The Yobe State Governor’s donation of 100 computers to Bayero University Kano (BUK) is politically uncalled for, considering the poor institutional standards of his state, where millions of indigenous students that voted for the governor are battling a lack of various technologies in their state-owned institutions. The donations to a well-furnished and developed Bayero University Kano could never yield a sound result for the governor and the entire students of Yobe State.
However, while this may appear to be good news for Bayero University, it must be tempered by a thorough examination of Yobe State institutional standards and their pressing administrative, social, and academic considerations to resurrect active education in Yobe State higher education institutions.
Yobe State University is among the recently initiated universities in Nigeria and is currently experiencing low student enrollment. Their sources are weak due to a lack of advanced facilities for carrying out academic activities and insufficiently advanced technology to properly train their thousands of students. Meanwhile, Bayero University Kano (BUK) is one of the top-ranked and accredited universities by the federal government of Nigeria.
The university spends years running enough budgets and acquiring modern techniques with a large student enrollment every year. The university’s library is well advanced, and the federal government continues to meet its demand for achieving standard academic excellence in the country.
Bayero University Kano does not require computers to function because they have enough to run any programs and maintain reserves in other ways. There is something to ask the Yobe state governor.
Did he ever visit the Yobe State University library and witness how old it looks? Not just the library, the whole Yobe State University building is demanding a proper renovation from the lecture rooms to the library, rebuilding theater halls, roads, distributing solar-powered electricity and panels, sport coats, purchasing modern books for the library to enhance the students’ research, and other practical equipment for the medical and environmental science students to proficiently acquire knowledge inside the state university.
Besides the urgent calls for the governor’s attention on the rehabilitation of Yobe State University, there are similar institutions around the local government areas of Yobe that almost collapsed in infrastructure, while others have been struggling with academic materials for over decades without any state intervention.
An instance of such institutions is the College of Administration and Management Technology (CAMTECH), Potiskum, and the College of Health and Technology, Nguru, alongside others with poor infrastructure. Those institutions spent years under the state government, but neither the governor nor the ministry of education attended to them for regular check-ups to monitor what changed those institutional needs to keep existing.
Conclusively, it is not a bad idea to donate computers to other universities or limit the governor’s desire on where or who to donate something to; rather, it is a call of attention to share with the governor that institutions under his places of political primary responsibilities are structurally and academically collapsing to a great extent, and the key factor to saving them lies in the hand of Governor Mai Mala Buni.
Kasim Isa Muhammad, Department of Mass Communication, University of Maiduguri.
