In this interview, the Vice–Chancellor of the Lagos State University of Science and Technology, Ikorodu, Prof. Olumuyiwa Odusanya, tells GRACE EDEMA that curriculum review, lecturers’ industry experience, and an enabling environment will help produce graduates who will become job-creators
How should graduates be trained to come out to be job providers and not seekers? What training is necessary?
It starts with the curriculum and it continues with the teachers. A number of our teachers and lecturers don’t have industrial experience, so if all a man has to teach is banking and finance and he has never worked in the bank, how is he going to show the students beyond the theory and research how things are done in the bank? We have limitations because we often forget that the Ph.D. is not a teaching degree but a research degree. In many places for example, Ghana and East Africa, there’s a lot of interplay between working in the industry and in the university. When you have people like that, it’s easier to know what the industry wants, it’s also easy to know what skills we need to give those students we’re training. The training itself must give room for innovation, creativity, and experimentation, and be supported, that is how they (students) can become job creators. These are the three areas that will make our graduates become job creators and add more value rather than continuously applying for work.
You said lecturers don’t have industry experience because many of them immediately after their Master’s and Ph.D. go into lecturing, do explain more
Well, there is a wide gap between the practice field and academia and so even if the lecturers don’t have time to go into the industry, they can do work placements. For example, it is possible for people in Mass Communication who are teaching to have some placement or schemes to work with social media organisations, or online media places and be part of the process. This will enrich and broaden their perspective and you can bring that to the classroom. While they are doing these things, lecturers can take their students with them, those are the things we require. When they are on sabbatical, they go to the industry to see production processes and financial issues, and then bring that back to the class. In these ways, we can always enrich what we give our students and make them better prepared.
The House of Representative is trying to come up with a policy that medical students/graduates should work for five years in Nigeria before relocating to anywhere they want to, to reduce the brain drain issue. What is your take on this?
That has passed the second reading and everybody knows it created a very huge backlash for the medical community. For medicine, the rule is that we spend a year post-graduation for internship and you must be signed off. If you have not been signed, you can’t even go and do NYSC. There is nowhere in the world where you need five years before you can get full registration so it will solve no problem. Once you’ve come from an academic medical school, you can go to any country and do your 6th year. Those behind the idea are prescribing the wrong medicine for a problem, if it was for a patient, the patient will die. It will not work or solve any problem; it has been attacked and debated, in fact, even a high-ranking senator, who is also a doctor equally said this is not a solution, so the proposer of that bill should have done sufficient research to see what is happening. People are leaving Nigeria from all fields but it’s just that the health sector is prominent. It is not the solution to the problem of brain drain, there are more realistic solutions.
So, what are the solutions to brain drain?
Brain drain is a global phenomenon because people are required everywhere and there is an absolute shortfall of between 10 to 30 million health workers who move to where the grass is greener. The first thing to do in dealing with brain drain is to create an enabling environment for your workers in each country to retain them because in not retaining them, you’re producing manpower for others very cheaply. In creating an enabling environment in the country, I don’t mean just salary but let there be water, power, and security. This is not the first brain drain, it happened in the 90s and the government tried by creating special allowances for the health sector. The second thing is to pay attention to the lives, security, and welfare of the health workers and not just the doctors alone. The government should also provide opportunities for training and for them to have a meaningful contribution to improving the health of the people and not just when people are sick. These are the steps I believe can be taken to address the brain drain. Let there be up-to-date facilities. Brain drain remains a global phenomenon and will never stop but it can be reduced to the minimum if we value, care, and give adequate attention to our health workers.
There is this other issue, last year when the Ukraine-Russia war broke out. The MDCN told the students that came that they cannot award them certificates or cannot be allowed to practice there. But if they want to do that, they have to do one or more years in Nigeria. They claim they are schooled online so they have not completed learning. What is your opinion on this?
No one can do medicine online; do you want to have an online doctor who never went to medical school? No. The rule is that in every country there is a body that sets the standards to practice in that country. In Nigeria, it is the MDCN. They have a list of schools both internally and externally that they believe have minimum standards and rules, which is that if you are not in Nigeria, you must come and spend some time to learn how medicine is practised in Nigeria and take a qualifying exam, so they were not singled out, it is the standard practice and has been on for years. The challenge was that some of them did very poorly. With COVID-19, there was a bit of online schooling but after COVID-19, it was expanded back to full. Even during that time, there were some bits of continuous clinical practice in clinical education because medicine is bedside practice, it takes six years from entering the university at 100 level to become a doctor and after that, you still need one-year minimum to do an internship, so it is seven years of rigorous training.
Do you think all courses especially in science and engineering tech can achieve training with online learning?
What you need is blended training for all courses. Everything cannot be online. We still have virtual lapses but there is a place to see, and a place in science and engineering to do material testing to produce new particles. There is a place for online training but there’s a place for hands-on. We can’t replace the part of mentoring and the impartation of competencies. Online will work mainly for those courses that are philosophical and acquiring abstract knowledge but, in the places where you need practical applications, the physical is needed. Digital learning in engineering and science courses is adequate but not complete. You can have many cohorts, and many groups, but they will never replace face-to-face laboratory exposures.
Artificial learning is fast becoming used in society and it’s gaining more popularity. Being a technology school, what is LASUSTECH’s plan in ensuring they train students in AI?
AI is easy. I think the first thing any university must have is a robust e-learning platform, and we’re doing that. Artificial Intelligence is just one of the tools whereby you create things by using data that is available. Of course, it’s being misused but we will get to the point of strengthening AI, its part of the numerous modules available for e-learning. Artificial intelligence will come in to help people do a lot of things but will never replace human reasoning and their original work.
By May 29, we will be having a new government both at the federal and state levels. What is the advice for the incoming government?
In a capitalist economy, the government cannot be large but Nigerians want the government to be large and big. There’s a limit to government revenue. So, the government must focus on funding education, and universities too must also look for other revenues. The government is doing a lot through TETFUND and through direct funding. Lagos State is funding its own schools well and that should be sustained. Education remains the number one tool for developing any nation and so my advice to the government is to keep funding the school system through various means and methods and also demand accountability and to see that we are able to create spaces for our graduates to get jobs, and to get them to also produce. Fortunately for us in Lagos State, the Governor has gotten a second term and we expect the THEMES agenda now on the rise in Lagos would be better, well positioned and education will become the key pillar of this agenda.
What investment should the government make in the state and community health sector to attend to more Nigerians in rural areas?
The health sector can’t be dependent on the government. Local governments are supposed to look after primary health care centres, so it must start at the local government level. It is not a question of building more facilities, it is first to improve health knowledge, to tell people to take ownership of their health, and to also create conditions that will make health care accessible. Health is not produced in hospitals. Now, what the government must do is to make sure we have facilities, train people and employ them, but more must be put on the preventive and social aspects, like avoiding things that kill children, force-feeding, female genital mutilation, taboos, and empowering the people rather than just dealing with the facilities alone. There should be investment in health technologies. Nigeria is not producing vaccines. If we put a lot of investment into all these, health will improve without necessarily increasing facilities. Our people always look at structures first but no, its systems, people, equipment, and social improvements that bring health.
