Professor Abel Olajide Olorunnisola is the Vice Chancellor of Dominion University. In this interview by MODUPE GEORGE, he shares his contributions to knowledge on renewable energy technology discoveries, the growth of the institution, as well as other topical issues in Nigreia’s education sector. Excerpts…
You are no doubt passionate about renewable energy technology and having worked in that area of study for over 30 years, tell us about your new discoveries?
I belong to the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR), where we are looking at how to promote the use of bamboo for charcoal production instead of wood. Rattan is a cane known as Pankere on this side of the world. Pankere is used for furniture and Bamboo too can be used virtually for anything you can use a wood for, including for energy. An example of such is charcoal.
Oftentimes, people cut down woods to make charcoal and they cause deforestation, whereas if they use bamboo, they will get the same quality of charcoal. Bamboo on its own will grow back when you cut it down, and it will mature within the space of three years unlike wood that will take at least seven years. This is one of the areas that I have been assisting on the international fora to deal with the issue of renewable energy. Also, I have done some researches on biogas. This has to do with how we can use biogas for cooking and electricity. Biogas is a simple technology; it’s about any waste material apart from wood, which will not break down easily. It could be poultry waste or cow dung. This tells that if you add some water to any of these waste, put it in a container and seal it up for about a month or days, biogas will be generated, which can be used for cooking or electricity. Biogas can be generated from our soak-away at home, if you can connect a pipe to the soak-away, you can use the gas to cook. This has already been done in Kenya, there are lots of deliberate public toilet facilities that were created for people to defecate. After some time, micro organisms will break down the excreta and it will generate biogas. Biogas is odorless and it is just like the normal cooking gas. It is not a new technology, but it is just that people don’t know much about it, especially in Nigeria, where we are backward.
I have also been involved in briquetting. Briquetting is about compacting saw dust or any other waste material into a solid form and you can then burn them as fuel instead of firewood. Apart from saw dust, groundnut or coconut husks are also good examples. You can break them into small particles and either compress with a machine if you are going to be using them in a furnace or enclosed area or you add a little binder to bind them up, which can be your pap, or cassava starch and then start to cook. Even as we speak, briquetting is a major industry in the US. It is used for barbeque in particular. Also in Thailand, where they produce a lot of rice, they use the rice husk for briquetting. There are quite a number of renewable energies out there.
When you talk about electricity, solar energy is a critical one that we are not tapping into in Nigeria. See how hot the sun is, that is light when it’s about 6.30pm. With that, you can have about six hours of light, all you need is to put your solar panels out there to harvest the sunlight to produce electricity. China, Kenya and many other countries are tapping into the use of sunlight to generate power. Some of them even have what you call Solar Farms. In fact, the Chinese have gone so far that some of their roads are paved with solar panels; while they drive on them, yet they tap light from them.
How do you think the Nigerian Government can also tap into this innovation to solve power issues in the country?
A lot of Nigerians are already maximizing solar to generate light, but the problem with Nigeria is that everybody is doing it on their own; they are not connected to the national grid. This is the area the government needs to work upon, to ensure everyone is connected to the grid. So, that when one is generating excess power, the rest goes to where it is needed. What we are doing now is off grid production. This is what other nations have done. If we had done this, all these national grid collapses that we are talking about would have been minimised.
How do you intend to make all these scholarly renewable technology inventions to be of national benefits to both the town and the gown?
When I had my inaugural lecture in UI in 2013, I said that what they do in other countries in professional programmes such as agriculture, engineering and the likes is to appoint some people as extension workers. In Nigeria today, we only have agriculture extension workers. However, in Engineering there are supposed to be people who would go out there to see what the challenges are, come back to the laboratory, solve the problem and then take the findings back to the community. In fact, most lecturers are supposed to be engaged in teaching, research and administration, which is called community service, but nobody, is creating time for extension. Extension involves you producing small pamphlets and hand booklets; teaching people on how to do this and that. It also involves going out there to meet the people and bringing them in to see what you have done. The nature of our work as academics doesn’t allow that, even the promotion process doesn’t recognise that. Nobody will promote you just because you are producing pamphlets to tell people how to build houses with sawdust reinforced concrete. We need to change the mode of employment of people into engineering programmes in Nigeria. We need to engage some people as research and extension professors¸ not just teaching and research professors, which is what we have all over the places. There are many things that have been developed in Nigeria that are wasting away; all across our universities and polytechnics simply because there are no provision for extension. Though it’s not everybody that can do it, some people must be engaged to do it.
Now as an administrator who has a university at its disposal where you can practicalise some of these things, how do you intend to implement some of these things in Dominion University?
