Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU) has counselled its members to get acquainted with modern Information Technology (IT), so as to remain relevant in the university corporate system.
Chairman of the association and registrar, University of Ilorin (UNILORIN), Kwara State, Mr. Emmanuel Obafemi, who stated this at the “12th Annual Retreat and 63rd Business Meeting,” of the group, maintained that being IT-savvy will not only help facilitate operations and services in the contemporary university system, it will also help improve human capital development in their various institutions.
The four-day meeting, which had “Strategic positioning of human resource in university system,” as its theme, dwelt extensively on how to address issues of human resources in institutions of higher learning, noting that universities, as an advanced educational institution should not be surrounded by uninformed workforce.
He said, “We have discovered that our human resources development is getting down especially now that IT has taken over. Many of our older generation people have phobia for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) gadgets, whereas they are the in-thing now. If we do not as registrars also work on our knowledge on IT, we will become irrelevant.
“So, we are here to sensitise ourselves as registrars to changes in the world of work and new trends in IT development. At the end of it all, it is human capital development and if the human capital of a university is low, the university cannot survive.”
Obafemi therefore urged university administrators to invest heavily in IT infrastructure so as to reap the benefits therein. “Any university that wants to navigate into the future must invest heavily in IT and infrastructure. For instance at UNILORIN, nobody carries paper about. The council, senate and all my committee in the university are paperless. If there are still universities in this contemporary world that are still carrying papers and files about, then there is a problem. So if the university is thinking of the future, it has to invest in IT,” he stressed.
Listing inadequate funding, dilapidated infrastructure, poor electricity, among others as major challenges of the sector, without which IT cannot function optimally, he charged the Federal Government to fund universities adequately and also allow them some autonomy.
Also, General Secretary, ARNU and registrar, Tansian University, Umunya, Anambra State, Dr. Peter Ejikeme, said the issue of human resource in the university system is imperative, since office of the registrar is the hub of the university.
