By Oludamisi Ojo.
The Vice-Chancellor, Federal University, Oye Ekiti (FUOYE), Prof. Abayomi Fasina, is not comfortable with the alleged harassment being meted out to developers and those handling various federal government’s projects in the university by landowners.
According to him, the development had stalled completion of some of the government’s projects and driven away investors, who showed interests in building structures that could have shored up FUOYE’s facilities, but for the harassment being suffered in the hands of those he described as “Omo Onile”.
The VC also said that the university had secured full accreditation for the 48 courses being offered by the institution, saying this had built confidence and patronage for admission to the university.
At a press conference held at FUOYE on Tuesday marking the beginning of activities lined up for the one year of his appointment, Fasina urged the community leaders to warn those driving away contractors and developers under the facade of land ownership.
He said” Let me appeal to landowners to stop harassing contractors working with the federal government on this campus. Though the matter was being handled by the police, this should not continue because it is affecting development here on campus.
“Another menace was these local vigilante groups called Egbon Adugbo, who were found harassing my students by extorting money from them. This must stop. We are not going to take it lightly with them. We have told the Council of Chiefs and the matter is being looked into”.
He noted that through hard work, timely promotion, and brilliant scouting, the university now has 74 Professors and 51 Associate Professors, who are contributing hard to scholarship and giving the institution a good ranking globally.
Some of these Professors’ he said were promoted when he got there as a Vice-Chancellor.
Fasina said he asked his lecturers to be hardworking because his vision is to promote 100 lecturers to the professorial level before the expiration of my tenure.
He added his administration had built twelve 300-seater lecture theatres for improved teaching and learning.
His words”My target is to build 10 of these structures annually to give over 27,000 students population the deserved comfort”
In the area of contributions to agriculture and food security, the VC stated that his mission is for the university to be able to feed Ekiti through commercial farming, clarifying that the institution had procured tractors, plowing, and harrowing machines and other modern farm implements to achieve this.
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“We are going to give the faculty of Agriculture a matching order to start mass production of food crops and our target is to spend part of the proposed N400 million grant from the CBN on farming. The faculty has all the implements and we expect that they can start this by feeding the university community and move up to feed the whole of Ekiti”.
Fasina stated that the university had gone fully digitalized in tackling security threats and that the institution was getting the deserved and expected results.
On accommodation, he said the university is mapping out a strategy to build more residential buildings on campus, lamenting that only 1,400 students are currently residents on campus.
Apart from this, the Soil Scientist said FUOYE is negotiating with landlords to charge fairly and stop extorting the students through the imposition of arbitrary rents.
