Founding President of the Nigerian University of Technology and Management, Dr Babs Omotowa, tells EMMANUEL OJO how the institution plans to create a world-class educational platform that will compete with top-ranking universities in the world and the challenges facing tertiary education in Nigeria
What is the vision behind the Nigerian University of Technology and Management?
There are two main reasons behind the founding of this university. One is that, across the world, when you look at the developed countries, there was a period before their development. You will find out that those countries focused on ensuring quality education for a lot of their citizens, whether in the United States or Europe. If you look at Nigeria and if you go back to the 1960s, when the quality of education in Nigeria was very high, you will discover that in the 1970s, the quality of development in Nigeria, the quality of the civil service and the quality of the people across the nation was a lot higher. We noticed that the quality of education in Nigeria has gone down over the years and you can see that along the lines of deterioration in the economy and the development of the nation. So, it was key that we look at building quality tertiary education in Nigeria as an ingredient to the development of the nation.
The second part is that as we look at the development of the universities in Nigeria and the poor quality, it’s obvious that the youth are not prepared for the future. Many graduates of Nigerian universities still have to undergo two years of training by their employers when they get employed, which shows that the output of the university is not what the industry desires. We are also very keen to develop a strong industry related to university whereby we will be preparing youths for the future and the industry.
The first idea for the NUTM was in 2006 during a leadership programme but it was not until 2019 that it was registered as a not-for-profit with the Corporate Affairs Commission. Our first set of students came on campus in 2020, during the Covid-19 period and we got our licence in 2023. So, our journey, we would say began in 2006 when we first got the idea but we didn’t start. We started in 2019 and from then onward, we have been moving steadily.
How do you explain to the public that it is a non-profit organisation when it is not a tuition-free institution?
It is not-for-profit because nobody is a share-holder benefitting anything from it but workers have to be paid. We can’t say it is not-for-profit and our faculty will be not-for-profit. Workers have to be paid and have to be paid the right wages. We need to buy up-to-date equipment which is not cheap either. So, not-for-profit means that nobody is getting a profit share out of it but it doesn’t mean that the workers will not be paid
In what other ways has the standard of tertiary education in Nigeria dropped and how would you assess the system?
The evidence is that most graduates still have to be retrained before they can be redeployed in an organisation and I think part of that goes to many organisations. In many universities, the teaching method has been about memorisation and regurgitation which doesn’t prepare the student for the practical, critical thinking that they have to do in the industry. Also, the curricula of many of the universities are all historical curricula, which again are not relevant for today’s world. As the world has changed and is changing tremendously, being able to get the right people, with the right skills and the right mindset remains very critical.
How does NUTM intend to achieve international standards to make Nigerian graduates globally competitive?
So, there are various stages of growth of a university. There are early stages and then you get into more mature stages. In the early stages of university, a few things are very important. First, to build a world-class university, you need access to world-class faculty and for us, that has been achieved by having faculties from Ivy League universities across all the universities as our faculty. So, more than 80 per cent of our faculty comes from Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Oxford. They are adjunct faculties and some of them do it as visiting faculties, some of them do it online as well. So, having access to world-class faculty is a very important part.
The second part is the curriculum. How do you ensure that the curriculum is relevant for industry and the future? For us, we have ensured that our teaching methods are experiential; they are not memorisation and regurgitation, they are more practical, hands-on, and experiential learning but we also ensure four things for students that come to our university. First is that they are exposed to technology, whether it is artificial intelligence or machine learning; we ensure that our students have access to the latest technology. Second, we expose them to leadership programmes because we want to expose them to innovative leaders, leaders who can lead successfully in the new age. We also expose them to entrepreneurship, which means that any student who comes into the university, will be part of a venture that they start and these are part of the problems of the society that they are trying to solve and they can then choose to go forward and continue with those ventures or to go and work. The fourth thing is the acquisition of skills in solving problems, and critical thinking, skills that are very important to be successful in life.
Is that why the university made technology and management its major areas of focus?
Experts would say that all companies in the future will be technologically driven. You can argue that living itself is becoming a technology life, so, anyone who is preparing for the future and is not tech-savvy will struggle a lot, either in work or in life. So, I think technology is very important for living. We are focusing on that because it becomes very important for the future. We are also developing innovative leaders for the future and that’s where management comes in. All institutions, public and private, have to be led by people. So, having quality, innovative leaders will be important in the future. We are not going to be everything to everybody; we are very clear on our focus area which is technology.
You have also noted that many youths are not prepared for the future, what needs have you identified that you would like to meet with this initiative?
So, I already spoke about technology, which is very important. The other aspect I would like to talk about is entrepreneurship. There will be fewer and fewer jobs in the future and that’s why there is a need for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who will be able to solve societal problems. In a country like Nigeria, we have a societal problem and if we have developed youths to solve them, it will be very good but it also means that they can create jobs for themselves. For example, half of the students who have graduated from our initial pilot programme have continued with the business ventures they started when they were here at the university. Between the time last year, they started those ventures, they have already raised $2m and have created hundreds of jobs instead of looking for jobs. They are not just creating jobs, they are solving societal problems that would have been left unsolved, if we had not trained them in those areas.
