The Vice-Chancellor, University of Abuja, Professor Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah, has called on the academia to work closely with industries to make their research work useful to national development.
Delivering the 13th Convocation lecture of Fountain University, Osogbo with the theme ‘From Within to Without: The Ripple Effect of University Challenges on National Destiny’, Na’Allah lamented that many research works done in the system are languishing on the shelves due to lack of collaboration between universities and the industries.
He said in world-class universities, lecturers set aside what they called industry days within the week, ”To visit the industry, find out the crucial industry personnel to talk to, passionately seek opportunities to present their research ideas and laboratory findings, and seek a day when the industry would reciprocate their visit to come to campus or another day the university researchers would return to the industry to fortify the collaboration.”
“It is in the Nigerian university system that professors and lecturers wait for industries to come to them to plead for a relationship, and not the other way round,” he added.
He also noted that without conscious efforts to ensure collaboration between universities and the industries, the Nigerian university system would be unable to achieve what universities have achieved in the USA, UK, Taiwan, China or any nation that has taken the university system very seriously.
Na’Allah said private universities in Nigeria could overtake public universities in terms of introducing and implementing innovations.
“I wonder why the private universities in Nigeria have not overtaken the public universities and provided for Nigeria the skills, the experts, and the advanced talents that can take Nigeria to a new level,” he also stated.
