Address by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah, on the forthcoming election of Provost, College of Health Sciences and deans of faculties.
My dear Staff,
I hereby send warm season’s greetings to you all, hoping you and your family enjoyed the Easter Break. May God Almighty continue to keep us all healthy, happy and enable our great University and our nation grow stronger.
I am writing you about the impending elections throughout the University, covering the college and the faculties. I want to appreciate the unions and the various individuals who have interacted with me on this matter. I have always assured all that we shall get there soon, explaining some of my strategies for allowing a bit of a delay.
The University Act provides for election into the offices of Provost and Dean, and as you all know that under my tenure we have conducted very successful elections into these positions before and will do even better again. The elections timetable will now be released. I want all the faculties and the College to fully mobilise and look for excellent qualities in these to-be academic leaders.
As a University destined to play enormous roles to impact Nigeria, the qualities of our Provost and our Deans are very important. I trust that you know what level the great University of Abuja is today, in terms of scholarly delivery, in-house training to improve staff skills, prompt release of grades to our students, use of technology, external grants attraction by staff, important fundraising tradition being established by the University to augment funding for every unit of the University, student and staff welfare in terms of equiping every staff office and the University Library and our Laboratories, staff promotion and recruitment, promoting staff owned housing off campus, staff personal investments for their future happiness, raising of academic standard in every department, faculty and college, establishing and sustaining lectures such as Humanities Lecture, Education Lecture, and great scholarly tradition, and many more.
What we need, my dear staff, are great and courageous academic leaders who are themselves academic achievers and who show true love and care for others.
I assure you of my utmost dedication to conducting elections into all the vacant offices and support each and every elected College Provost and Faculty Dean to take the great UofA to its deserved status nationally and internationally.
As my tenure winds up as your vice-chancellor, our University is becoming more of a pride to our nation. Our current suffering from lack of electricity is temporary due to the enormous cost of diesel and the hooligans who cut the cables to our dedicated line, thereby cutting short the enjoyment of a 20-hour daily non-interrupted electricity. The ongoing project on our campus of 3 megawatts of Solar Power is almost completed, the Energy Research Centre is looking at ways to create additional alternative energy, faculty-by-faculty, building-by-building. Our determination is to ensure that the current suffering would never reoccur on this campus!
The future of the great UofA is bright! Continue to be proud of the University and kindly elect great leaders for our great University.
Please let me know if there is any way I can be of help to your personal efforts to achieve your goals.
All my best wishes!
Abdul-Rasheed
