Nigeria’s universities over-unionised, FUOYE VC laments

The Vice-Chancellor of Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Prof. Kayode Shoremekun has lamented that Nigerian universities have been over unionised, and the development is affecting the effective discharge of duties by management of various universities in the country.

The VC, said the difficulty of the country to meet up with the huge demands of universities’ staff

was because the income being generated is a mismatch of the expenditure, attributed poor financial resources of the nation as the cause of what he described as militant staff unionism on campuses.

He made the remarks on Monday while addressing newsmen during the 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 combined Convocation Ceremony of the institution which held at the VC’s conference hall of the university.

The VC said: “Nigerian universities are over unionised and this is distracting the administrations of the institutions. This is because Nigeria is poor and our income is struggling to meet up with huge expenditure: There is a mismatch between income and expenditure. The macro environment needs to change to favour the system and only then will militant unionism that results in tigerized

demands will end.”

Speaking about the Convocation ceremony, he said FUOYE is graduating a total of 1000 students from five faculties of Agriculture, Arts, Engineering, Science and Social Sciences.” .

On the graduating students academic performance he added that: “…a total of 35 First Class degrees in both sessions, 366 Second Class Upper, 472 Second Class lower, 119 in Third Class degrees and 8 in Pass.

The VC also spoke about his achievements in the past three years which he said included  completion of over 40 infrastructural projects on the twin campuses of Oye and Ikole of the school, increasing academic programmes from 29 to 60 with full NUC accreditation, increasing number of students from 512 to 17,000 and building a conducive learning environment among others.

Prof. Shoremekun said FUOYE will also soon begin Distance Learning programmes in a collaborative effort with the Commonwealth of Learning, (COL) Canada.

He reeled out several awards and grants received by students and staff of the university who have excelled in national and international competitions and research endeavours.

On his achievements, he said : ” We have constructed makeshift, functional lecture rooms. We provided effective internet facilities for students and completed a well furnished and occupied University Library. We also completed several well furnished and occupied laboratories in Faculties of Science, Agriculture and Engineering as well as improved greatly on the security architecture of the University which has helped to reduce drastically anti-social tendencies such as cultism, drug abuse etc.”

 The VC spoke further on staff welfare and career advancement: “we have equally recorded admirable strides in these areas as we have 19 of our academic staffs having benefitted from TETfund Ph.D interventions, with five (5) taking care of foreign academic programmes and 14 academic programmes locally.

” We also have another 139 staff members benefitting from TETfund Conference attendance for career advancement. 110 of the beneficiaries of this scheme are academic staffs while 29 are non-academic staffs.

He spoke on other achievements which included the commencement of Post-Graduate School, connecting the twin campuses to national grid and creating FUOYE’s independent ICT portal, starting a culture of inaugural lectures, and the honorary Awards to three humanists, Imam Abubakar Abdullahi, Chief Guy Garguilo, and  Bishop Femi Felix Ajakaiye, the  Catholic Bishop of Ekiti in recognition of his exemplary service as a clergyman, activist, philanthropist and humanist.

On the choice of the honorary awardees, he said their choice was guided by integrity, patriotism, and selflessness.