The NUC regulates what goes on in every Nigerian university. There are stipulated rules that we must follow and these things that I have mentioned are not there. Unless people are rewarded for such efforts, nobody wants to waste their time on something that will not earn him or her a promotion. I think Nigerian universities are over regulated and I’m choosing my words carefully. I am not saying they should not be regulated at all, but they are over regulated. When you over regulate, you leave no room for initiatives. So, if there are no such rooms that these are the things to be considered for promotion, perhaps, I will be considering what I’ve just told you as a VC, but if I do, I will be told it’s against the promotion guidelines, which is more or less universal in Nigeria. UI had started Agriculture as a course since 1948, what impact have we had on agriculture around here. This is simply because we are not doing enough on extension.
There is no Nigerian university that has an extension professor in its Engineering Ddepartments; all the innovations are just lying there on the shelves. Most times, they just die there. Many innovations have been dying, it’s painful, but that is what we do. Quite a lot of resources are wasted in Nigeria, simply because we are not managing our resources well; even there is mismanagement of our human resources. There is no technical problem we have in Nigeria today, that we don’t have a solution for.
How has it been charting the course of the five-year-old Dominion University?
It has been an interesting and challenging experience, trying to work in a university that is just growing and about to take-off. We are five years old going to six. You can imagine the type of challenges you will have with a toddler trying to walk and then run. That is what it is with a blossoming university. However, God has been good; so far so good, He has helped us in numbers of ways. I trust that He would continue to help us. In terms of achievements, as at October, 2023 we had just two faculties; Management and Social-Sciences; Computing and Applied Sciences. Today, there are three; we have added the Faculty of Allied Health Sciences which has three programmes in Bachelors of Nursing Sciences, Public Health and Medical Laboratory Science. Also, in the same year, we graduated a total of 96 as our first set of students and in November 2024, we graduated 148, at our second convocation ceremony, meaning that we are approaching having 250 graduates that have been produced already in this university within the last five years. Also, in the last five years, over 1,000 students have matriculated in this university.
Our academic staff have also increased, in the last two years about three of our lecturers have obtained PhDs, as another became a chartered accountant, which is a plus for us. Our first set of students have completed their National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme, as the last sets are about to be mobilised. Also, we had our first international conference in April, 2024, where we had people join us from Ghana and Egypt. It was organised by CISCO System, Icn., an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. That was the first time the conference was being held in Oyo State. We were the first university in Oyo State to host the CISCO’s annual West African English-speaking conference, which was held in all kinds of places. In fact, we got an award for a job well done. Of course our student population has also increased.
Global relevance of courses is key to choosing the best private universities nowadays for further studies, what are the rules guiding your choice of programmes in DU?
We have three faculties now, take for instance our Faculty of Arts, we have courses like accounting, business admin, economics, mass communication, criminology, and security studies. These are globally relevant programmes. In our Faculty of Computing and Applied Sciences, we have computer science, cyber security, software engineering, biotechnology, informatics, microbiology, industrial chemistry and biochemistry. These are all very relevant internationally-accepted courses, especially computer science and in particular cyber security, which is one of the latest programmes today.
The same applied to our third faculties. There is none of our programmes that is a pushover. In fact, all our courses are all accredited except nursing that we just started in September, 2024. The reason is that it is not due yet. However, the NUC had been here for resource verification. They were satisfied with what they saw and they gave us the go ahead to run the course.
Lack of funds to carry out serious academic research worthy of producing competitive and world-class delivery has always been the drawback in private universities, how are you taking up the challenge in your institution?
The beauty of regular accreditation by the NUC is to check your resources as an institution, whether what you have is adequate to prepare the students for the world of work. In this DU, we buy all the equipment; we don’t borrow or hire from anywhere. We have very wonderful equipment in our laboratories in this university; they are comparable to what you find in foreign laboratories. We have invested heavily into procurement of equipment and we are also lucky that light is very regular here, alongside standby generators that run as alternatives. So, our staff cannot complain of not having equipment to work with. Do we have all that we need? No! There is no university that has it all, but if you have up to 80-90 percent of what you need, you are good to go.
However, it is true that funding is a limiting factor to conducting research in Nigerian universities. This is one area where the government has discriminated against private institutions, believing that TETFund is only meant for public universities. I believe TETFund may choose not to build structures for private universities, but it should be able to support research and other areas. There is nowhere in the world where the government does not support research. We talk about Harvard and Yale among other foreign private universities that are doing well, yet they are being supported by the government.
Have you won any international grants yet as an institution?
Yes, we have won international grants. We had an agreement with the oldest university in Greece, for exchange programmes. On account of that, two of our students were in Greece in 2023 for one semester and three months, ditto two members of staff. As we speak, another set of two students are preparing to go in March and the staff that will go with them too. The students are spending the whole of the second semester there. Quite a number of the staff have also won awards, as one is currently in Poland on full scholarship for her PhD and another one is in South Africa on Post-Doc., While one is back from the US after nine months, another was sponsored for PhD in Kenya, but she is going back to Rwanda, another is almost out to South Africa for having won a Post-Doc. As young as we are quite a number of our staff and students are having international exposure, which is what makes us a university? So, we are not parochial.
