When Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah, the vice-chancellor of the University of Abuja, took over the leadership of the institution in 2019, he set up an agenda to make UniAbuja a global brand. Under his watch in the last four years, the university has embarked on different initiatives, which include a partnership with the Chinese government to introduce railway engineering as an academic programme.
The government established a dual mode also – so we had distance learning and at that time, it was on the verge of being closed, totally closed. In fact, there was a letter already from the National Universities Commission saying our distance learning was closed.It was at that time I took over as the vice-chancellor and many of you were here when I told you that our goal is to reposition the university to be a global institution that produces students to be global citizens.
Our staff are all over the world, mobilising for grants and bringing money. When we came, the very first year, the grants we could put together were just about N300 million. That is external grants. Last year, it was already more than N1 billion and that was a steady increment. It is incredible the kind of attention our university is getting not only in grants; some of our students now speak international languages. The university has made foreign language compulsory in addition to entrepreneurship. So, many of the students now speak languages beyond their own. We realised if you want somebody to get global citizenship, we expose them to other parts of the world.There are some programmes that we have introduced.
For the first time in Nigeria, we are actually having two heads of one department; one academic head and the other, industry head. I am very happy to tell you that this department is taking off as we promised and recruitment has been done. Railway engineering is even bigger because we are collaborating with the Chinese government. The president of China picked the University of Abuja for what we call the Leban workshop.