Abia Poly Ready To Award Degrees – Rector

Abia State Polytechnic is training about 40 members of staff of the institution on various doctoral degree programmes to put the school on a sound footing to award Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) in technological studies when the policy is implemented in the country. Rector of the Polytechnic, Elder Allwell Onukaogu, disclosed this at the pre-convocation press briefing held at the school’s conference room in Aba Tuesday. About 4,000 students would be graduating from the school Saturday. It is expected that the National Board for Technical Education ( NBTE) will give approval to the Polytechnics in the country to commence awarding degrees from next year and Onukaogu said that Abia Poly would not be caught napping when the policy takes off as it is preparing its staff through capacity building. “We are also gearing up towards capacity building and keying into the new policy whereby the Polytechnics will award B.Tech. What it means is that indirectly, Polytechnics will indirectly be special universities, specializing in the various technologies which mean that our human capacity has to be strenuously developed. “I want to announce that with the assistance of ETF, about 40 staff are pursuing programmes leading to the award of P.hD in their various special fields in the universities. What I am assuring the people is that this Polytechnic will be able, when the other Polytechnics will take off, to award quality of Bachelor of Tech Degrees in all the fields that we have prgrammes in” the Rector said. He recalled that when he mounted the saddle last two years, the school was on the verge of being closed by the NBTE for being deficient in science programmes. “When I took over, we were to be closed. We had been asked to stop admitting in certain programmes on account of our deficiency in technology-based programmes. Before then the only technology-based programmes we had were in the Computer Science and Statistics”. “I inherited the challenge of bringing the ratio of technology-based programmes to 70 per cent from the 33 that it was when I took over and the regulation by NBTE was that if a Polytechnic did not get the 70 science and 30 humanities ratio, you should begin to wind up,” he said. “It would have been a thing of shame for the people of Abia State, for the staff of the Polytechnic and particularly for me at the time I was in charge for us to lose what my predecessors in office and previous governments before the current government had done much to establish,” he added. He said the school has met the ratio in science programmes as it now runs Environmental Sciences (Six Departments); Town Planning, Urban and Regional Planning, Quantity Surveying, Architecture, Building Technology, Geo-informatics and Estate Management. We also have Bio-Chemistry, and Chemistry, Micro-Biology and Biology, Physics with Electronics at both HND and ND levels. On achievements in other areas, Onukaogu said the school has “seen tremendous improvement in terms of facilities.” He assured that the school was striving to institute core engineering programmes despite all odds. “It has not been easy, but we are not daunted. We are worried that in Abia State, no tertiary institution has Engineering progarmme. We will not rest on our oars until we are able establish all the core engineering programmes here. The commencement of Building Technology which is an aspect of Civil Engineering is also a basis on which we can build,” he promised. He said the Polytechnics’ second campus at Osisioma would soon come on stream as the school has reached understanding with the host community to release the land for development.