Louis Okoroma
Oasis brings to mind, a desert or wasteland of sand, unending sand and extreme heat in the day and chilling cold at night. A desert is unfriendly and uninhabitable with the oasis coming in to provide some succour. In the well-known deserts, if the oasis is big enough, some semblance of life usually springs up around it because essentially the oasis is an isolated body of water and sparse vegetation, in this vast wasteland of sand.
The North-east region of Nigeria, according to development experts and economists, is among the backward part of West Africa and indeed the world because of poor human development.
Before now, like other parts of the North of Nigeria, the North-east was characterized by high illiteracy, poor educational facilities, high number of out-of-school-chidren, high unemployment, high maternal and infant mortality due to poor health services, low industrialization and prevalence of subsistence agriculture and the threat of desertification!
Today, however; insecurity and the activities of the dreaded Boko Haram terrorists have further dealt a devastating blow to the developmental aspirations of the people with the result that the United Nations estimates that about two million of the population of the area have been displaced by the Boko Haram terrorists.
Before the government of President Muhammadu Buhari degraded the Boko Haram from a fighting force that appropriated large swathe of the country’s territory in the North-east, insecurity had uprooted most of the population in the region, notably, in the states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa. Today, the UN estimates that millions of Nigerians in this region face starvation because agriculture and food production as well as ordered life have been dislocated by the activities of the Boko Haram before the coming of Buhari’s government.
However, it is in this desert of despair that a son of one of the struggling states, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, a former Vice President of Nigeria, from Adamawa State, a home boy in spirit but cosmopolitan in outlook and a leading entrepreneur, established the American University of Nigeria (AUN) in his home town of Yola, capital of Adamawa State. He conceived AUN as a development university that will combine the normal liberal studies for which tertiary institutions are known with the practical endeavour of community development and service and thereby transform and impact on the people and environment where it is located.
Since 2004, when this model development university started to admit students in the then sleepy town of Yola, the AUN has grown like an oak and not only is it transforming and impacting on Adamawa State and its neighbours, it is providing the much-needed and desired succour and hope, like the oasis, for souls lost or about to be lost in the desert.
The AUN held its 2017 commencement or graduation ceremony from May 11-13, 2017. One thing that stands out about the young university is that it has continued to make progress impacting and transforming the North-east region in line with the vision of its founder. Also, its international character is growing and consolidating as students’ and faculty from different parts of the world knock at its gate and gain entrance.
Being a development university means that students are exposed to the real challenges in the country and the community and gain the knowledge and skills to develop sustainable solutions. Most American universities wrestle with how best to design programs of study that address global problems and engage their students in community work. It is the same at AUN. Using the North-east region and its problems as a model, the management, staff and students of the university are encouraged and assisted to find solutions to problems confronting developing communities in Africa.
In its thirteen years of existence, AUN has been confronted with a number of challenges that tasked its reputation as a development university and like the oasis of hope that it is, it has not disappointed.
The first of these problems are poverty, unemployment and hunger among the majority of the population of Adamawa State and environs. The school has dealt with this problem by providing employment to hundreds of Adamawa State indigenes and those from neighbouring states in different cadres. The AUN has also combated hunger through its community programmes. Another serious problem with consequences for the development aspirations of the North-east region is high illiteracy and the inability of many including the almajiri population to read.
The illiteracy rate in the region is about 77 percent!
With the help of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), AUN is implementing Technology Enhanced Learning for All (TELA), an educational project to teach over 22, 000 vulnerable children in the immediate community, basic literacy and numeracy skills. Using mobile apps in the local languages developed by its computer science students and faculty, and radio programmes written and produced by its multimedia students and pedagogy designed by one of its professors in education, hundreds of students and five faculty of the University are teaching thousands of children to read and count.
In the case of the almajiri, the launch of the building where they are fed and taught to read was one of the highlights of the 2017 commencement ceremony of the university. The launch was performed on behalf of the AUN founder, Atiku Abubakar, by the interim President of the University, Professor Le Gene Quesenberry, on May 11, 2017.
A third problem is conflict inspired by religious differences and suspicion which often led to clashes and violence between communities and people of different faiths.
The AUN took up the challenge especially during the stewardship of its immediate past President, Professor Margee Ensign. The AUN reached out to Christian and Islamic religious leaders, community leaders and traditional rulers and created a platform for conflict resolution and dialogue, known as the Adamawa Peace Initiative (API).
Under the watch of the AUN-API, Adamawa State has enjoyed peace and stability as issues capable of causing violence among the people are discussed in the API and amicable settlement reached.
There is no doubt that given the way and manner the university is marching on, it will surely realize and advance the vision of its founder as a development university successfully finding solutions to the developmental challenges of North-east Nigeria, in particular, and the rest of Africa, in general.
Okoroma wrote from Yola, Adamawa State.
