The Vice Chancellor, Plateau State University, Professor Shedrack Best, speaks with some journalists on the security challenges confronting the university and how the management of the tertiary institution has managed to bring insecurity, as well as other issues, under control. ISAAC SHOBAYO was part of the interview session.
Plateau State University has been grappling with security challenges on different flanks for quite some time. What is the management doing to tackle the situation?
It has been a recurring decimal. Don’t forget, December last year was when we had this terrible, ugly incident where some people were killed in a series of coordinated attacks on Bokkos, Mangu, and Barikin Ladi local government areas of the state, and so the atmosphere was that there was apprehension among the staff and students. So we had to work to rebuild the confidence of everybody, and we’ve looked for how to improve security. We are working with DSS [State Security Service], with the police command in the state; we are also working with the STF. Even though we have challenges, it’s not as bad as it used to be. The campus is open and porous because there is no perimeter fence. [We received intervention] from TETFUND to fence the campus. If you go there now, you will see a lot of fencing activity going on. I believe by Christmas they would have covered that whole section, and the other contractor would work from where ASTC is. If you know the area, the ASTC Dairy Farm, that area is open. We are going to continue to follow up until the whole campus is covered up, and our intention is to also build observatory towers and plant CCTV cameras with night vision so that it will make the work of the police and our own internal security easier. The governor supported the university to hire more internal security personnel; so we are using them to check on the poachers. Unfortunately, on the northwestern side of the university, we have a lot of unpleasant neighbours, the herders, who believe that the university must be their grazing land. It is a battle and, honestly, I want to assure you that we are winning that battle, because I don’t believe that a university is a grazing land for anybody. Let them maintain their lane. Allow us to maintain our land. I have stationed patrol vehicles to pursue them out of anywhere within the areas of the university. They don’t add value, quite frankly. They terrorise, and they frighten and scare our students. So they are very destructive. And we have just stopped them from extending that destruction into the university. It is a huge struggle, but we are winning.
Some time back, academic activities were disrupted in the university; the academic and non-academic staff were on strike as a result of one issue or the other. How did you stabilise the system?
At the time I was appointed as the acting vice chancellor, the academic staff were on strike. So we had to reopen the university by meeting the agitations of the unions.
We got ASUU [Academic Staff Union of Universities] to be paid, only to discover that the other unions were not included in the discussion. The day that ASUU members started receiving their entitlements, I received a letter from SANU that they were going on strike. I said what happened, they said that they too were being owed money. So if you were owed money, where were you when the discussion was going on? And I blamed the management because the management did not bring it to the attention of the authority concerned. You are dealing with many unions and as a university, I know that if you don’t carry all the unions along, it is dead on arrival. So we had to go back and ensure that the other three unions: ASUU, NASU, and SANU, were paid. All their arrears were cleared. So it gave us an enabling environment. And that is why we had everybody’s cooperation. We ran through the first semester, then also resumed running through the second semester, and we began to clean up the university in all areas in a very aggressive manner.
The university is wearing a new look compared to the previous situation where there was no proper planning. How were you able to do this?
What they told me was that they used to wait for the harmattan, and then they would set fire to the grass. I said you put fire in a university? I said no, that is not acceptable.
So we acquired a tractor for the university, and all manner of grass mowing machines. If you go there now, you’ll see that it looks like a campus. It is good. I’m happy with what is there now and the classrooms where we also began to clear the surroundings so that it looks receptive. We did the same with the students hostels. It is more homely now.
Accommodation for both students and staff have been one of the challenges facing this citadel of learning. What is the report at the moment?
About 85 percent of staff and students live off campus because of insufficient hostel accommodation. We are looking for partnerships with people who will help us build hostels. We’ve started discussions with BUA Cement and Dangote, hoping that they will donate hostels to the university. Just last week, we took delivery of a new hostel for girls. It was a TETFUND project, and in the last three years, it had built two new hostels for girls, and we will continue to ask for more. A new hostel is at the foundation stage now, which is for boys, and when that is completed in the next six months, we will have more students on the campus. Most of the security challenges we have are from outside the campus. We’ve not had any episode right inside the campus except once when some of our unpleasant neighbours invaded the girls’ hostel and then also disrupted Theatre Arts students while they were having their rehearsals at the back of the Senate building. Other than that, most of the security challenges occurred outside the campus. You recall in April 2024, barely four weeks after I was here, we had a security breach. What went out in the media was largely different from what transpired because it looked like the university was attacked, but, as a matter of fact, the university was not under attack. What I met on the ground was a situation where students had developed a culture of not paying school fees, and they would be boasting about graduating without paying as a mark of how powerful they were. So when I came in, I told them it would not continue, that I’m not aware of any university in the world, any institution, where people pay fees when they feel like. All manner of things were happening, including people who went behind the scenes and tried to bribe university officials so that they would turn their eyes away from the fact that they didn’t have any status because they didn’t pay their tuition fees. So I stopped all that. Because I enforced it, those behind this cartel were unhappy. They were looking for how to protest. And I told them, even if they protested to the end of the earth, nothing was going to change. And as long as I’m there, nothing will change. Students must pay fees. If they’re indigent, we can create a framework that will support them, but it’s not by impunity that they would refuse to pay fees. Of course I realised there are indigent students, and I have proposed to my management team that we consider some scholarship schemes that would support such students. But a situation where students choose not to pay will not be tolerated.
On transportation, we have to deploy buses to move the staff and bring them back as our own support. But the logistics of running the transportation is quite difficult. We spend a lot on fuel; we spend a lot on vehicles in order to ensure that they report for work on time. And there are no staff quarters for them to live on campus as a young university. These are some of the teething problems of a growing university. We also have the challenge of water and electricity. Our source of power is NESCO. NESCO sometimes comes on and off; they are not able to energise the university twenty-four hours. We do resort to solar in order to power some of our boreholes and our street lights at night. And that is also helping us to stay afloat.
With the security challenges facing the institution, what is students’ enrollment like?
The student population has grown. We began with about 400 students when the university opened. Today we have 10,000 students above. By next year, when the two new faculties come on board, it will be far in excess of this number. So, strategically, we believe that this university will grow in the different areas that any university should grow.
We have approached the proprietor to build the roads and road network in the university. Because if we have road networks that are well lit, then the campus will come alive. It is a very beautiful and serene location; it is the cream of the plateau when you are in that place. And if you go there in the months of May, June, and July, you will see the hills and the undulating landscape; it is awesome and it defines the plateau for you. Therefore that [university] the environment is something that we must protect, nurture and cause to grow. This is why I have been keen on making sure that the university does not look like its neighbouring village. We cannot build a university in a village and then make it to resemble that village.
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