If our students look for jobs, they have wasted their time here —Provost, FCC

(c) TRIBUNE.........

Provost of Federal Cooperative College, Ibadan, Dr O.E Oyebade, says his college strives to produce self-employed and trail-blazing graduates, with greater emphasis on agricultural entrepreneurship. He urges the Federal Government to come to the aid of agricultural and allied institutions in term of infrastructure development.

You are part of the higher institutions in the country by your curriculum and your design, but unfortunately your institution and others agric training institutions have been excluded from the beneficiary list of the Tertiary Education Tax Fund (TETFUND). How does that affect your mandate?

It is rather unfortunate that by definition of tertiary institutions, the agro-training institutions and those related to that sector have been excluded from this TETFUND arrangement. This is a big shock to us in the sense that the TETFUND, formerly ETF, was able to transform the environment (training environment) because we have so many facilities that we were able to establish through the ETF funding. In fact, this building we are inside is a product of ETF funding. So, by that token, we found ourselves having to look elsewhere else for such funding to expand our programmes and enhance the learning environment to make it more conducive to the students. But we are short of fund for the project and programme expansion to increase our carrying capacity as to how many students we can handle at a time.  That has been highly affected. Right now, we are still praying because the main source of funding is with the ministry. That means unless our budget is increased, the funding to be coming from the ministry is increased, we just have to curtail our activities and probably just be sure that we are able to maintain our accreditation granted by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTC). So, we are making all efforts, looking for public-private partners in hostels so that we can accommodate more of our students on the college. Some private organisations are already discussing with us to establish hostels here. We will occupy the hostel, pay the owners for some years and after that, the property will be transferred to the college. It will be operated and transferred to the college, that is what we are working on, but if the funding from the ETF is not forthcoming, we are continually thinking of how to look inward and outward to see that we continue to survive. So, as for now, it has affected our activities. We wanted to input some other programmes, but we have to put such proposals on hold until we get the sufficient funding to put the facilities on ground, otherwise the NBTA may not approve the programmes.

What is the association of agricultural and allied institutions doing collectively to make your protest known to the government?   
With the way things work out in this country, we are somehow handicapped. We need to push a very noble idea through the National Assembly. It is the first body that we need to contact and we are doing that.  Also, we are seeking the assistance of the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development to help us push this through to the executive cabinet so that if the National Assembly is dilly-dallying, if there is a little pressure from the executive arm of government, it will listen to our cry.

Even the Ministry of Education, the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) know that the role we are playing is very important. In the last JAMB annual reading, of all disciplines, agric was the least patronised by student in this country in terms of applications and intake. They don’t want to go for agriculture; they prefer Medicine and Law. But if the government is aware of this and they are cutting off the agro-training institutions from TetFund, even though our admission is moderated by JAMB, our students are awarded National Diploma and Higher National diplomas just like the polytechnics, they go for NYSC, it will not augur well. So, I don’t see what definition of tertiary institutions will exclude them from all intent and purpose. I think they just want to give the dog a bad name in order to hang it.

So, in what ways is your college actually contributing to the agro-economy of the country?
You know cooperative societies are constituted by members who are also working in the agricultural sector of the economy. The agro-related societies go into production and whatever they produce, whether it is food or cash crops, they put these in the economy and this has impacts. If cooperative organisations buy cash crop like cocoa produce and others process it, then it is either sold locally or exported to other countries. So, our graduates they serve them in terms of management and setting up business that will be profitable. So when our graduates are employed by these societies who invariably are either farmers or some other producers in other sectors. We train our students and we impact in them the skills that are required in an entrepreneurship business that will be required by these societies. So our products are definitely helping the members of the societies to be able to sustain and make their agro-businesses viable and profitable. So, they contribute meaningfully to the economy of the country.

How will you describe your graduates based on quality and quantity of curriculum exposed to them, as required by the Ministry of Education and the National Board for Technical Education?
We have so many enterprises through which we impact entrepreneurship skills in our students and we have experts in various fields, even where we didn’t have experts, we have people from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture to teach them skills. For instance, we have poultry farms, sheep and goat rearing unit, dry season gardening and we also impact knowledge in maize and cassava production and processing. So, the necessary change which the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) is emphasising on is what we concentrate on here by impacting the skills in our students so that if they go into fishery, for instance, they know how to source and input and there are many businesses in sourcing input.  They know what it takes to do the actual production and processing to make every product more valuable in term of marketing.

Are you saying your college is involved actively in the agric transformation agenda?
Definitely, that is what we do here. We try to make sure that our students are into the transformation agenda. It is all about adding values and those values change from one commodity to the other and if our students are involved in these, then they are able to play a crucial role in the Agricultural Transformation Agenda.  So, when they go out and get employed by the societies and other organizations trying to produce agricultural commodities, they make notable impacts and help such organisations to produce good and quality commodities. What we do here is not just to demonstrate; we make the students here to participate and do it on their own. It is not a story, it is something that they must pass through and they know unless somebody is just trying to waste his/her time, you have already been equipped with knowledge and start-up kits, and there is no need looking for jobs outside. If any of our students looks for jobs, I think that person has wasted his/her time.

As the head of the institution and a role model to all the students, are you practicing any of these things as a personal venture?
I once had a poultry farm, but because I am getting more involved I stopped. I have to concentrate on what is happening here in the college now, I mean the training, but right now I am establishing a fishery farm using the fiber glass ponds that have just been introduced. I am doing that in my backyard and it can give me about 3,000 cat fishes at the end of every four months, because I have been using juveniles and not fingerlings and by the time you raise that for four months, you are already in the market. And what we do is that our students who offer to go into fishery, for instance, don’t have to sell fresh fish. We are also establishing smoking kilns. When you are not even into processing, you can loan it to people outside. 100 KGs of fish will earn the owner of the kiln N4,000 and people who know the value and the difference between smoked fish and fresh fish will  not want to give it out at fresh value.

I pity most of our youths that roam around the street, even those that are involved in accidents on daily basis riding okada.  It is not the best for them. In other countries, youths go into agriculture because that is where the money is, and in our country we spend a lot of money importing food into this country and we have very strong and agile young men and women who should go into agricultural production and make money. The money we are spending abroad should actually be retained at home. They have better opportunities to go into agriculture. And as for the government, the government is trying, particularly the Agricultural Transformation Agenda. The government is trying to encourage the youth. They organise youth programmes where our youths are encouraged to approach the ministry and see what the youths are already doing under this programme. There is one seminar that we ended just last week. A youth was invited from Ogun State. He is already into millions from fish production and he has employed so many other youths. So, if our youths are determined to make cool money and earn good living, agricultural enterprises are places where they should be.  They should invest their energy particularly and they can produce and I can assure them that no agricultural product can be produced in this country and be a waste.