By joshua 
FUOUE to chart new course for sustained growth – Prof Ogunwole
Professor Joshua Olalekan Ogunwole, a distinguished soil scientist, erudite scholar and foremost educationiist, was recently inaugurated as the new Vice-Chancellor (VC) of Federal University, Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE), taking over from Professor Sunday Abayomi Fasina.
With over 30 years of experience in teaching, research, and academic administration, acquired in different universities, Professor Ogunwole emerged as FUOYE new VC via a totally transparent, competitive and merit-driven process superintended by the Pro-Chancellor/Chairman Governing Council of the university, Distinguished Senator Victor Ndoma-Egba, SAN.
A former VC of Bowen University, born on July 23, 1967, is the fifth substantive VC of FUOYE. Until his appointment as FUOYE helmsman, he was Deputy Vice Chancellor, DVC, (Strategic Partnerships, Research, Innovation, and Linkages) at the university, and he was believed to have championed research collaborations and innovation-driven initiatives.
Ogunwole, a Council Member of the Nigeria Institute of Soil Science (NISS) is a Fellow of the African Scientific Institute (ASI) and the Soil Science Society of Nigeria (SSSN), and recipient of international fellowships such as Fulbright (USA), TWAS (India/Sri Lanka), and Alexander von Humboldt (Germany).
As Bowen VC, he was said to have offered dynamic and purposeful leadership that significantly transformed the university, spearheaded major infrastructure projects, enhanced staff and student welfare, delivering a remarkable financial turnaround that meaningfully improved the institution’s Internally Generated Revenue (IGR).
In this media chat few days before his inauguration, Professor Ogunwole dwelled on his vision for FUOYE, the 15-year-old university
Excerpts:
Congratulations on your appointment as the new Vice Chancellor (VC) of Federal University, Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE). FUOYE is an institution that you have been part of. Significant progress was made by Professor Abayomi Sunday Fasina, the outgoing VC. As you prepare to take over from him, what is your vision for the university moving forward?
You see, the outgoing Vice Chancellor (Professor Abayomi Sunday Fasina) had grown the university tremendously. The university had experienced a vertical growth. And normally if you plant maize and it grows so tall. If you don’t take time, a small wind can blow it down. So, my own plan is to strengthen the base as we go on so that no storm, no wind can easily bring it down. I give you an example. The university has grown from 20,000 students when Fasina came in, to 60,000 within five years. Now, what that means is that our carrying capacity is just about 20 to 25 thousand students.
So, if we keep growing like that we can be blown out. Therefore, what we now need is actually to do everything to strengthen our carrying capacity. That is what I mean by strengthening the base. Improving lecture theatres, looking at how we can digitally teach and reviewing our course delivery system. Those are the things we will do to be able to sustain that growth. And then we will be growing a little bit more slowly than the way we had grown before. That is it! But the university will be technologically driven. That is one thing that FUOYE will be known for in the next five years by the grace of God.
To what extent do you think that the role you are taking up fits well into your resume?
Well, you know I have been Vice Chancellor of a private university, Bowen University. Unlike here we go look for money to pay salaries. We look for money to do research. We look for money to push innovation. We must look for money to do anything. Nobody puts anything on your table. At least, here, the Federal Government pays salaries. So, we have been in the corporate world of the university before. Except in the area of dealing with unions, running a public university may not be as challenging as a private university, particularly in terms of finances.
As you prepare to come in as FUOYE Vice Chancellor, how do you intend to build a strong team that will ensure effective governance in the university?
All along what I do, I spend a lot on training. In the next few months we will be talking about chain management training, top management training. We will bring people to talk and then review. When you tool and retool, the tendency is that you will have more compliance within your chain. If Jesus can have one betrayal, you will know that you can’t have it all. But you will have more compliance with the chain.
Having been in the system, what are the challenges you anticipate and how do you intend to tackle them?
