12 Years of Remarkable Progress: How Crescent University qualifies as Nigeria’s answer to other universities’ problems, Tola Adeniyi, Nigerian journalism veteran, reminisces
By Kemi Kasumu, General Editor and Kehinde Bashir
Elucidating further on his choice of CUAB as lead example of a better thing that has happened to Nigeria in recent times, Chief Tola Adeniyi described the Judge Bola Ajibola-owned university as “a perfect reflection and image of its founder”. He added that Crescent University “may be the country’s answer to all the problems facing other Nigerian universities” as the university has never recorded a single day of strike or closure in the last 12 years and has not recorded a single case of cultism.
The Crescent University Abeokuta, Nigeria (CUAB) is on its 12th year running having been established in July and become operational for academic programmes in December 2005.
Before it clocked 10 when the university and its friends from round the world particularly in Nigeria celebrated in 2015, the institutional citadel of academic and moral excellence, whose pioneer Vice Chancellor was Professor Folal Lasisi, had achieved a great feat in virtually all the things that it set out to bequeath to Nigeria and the Nigerian people: production of graduates who will not only be sound in the academic but also excel in the moral and spiritual alertness which keep them away from all social evils and intents to commit same and helping Nigeria produce leaders who will take over its affairs and sustain the current anti-corruption effort and naturally assume the duty of a corruption-free and impunity-free Nigeria, politically, economically and socially, in the future.
By the time the university would hold its third convocation in 2013, leaders of states of Nigeria and abroad particularly Scotland, Saudi Arabia and parts of Europe had noticed the wave of progress the Crescent University Abeokuta, South West Nigeria was already making so that it had become a place that every parent and state governor wanted to train their children, locally in Nigeria without losing a single of touch of quality embedded in foreign universities, being that they began to see that a university of excellence now existed at home in Nigeria which would give their children or wards something equal in quality if not better than what they would have gone to do for them in foreign universities.
At Crescent University Abeokuta (CUAB), Nigeria, there is one advantage over what is obtainable abroad, despite the quality of being foreign university, and that is the fact of consciousness of the need to produce “not brilliant beast but academically and morally sound people who will take part in the restrategising, reconstruction and reallighment of Project Nigeria where corruption will be seen as truly practicably despicable thing to be kept off from and interest of the nation and love for development of the generality of its people will take the centre stage in the hearts of the new generation of leaders that the institution of higher learning, which CAUB represents, aims and has continuously moved on to achieve for Nigeria. This has shown in the successes some of the past graduates including Rofiat Alli and Adenike Gawat, who are both first class products of Crescent University Abeokuta have achieved in their post-graduate studies abroad.
Rafiat Alli is a first class B.Sc graduate of Accounting from Crescent University Abeokuta, home here in Nigeria (2013). She went to the United Kingdom (UK) to also stand on top of the game as she also emerged the best with a distinction in her set’s M.Sc in Forensic Accounting at Pretsmouth University, UK. Adenike Gawat had made her first class B.Sc Mass Communication in the same Crescent University and was helping a Nigerian bank build his ICT department by the time she had to proceed to Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland, also in UK, where she beat everybody to the academic work to clinch a distinction at M.Sc in Corporate Communication and Public Affairs in 2014.
Aside Alli and Gawat, before CUAB commenced its post-graduates studies, it happened on two consecutive academic years that it presented candidates to sit for entrance examination into post-graduate studies of the prestigious University of Lagos (UNILAG) and that the next candidate that passed the entrance examination at each sitting came only after the number of candidates presented by Crescent University Abeokuta had been exhausted in the successes that occurred.
The other area CUAB has distinguished itself from others is in the area where it not only monitors the post-school progresses of its graduates but it has also been inundated with series of feedback it is getting from further schools, offices and communities where those products have put their “academic and moral excellence” principle to practice after leaving school.
At home in the school, students of Mass Communication Department, under the headship of the Head of Department (HOD) Mass Communication, Dr. Kola Adesina, are already practicing both print and broadcasting journalism in their rights whereby they have got to their credit a periodic newspaper called Progress Report and a magazine called NewsMakers. Both have carry on with similar inscription on them which reads: “A students’ training publication in the Department of Mass Communication, Crescent University Abeokuta.”
All of these feats were the remarkable imprints, which once spurred the main actor and proprietor who, by Allah’s assistance, has made the efforts happen, Judge Bola Ajibola, SAN, KBE, LL.D, D.Litt, FCIA Arb, FIPDM, CFR, to say “Alhamdulillahi that my heart desire is made possible by Allah right in my life time.”
Need for enabling policies – VC CUAB Gbajabiamila
However, university business is a long term project that requires a lot of support and encouragement from government and foreign bodies interested in helping restore quality-based and high standard education in Nigeria. Private universities are particularly in need of these support as they are merely helping the Nigerian government with an intervention to get things right.
