How Former Gov. Ahmed Starved KWASU of Fund, By Prof. Na Allah

The Vice-Chancellor, Kwara State University (KWASU), Malete, Professor AbdulRasheed Na’Allah, has on Monday, June 4, appealed to the new Kwara State Government to restore the subvention of the University which had been stopped for about five years.

Na’Allah made the call at the Press Briefing for the University’s 7th Convocation Ceremony where he also disclosed that KWASU would graduate a total of 1352 students; 25 first class, 592 second class upper, 533 second class lower, 46 third class, 151 Master’s students and five PhD students at the Convocation set to hold on June 8, 2019.

He said the Institution is the only public University in Nigeria that had not been receiving subvention from the government and this had not been an easy ride.

“You see, this is our fifth year now, not a kobo. Not a kobo towards salary, not a kobo towards overhead, not a kobo towards nothing’’, he stated.

He furthered that the goal of KWASU was to contribute immensely to ensuring that the nation achieved stability, greatness and rapid development, adding that KWASU was open to collaborate with other competent institutions towards achieving these.

According to him, other areas of collaboration the Institution had recently explored are waste management, biotechnology and biomass production and it is doing these with Japenese companies.

Highlighting the benefits of the collaboration, he said it would open up new horizons for the students and enable them to understand the diversity of the world.

“The world is not only occupied by Nigerians, university is universality. We want the whole world to be on our campus so that we can work together. We visited the embassy of Japan here and we have reached a very solid agreement that this University is going to be a partner to Japanese University. We signed an MOU with a Japanese University in Kyoto.’’

The Vice-Chancellor hinted that the University had recently through its Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, won N21,000,000 grant to design a drone to help the country fight pipe vandals.

“This year, in the Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, one of our professors won a grant of N21,000 000 to design drone to help Nigeria fight vandals. We are honoured that the nation is looking up to Kwara Sate University to design that,’’ he said.

Na’Allah further disclosed that the Institution would start a General Studies (GNS) in Japanese Language by the coming Academic Session through its Japanese Language and Culture Institute. This, he said, would help the students meet their foreign language requirement.

“Already as a University, we have foreign language requirement of every student. No student graduates from KWASU without meeting a foreign language requirement. Before now, it used to be French, Arabic, among others but now, we have added Japanese to it. We are now asking students to have that freedom to pick if they want Japanese Language.

“We recruited a Japanese from Japan who is also the Director, Japanese and Culture Institute. It is a new programme which will be offering Japanese Language as GNS starting from this coming academic year. The goal of this is to open up new horizon for our students, to let them know that the world is open to them.

“Imagine you speaking Japanese Language just through taking it as a GNS; that has already opened the door for you. It is already easy to go to Japan and interact with Japanese companies,’’ he concluded