Well, some of us know that we’ve been in the news over the past one or two years for the very wrong things and so on. We want to change that culture. So, one of the things we will want to do is actually to change culture. And let me say that FUOYE is at what you’ll call an inflection point. At inflection, the point where you have grown this much, if you continue growing this way, you will begin to have a negative backlash. So, we have gotten to a point of inflection now. Every corporate organisation, every person must get to that level in the course of their life. At that point you must change some of the things you are doing. So, we notice that FUOYE is now at an inflection point.
At an inflection point there are three things you must do to move on. The culture that takes you to inflection you must change it. That is what I was talking about. And when we talk about the culture, it is about changing the mindset of the people. You change the way the people approach things and see things as well. Then, you must change your product. Our product is our students, our graduates. And that is why I was talking about our course delivery system or whatever, you must change it, if you must get out from inflection.
And then you must change your business model. We have run a faculty-based system which is a centralised system. Now, we must think about a decentralised system to make the university more agile. Reason being that, if you have twenty thousand students, it may be easy for every department, every faculty waiting for the VC to come so that he approves everything and so on. But when you are growing big and you still want to run a centralized system, you will have a problem. Problem of delay will be there. For instance, you write a letter, it takes a long time before it comes back. You want to get money, it takes time. So, we must anticipate we will be growing from 60 thousand now. Therefore, if we want to remain an agile university, a responsive university, and we want to save cost, then we must decentralise. Our business model must move away from a centralised system now to a decentralised system. Those are the three basic things we need to do, if we must get FUOYE running again with a 60 thousand student population.
Is it safe to say therefore that what you are coming with is more of a practical business solution model?
What we’ve done so far has actually helped us and brought us to this point. Now at this point, we must begin to emphasize high performance, or else we will be having challenges. One of the problems with organisations when they grow big is that if they still continue doing the same thing they are doing, you may not hear about them after some time. So, if you don’t want to fizzle out, then you must re-strategize. You must do some reforms. And then you must set new directions. Why do you think Coca-Cola survived over the past almost a century if not more. It’s because somebody is smart over time and keeps re-strategizing, repackaging and repositioning. So, any organisation that wants to remain in the limelight cannot go any other route except that route.
In specific terms, what opportunities do you see for FUOYE as you take up the mantle of leadership in the institution and how do you intend to harness them?
Already FUOYE is the fourth most subscribed university in Nigeria. We would want to improve on them. And then the opportunity for us is one, making most of our admission-based process to be digital. Meaning that you don’t need to come to FUOYE before you can do screening. We screen you from anywhere you are. When we want to do exams now for instance, if a student for one reason or the other cannot be physically on ground should be able to do his exams anywhere. Anywhere in the world, I will invigilate him or her. Now those are things, selling points now that the Gen Zs would love and could make us move from the fourth position.
FUOYE is an agrarian environment. We intend to capitalise strongly on that to be able to boost our IGR. In fact, we are working on that, within the next two years a FUOYE Agro-allied company will be registered with FUOYE having the largest shareholding. And then we go with the local government and the state government to push agro-allied production and tourism.
Another thing we are looking at is the nutraceuticals. For instance, the pharmaceuticals have paracetamol and so on. The nutraceuticals used food-based plants to make health relate products for treatments. Now, Nigerians are moving away from pharmaceuticals. And this is because over the times pharmaceuticals have become very expensive. And from the very beginning these were the things our forefathers were using. And people are seeing now with the advent of modern science that we could understand the science of these things. And so we could actually assess them and use them directly ourselves rather than waiting for China.
In other words, you are going to champion FUOYE to lead research into that?
We’ve already started something. The only thing is that we’ve not been able to put together equipment. And that is what I want to spend the first one and a half year to do. Even now as we are talking, 18 scholars that were trained have gotten to a point of producing one of these medications. It’s just equipment that is needed. Once we do that again, we are going to register a company for that purpose as well. So those are the kinds of things we want to do. We want to be able to encourage our students to innovate while they are in school. And as they are graduating, we help them with a start-up. We could facilitate start-up for them. And by so doing, we see that what they are planning is viable.