Per adventure, the cost of attaining university education through the private ones would not have been so high if the government had realized that it is its responsibility that those private investors are helping them fulfill, rather than seeing them as being in business. Investigations revealed that gestation period for university education business to commence profit making takes a long time hence, all along, even at 12 years on the match of academic and moral excellence, private universities in Nigeria, Crescent University Abeokuta inclusive, are still at the struggling stage and so need to be fully supported and encouraged by the government.
This could be the point he was trying to make when the Vice Chancellor of Crescent University Abeokuta, Professor Ibrahim Gbajabiamila, told The DEFENDER last week in Abeokuta that the Nigerian government should review its education policy and make it possible for private universities in the country to access Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND), arguing that the brilliant Nigerian surgeon in Texas, United States of America, who did remarkable work of removing a baby from its mother’s womb and returning it back and delivering the baby successfully, Dr. Olayinka Olutoye, told the Nigeria’s Acting President Yemi Osinbajo during his recent visit to Nigeria that all his education was attained in Nigeria and that he was as a matter of fact a graduate of the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State and himself a native of Ibadan, Oyo State Nigeria. According to Professor Gbajabiamila, Very highly appreciated and commended by the Nigerian Government for making Nigeria proud by their scientific and medical successes abroad, Olayinka said the only difference between practicing in Nigeria and abroad was that he had access to modern medical equipment abroad which gave him a hedge abroad over if he had stayed behind in Nigeria.
The CUAB Vice Chancellor, Gbajabiamila, therefore posited that Nigeria’s medical graduates could be retained to perform the wonders that people like Olayinka Olutoye have been performing abroad if private intervention in the education sector especially the university are encouraged with adequate funding and policies which make Ease of Doing Business possible.
Crescent University to the rescue – Tola Adeniyi
Reacting to the wonders of the CUAB, a father of journalism and former Managing Director of Daily Times, Araba Tola Adeniyi, said in his column in the Nigerian Tribune Newspaper which was republished by NewsMakers magazine titled, “Crescent University to the rescue” that Crescent University may the country’s answer to all the problems facing other Nigerian universities because of its focus on academic and character development.
In the Tribune publication, the columnist and veteran journalist, Tola Adeniyi, lamented the widespread decadence in the country’s education which is evident in the unenviable fact that Nigeria is home to 20 percent of the 57 million out-of-school children globally.
He said that “it is regrettable that the higher the enthusiasm of every parent is to give the best education to their children and wards, the lower their expectations are met in the kind of education institutions and facilities available and the low quality products churned out year-in year-out by such institutions.”
He also said that successive governments over the years had destroyed the secondary modern model instituted by the late sage, Chief Jeremaiah Obafemi Awolowo, to prepare children for skills acquisition.
“Progressively, we destroyed and abandoned the High School Certificate programme which, in those days, prepared students for the Cambridge Higher School Certificate Examination and the London University General Certifiate in Education (GCE) Advanced Level for direct entry to the universities, and worst of all we threw morality out of the window and allowed cultism and deviant culture to occupy centre stage in our schools and tertiary institutions.”
Chief Adeniyi traced the degeneration of Nigerian educational system to the military government of Olusegun Obasanjo which took over schools and colleges from private owners and ruined them.
He said, “It was the same story with universities hitherto owned by regional governments which the same headed Administration forcefully acquired and destroyed their enviable standards. The University of Ife was in 1975 ranked the world’s 12th best university architecturally by UNESCO.”
He also lamented the astronomical fees paid by Nigerian parents in the quest to procure quality education for their kids abroad and the attendant brain drain that follow as most of the students refuse to return home after graduation.
Tola Adeniyi emphasized the alarming nature of the quest for quality education abroad as Nigerians now throng to countries like Ghana and Benin Republic because of their steady academic calendars which makes students graduate on schedule.
The veteran journalist however expressed his delight over the mergence of Crescent University Abeokuta (CUA), as citadel of academic and moral excellence, as a panacea to the rot in the Nigerian tertiary education sector.
Elucidating further on his choice of CUAB as lead example of a better thing that has happened to Nigeria in recent times, Chief Adeniyi described the Judge Bola Ajibola-owned university as “a perfect reflection and image of its founder”.
He added that Crescent University “may be the country’s answer to all the problems facing other Nigerian universities” as the university has never recorded a single day of strike or closure in the last 12 years and has not recorded a single case of cultism.
He commended the family-like environment of the Crescent University Abeokuta which ensures that students are rarely homesick. He partly attribute this to the fact that the staff of Crescent University have vast experiences which they have used to give the university an international flavour.
*WATCH OUT for the thoughts (interview) of Vice Chancellor of Crescent University Abeokuta (CUAB), Professor Ibrahim Gbajabiamila, on moving Nigerian education system back to its lost glory. ONLY IN The DEFENDER.
