No fewer than 531 lecturers of the University of Jos undertook PhD and Masters degrees programmes in the last five years, its outgoing Vice Chancellor, Prof. Hayward Mafuyai, has said.

Mafuyai told the News Agency of Nigeria in Jos on Thursday that some of the lecturers undertook their courses in the country, while many others went to universities in Europe, America, Asia and other African nations.

Mafuyai, whose five-year tenure ends this month, was speaking on his achievements while in office.
Mafuyai said he paid special attention to human capital development so as to boost the quality of knowledge imparted on the students to make them more competitive.

He said: “Every university needs as many PhD holders as possible.
“What I did was to identify opportunities and encourage lecturers to apply for sponsorships so as to improve their qualifications.

“We sponsored some lecturers locally using some limited grants, while others got sponsorship from TETFUND, NEEDS, PTDF, embassies, foreign Fellowships and other countries’ scholarship schemes.”

Mafuyai listed such countries to include China, Canada and New Zealand.
“We even have lecturers that got up to three sponsors and had to select one while giving the other openings to colleagues,” he said.

Mafuyai said he also established four new faculties for engineering, veterinary medicine, agriculture and dentistry, which the school had yearned for since its creation 40 years ago.

“The four new faculties came with 23 programmes and boosted the university’s admission capacity from 4,555 to 6,592,” he explained.

The vice chancellor said he was particularly thrilled that the university currently runs a mining engineering programme, noting that only two universities had the programme, the other being Federal University of Technology, Akure.

“This programme has a special place in my heart because mining activities are massive in Plateau and we hope to develop skills and techniques that could help the artisanal miners and improve their income,” he said.

He said his administration also developed a degree awarding programme on archaeology “targeted at training young Nigerians to work toward discovering items that can put Nigeria on the world map”.

Mafuyai said he also improved on the institution’s infrastructure with new roads, bridges, libraries, hostels and other buildings, while teaching and learning equipment were purchased for medical and natural sciences faculties.

The vice chancellor said emphasis was being laid on making the university a centre of excellence in the area of research, stressing that it is collaborating with other excellent research centres the world over, to make that a reality.

He said: “We have excelled in various research projects and even got $8 million from the World Bank to support one such effort.

“We also won a $3.2 million grant from Fogarty Foundation in the United States, which allowed us to sponsor four academic staff in the faculty of medicine, to higher qualifications.”

Mafuyai said the university also developed anti-snake venom that was already being patented and revealed that the feat won a grant worth more than N2 billion, which the school ploughed back into more research efforts.

The outgoing official said he was proud of his accomplishments, and declared that he did his best and had no regrets, “especially since I did not allow any opportunity to slip through my fingers”.

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531 UniJos lecturers undertook PhD, Masters programmes in five years – Prof. Mafuyai