Abia Poly holds combined convocation for 28, 000 students

• Rector outlines plans to clear salary arrears

From Boniface Okoro, Umuahia

In a deliberate comeback bid, Abia State Polytechnic, Aba, will on Friday, May 12, 2023, hold a combined convocation ceremony for 28, 000 students who graduated from the school between 2010 and 2022.

Rector of Abia State Polytechnic, Associate Professor Hagler Okorie, who announced this during a Press Conference at the Rector’s Conference Room in the Polytechnic on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, said the school was striving to clear the convocation arrears of over a decade and also re-launch the institution into public reckoning, noting de-marketisation has been the major cause of low students’ enrollment into the Poly in recent years.

“I just want to let you know that Abia State Polytechnic, for the past 11 or 12 years, has not done convocation for its students that graduated. And when I came here, I thought it was huge; and I thought it was unacademic: So, we are now having 11 years combined convocation for Abia State Polytechnic.” the Rector said.

According to him, the event would be geared towards creating public consciousness and awareness that Abia Poly was still an institution to reckon with and to attract potential students to prefer it as a school of choice when they are seeking for admission.

“The positives and takeaways of the convocation are that when that (convocation) happens, we will have 28, 000 graduands. The exercise will attract both human and vehicular traffic and when that happens, Abia Poly will now have opened again.

“So, we will market the polytechnic more, to take it out of de-marketisation which is the worst enemy of the polytechnic,” he said.

The Associate Professor lamented that demarketing Abia poly has done a lot of harm to the institution, resulting in low student enrollment. But he said that his administration would now take on the task to change that narrative and make the public know the school has the capacity to run a 21^st Century digital polytechnic, courtesy of her monumental facilities.

“The problem we have in Abia Poly is de-marketisation. Discussion and narratives around Abia Poly is in a prejudiced form, with a lot of people that also do not have information. Abia State has some stuff, better than the mushrooming private polytechnics around town.

“And our duty now, as an administration, is to push this positive narrative to say we have got all it takes to run a 21^st Century digital polytechnic,” he said.

Okorie insisted that Abia Poly was superior to mushrooming private polytechnics in Aba because it has good facilities for teaching and learning, as well as qualified and adequate personnel, adding that “Abia Poly also exists also in the realm of capacity.”

“Abia Poly has capacity, capacity in terms of personnel, it also have a little above 85 per cent of Ph.D holders as lecturers and non-lecturers; we have in our Faculties, equipment that you cannot find in any South Eastern polytechnic, in any polytechnic in Aba, because some of our students are being swallowed up by the mushrooming private polytechnics around town,” he noted.

He promised to tackle the issue of salary arrears of about 33 months owed the staff after the convocation ceremony.

In tackling the salary arrears headache, the Rector said that the school authorities would have to do things differently.

He listed the steps to be taken to include seeking alternative sources of funding rather than waiting for government monthly subvention, establishing businesses and entering into partnerships with corporate bodies.

“I came here, I met salaries being owed and every Rector that comes here begins to dwell and battle about salaries; of course, we are talking about 33, 34 months of salary arrears.

“And I came, I said to them, gentlemen, I came with a solution, I came with what we can do to get away from where we are and an institution like this, are there no other alternative revenue that an institution can try to be able to have an alternative medium wherein funding can come from.

“An institution should think out of the box and create or galvanise other alternative sources wherein money will come from and it will be able to solve some problems, including salaries,” he said, assuring that he has “a handle around that salary issue.”

“We will do our best. As an administrator, I cannot just sit and wait for salary to happen. We will go out, chase for funding, an seek alternative sources of funding and then do other legitimately administrative work deserving of an institution like this, so that our institution can be afloat and work effectively,” he promised.

He said plans were in top gear to establish an Aba Business like, which, he said, has already gained very high acceptability among the Aba business class.

On the controversy over overstaffing in the institution, the Rector noted that as a lecturer in the school in 2002, he was teaching over 1, 000 students in a class in one stream, and that now the he has become the Rector, “that same class does not have up to 150 students.”

“It is not about the overpopulation of our staff, but the population of our students. If we have the numbers of students commensurate with the numbers of lecturers, no problem. My worry now is not about staffing; my worry now is about the student decimation, the population of students.

“All they will say is that there are more teachers now than students and not that teachers are not commensurate with what they should be in a standard polytechnic,” he argued.

Okorie appealed to the public to help shore up the student population of the school to help it to bubble again.

“For a school population to grow, it has to do with what we call referability, which means people referring students to enroll in a higher institution they know is good. That is what I want to happen now. My target is to shore up the numbers of students and we will be able to get out of the fact that people say that there are more teachers,” he appealed.

The Convocation ceremonies which commenced with the Press Conference, also featured a tour of  facilities in the various departments of the school by journalists which revealed excellent facilities with which students fabricated a lot of machines.

A novelty match between the staff and alumni of the polytechnic equally held Wednesday evening.

The Pre-Convocation Lecture to be delivered by Jackson Nwachukwu has been slated for  Thursday, May 11, 2023; while Friday, May 12, is the grand finale of the convocation ceremony, when the school would also honour some prominent Nigerians with an award of Fellowship of the institution,  including River State Governor, Nysom Wike, a former Deputy Governor of Abia State, Comrade Chris Alozie Akomas, and Chief Obi Cubana, among others.