The Vice-Chancellor, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun state, has disclosed that public universities cannot retain the services of its best-graduating students.
He attributed the inability to employ the best-graduating students in public institutions to the lack of autonomy in employing lecturers by each university.
Speaking ahead of the university’s 47th convocation at the Senate building on Monday, the Vice Chancellor said the school would have loved to retain its students that graduated with first class degrees but lacked the power to do so.
According to him, we are ready to retain our first-class graduates. There is no need to even think twice about that. But then what are the policies of government concerning recruitment in the universities?
“Before you can recruit anyone into any department in this university now, your papers have to go through seven agencies of government. It is not like you just pick anybody on the street and just say this is what you want and bring them in. You can’t because it has implications on the budget that is done for your school.
“For us, we don’t want to throw away our first-class students but because of the limitations that we have. It appears very difficult for us to retain them. You know the university is not autonomous to that extent. We just have to be looking ahead that policies of the government will favour us.”
158 bag First Class
Analysing categories of students graduating from the University, Professor Bamire said 7,910 students would be awarded first and postgraduate degrees during the convocation starting on Thursday.
“In all the programmes across the OAU faculties, we have a total number of 158, who made FIRST CLASS.
“One thousand, nine hundred and seventy (1970) made Second Class Upper Division while 2,906 made Second Class Lower Division. 942 are in Third Class Division while 65 graduates are in the Pass Division.
“In all, 6,710 will be graduating at this 47th Convocation of this University.
“Also, 1,276 postgraduate students will be awarded diplomas and degrees in their various fields across different faculties in our University,” he explained.