How can a curriculum that is constantly industry-relevant be adopted?
One of our approaches is that we have what we call industry councils. We have industry experts for the university that sit on industry councils, who are chief executives officers of industry and what they do with us is that we sit like twice a year during which we discuss the curriculum of the university and the programmes we want to start and we want them to affirm that those are regular programmes for industry and we also share with them the curriculum and they help to review it and identify things that are relevant or that we haven’t captured that they want to see in graduates.
So, this establishment of the council is the one that helps us to identify that our curriculum is very relevant to the industry and we also have special areas like technology. We have a technology council that comprises CEOs of technology companies which again helps us to look at our courses and help guide us to see that they remain relevant in the curriculum to teach.
What other partnerships are you creating to achieve the global brand you want, apart from your partnership with the Ivy League universities?
We currently have signed partnership agreements with three leading universities in the world. We have signed an agreement with Oxford University in the United Kingdom, with Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the United States and we have our signed partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology in India. These universities allow us to partner in various areas and we are running a joint programme in some of them. With the WPI in the US, we are running a master’s programme in Business Analytics from next year and for others, we can bring executive education to industry and leadership development in businesses in Nigeria. This partnership also allows us to do faculty exchange.
Why do you think Nigerians will find NUTM more appealing than what foreign universities in Europe and the US offer?
I think you can look at it from different perspectives. I think from the students, if you can access a world-class education from your country, I think it allows one to put into context what has been learned. Going to the US or UK to study, most of the context that will be learned will be within those countries. I think it is important to also understand the context of one’s country because the reality of working in a place like Nigeria is different from working in Europe. I think it gives that advantage.
Also, I think it gives the advantage of being able to get back home with minimal cost and not suffer from unfriendly weather in some of those countries. So, these are some of the advantages for the students.
For the parents, I think they don’t have to spend all the money to send their children abroad as Nigerians spend billions to send their children abroad, which covers not only the flight and accommodation cost but also the high cost of fees that are significantly higher in those places and the exchange rates are also not making it easy for parents. So, I think parents will be able to get that same quality of education at a far lesser cost here in Nigeria and it’s a big advantage, which will help more Nigerians have access to quality education and it will also drive development in the country. In a few years, it will be students who are not admitted at the NUTM that will go to Stanford and other universities. This is not new, as it was the case in the 1960s. It was people who didn’t gain admission to universities in Nigeria that travelled abroad and it is now time we reversed the case.
What are your aspirations and projections in the next five to 10 years?
We are currently on a temporary campus and in another five years, I expect us to be on our permanent campus which will be situated on Abeokuta-Sagamu Road. On our current campus, we are going to have 500 students. In five years, we are expected to have grown to a 5,000-student campus.
We are currently just starting our undergraduate programme with three competing courses, which are Cyber Security, Computer Science and Information Technology. In five years, I expect us to have 12 programmes running, nine undergraduate programmes and three master’s programmes should be running very well. So, these are some of the programmes we see in five years. In 10 years, I expect us to have our PhD students in our university and I expect that our research centres will be already active. In terms of our brand recognition, people will be rushing to come to the NUTM and it’s those who didn’t get the admission that will apply to Harvard, Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
You noted that the school was just about to begin its undergraduate programmes. What programmes did the 144 graduates take?
We started with a pilot postgraduate certificate programme. It was not a degree programme. We started that to allow us to pilot our differentiators in terms of getting world-class faculties and it was only when we had piloted and were satisfied with what we piloted that we applied for a licence and got our licence approved in May 2023, which allowed us to run undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes. So, those programmes we ran were certificate programmes but the quality is tremendous and the alumni group is one of the most sought-after in the country today.
How affordable is NUTM and are there grants available for indigent students?
Of course, quality education is not cheap because having world-class faculty doesn’t come cheap. However, we set our fees based on the market. We didn’t set it based on our cost because the cost of world-class faculty is not going to be the same as faculties that are not world-class. We only stated our fees based on the market rate, meaning that anyone who comes to our university gets at least 60 per cent as a scholarship because the real cost is much more than the average market cost; so, they (students) get at least 60 per cent already but we have great partners that have supported us over the years. For example, one of the scholarships that we gave last year was to one of the abducted Chibok girls, identified with the first name, Mary. Through this scholarship scheme, she was able to attend a whole programme without having to pay a dime and today, she is already making an impact.
I will say that everywhere in developed countries, the way tertiary education is being funded is not by parents bringing out the money and that’s why we think that it’s not affordable. If you go to the United States or the United Kingdom where school fees are about $50,000, parents in the United States cannot afford that as well but the two things I think are different and that we need to do more here in Nigeria is that first, there is a students’ loan scheme in those countries, so, in the United States and the United Kingdom, students take a loan to go to school and they are confident that they will get a job after graduation.
