Job creation: AE-FUNAI seeks collaboration

The Alex-Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike Ikwo (AE-FUNAI) Ebonyi, has sought the collaboration of the Songhai Centre, Port Novo, Benin Republic to create jobs.

Prof. Chinedum Nwajiuba, the Vice-Chancellor stated this on Tuesday during the public lecture series of the university, noting that such collaboration would make its students not to become job seekers.

Nwajiuba noted that the university aimed to send its students to Songhai for training with the centre providing technical support to achieve the desired aim.

“We hope to sign a binding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and most critically, to achieve a positive shift in the pervading attitude to work, life and living.

“This can be summarised as ‘miseducation’ of Nigerian youths, manifesting in ‘sweet without sweat’, benefits without responsibility, wealth without work and a general mentality of entitlement.

“We hope to establish a long term action-oriented relationship with the Songhai centre that supports our core mandate of teaching, research and community service,” he said.

The vice-chancellor said that the Directorate of entrepreneurship and employability of the university had been directed to make its teaching staff, identify and articulate entrepreneurship/business opportunities in each discipline.

“I believe that only the anatomy programme suggested one business opportunity available to its graduates who upon graduation will not need to carry about applications, for non-existent jobs.

“The Directorate of physical planning sees that all buildings in AE-FUNAI must harvest rainwater which shall be channelled for productive uses.

“We saw at the Songhai Centre, a model of water harvested and what we consider as wastewater here was collated and all put into productive use for fishing and all-year-round framing,” he said.

Prof. Godfrey Nzamujo, Guest Lecturer in the series noted that the university system since inception had been the privileged and effective space for addressing societal challenges.

“One will, however, think that the relevance of our university system presently will depend heavily on the level of its involvement and commitment to efforts and projects designed to address visible challenges.

“Unfortunately the present day academic culture has failed to restructure institutional operations to generate new competencies and conceptual frameworks to embrace these challenges in real time.

“The organisational framework called universities has not evolved significantly beyond configuration assumed in the late nineteenth century,” he said.

He suggested that to become relevant, the university system must be redesigned into adaptive knowledge enterprises that are committed to serving the society.

“This can be through spurring an effort to generate knowledge, innovations, ideas and cultures commensurate with the scale, scope and complexity of the challenges that confront Africa presently,” he said.

The theme of the lecture series is: ‘The African University of the future: A knowledgeable enterprise for articulating and incubating radical solutions to the formidable challenges on the continent.’