that likes books more than me? So they encouraged me, in the end of course I also did well in my first degree so I decided that I will go to the University of Ibadan to teach. A lot of my classmates who had finished from ABU who had the same results with me ended up teaching back in ABU but I felt that UI was older, they had much more experienced people there than ABU. So I took my chance as a youth corper. I applied and I was invited for interview. I was appointed assistant lecturer in English Literature, mind you my mates were appointed graduate assistants, that’s why I say I’m always favored by God. And when I got to UI again I had no choice but to love this job because these people that I met I couldn’t believe that people could be so dedicated to their calling. I can mention names, the first Head of Department that I had was actually S.H.O Tomori. He was a Professor of English as a second language actually based in adult education in Ibadan; this man loved his job. He had graduated in 1954 which was a clear 20 years away from me. And he was always so free with people, he was so elegant, he was so knowledgeable. And I said if this man graduated 20 years ago and is still very vibrant, it means this is a job I can do all my life. It means that there is a future in this career, I also want to be a Professor, I want to be so famous like Tomori, and I want to be famous like MJC Echeruo. I want to be famous like all these people. I think they saw it in me because I was so small, so young, when I joined UI I was just 24. But they saw that commitment and enthusiasm and they encouraged me. Before I knew it my HOD recommended me to win a Commonwealth Scholarship, a fellowship to study in Sussex. So I came back, when I came back that was when the temptation you were talking about started. My uncle was working under Aper Aku. He is Kpamor J T Orkar. He was not yet commissioner, he had won an election into the Benue State House of Assembly, but he was very close to Aku so Aku wanted to bring him into his cabinet. He told Aku that he wouldn’t want to leave the House where he had been elected by his people to come and take an executive post, but he can find somebody for Aku, he has a younger nephew, bright, teaching in Ibadan, he will go and talk to him. So he came, he actually spent a night with me in Ibadan trying to persuade me to come over to Makurdi so he would introduce me to the then Governor, the first executive Governor of Benue State. I told him uncle, I want to do my PhD and he respected it. He didn’t argue with me again. He left and actually took that job as commissioner for works under Aper Aku. So that was a major, and I think inspired, decision, inspired only by God. I refused to be tempted by that kind of offer. So I continued to teach in UI. I later moved to ABU. But the story I had told about my wanting to do my PhD went round so nobody bothered me anymore. When I finished my PhD a few of those concerned people then came and said you said PhD now you’ve gotten a PhD now come. I said no, I have to be a Professor and I’ve stuck to it, I love it. Up till now I have no regrets and having put in 37 years, I always tell people I love doing this thing. Why do I have to leave it and do something else? You know how much my people have tried to get me out of this; sometimes it makes me feel even ungracious to say no to people who love you. But I think these decisions must be taken because I want to make a fundamental point which I have made several times. In other countries, politics is also a very powerful weapon. It is the weapon that manages peoples’ lives so to speak but politicians by their acts do allow other professions their due recognition. Consequently, the whole system is engineered towards one purpose. How do we get it to be better, how do we develop the human capacity to make it achieve more? In our context, it seems to politicians that every budding professional is a potential politician and that’s why we suffer. Every professional is just doing that profession because the political opportunity has not yet come, I don’t agree, I don’t agree. And I think if nothing else I have tried to show people that it is possible to steer the course, believe in it, and carry it to the best of your ability.