Charles Esimone

Charles Okechukwu Esimone (born 29 December, 1970) is a Nigerian professor of biopharmaceutics and pharmaceutical biotechnology who served as the vice-chancellor of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria from 2019 to 2024. Quotes I started my administration with a clear vision — what I describe as Project 200. Project 200 is our vision to put Nnamdi Azikiwe University among the best 200 universities in the world, 10 in Africa, and number one in Nigeria. That vision had five major pillars described with the acronym of ACADA: academic excellence, community service, administrative exploits, discipline, and advancement. These five ACADA pillars were the things that revolutionised what we have done and that made us do things slightly different from what my predecessors have done. The vision was crafted with the notion of looking at the gaps and what we needed to do to take us to where we ought to be as a university. In terms of academic excellence, we did things completely differently. Of course, if you look at the overall ranking of the university now, it is very clear that the ACADA pillars of Project 200 have helped us. When I started as vice-chancellor in 2019, our overall ranking was 4,927. But as we speak, even though we encountered two years of losses attributable to COVID and industry strikes, our current world ranking is below 1,500 from 4,297. As we look at our ranking in terms of universities that are not up to 50 years old, we are even below 500 ranking on the world stage. That is a very great feat. In 2023, we were number 31 in sub-Saharan Africa. Of course, in Nigeria, we have been fluctuating, depending on the ranking houses. We were ranked number 4 in Nigeria, but we have been oscillating between number 10. That is far from our ranking by the time I came on board. We were around 31. The five pillars of Project 200 have placed us very high. I also try to look at how people deliver lectures. That is why we embrace ICT as a viable tool for lecture delivery. As we speak, it is almost impossible right now for you to go to a lecture hall and then people are dictating notes. We are using PowerPoint, and it is compulsory more or less. ICT and online modes of teaching and lecture delivery have been entrenched very consciously in the system. By the time I came on board, the bandwidth that we were using in the entire university was just less than 10 megabytes. Internet was not common. I started by procuring three STM-1s so you don’t have any excuse why you cannot do digital teaching or research. As we speak now, we have moved from three to six to make sure that internet connectivity is everywhere in faculties and departments. Generally, the standard is sub-optimal. It is below optimal standard. It is a great course of concern for those of us who are proprietors or who are executives in the university system. There are a couple of factors responsible for that. All over the world where you have funding dedicated to the educational sector in terms of budgetary allocation, it is a signal that there is a deliberate commitment to enhance, improve and allow education to be at its optimum and to contribute to the national development of the nation. When you look at the budget of a nation and you see the percentage that is allocated to education, you can know where the priority is. Unfortunately, no, in Nigeria. It is a thing of context. This is my personal opinion. I believe if you want to make suggestions like you find in other climes, there are many other ways to sort out this. One way is to get private sector involvement. The unions can decide to appeal to the private sector. Private people like Dangote, Tony Elumelu, and others can just endow big money to universities. That is how Harvard, Oxford, all of them survive. They don’t get specific government grants. They have all these endowments that are coming. The alumni base also helps them to get big funding. But why I said it is unfortunate in Nigeria is that if we are talking about the government’s intervention, if you want to get the government to do something, usually, it can only come through strike. External Links Category:1970 births Category:Living people Category:Africa