As Nigeria faces mounting questions about relevance, leadership, and innovation in educational development, Dr. Emmanuel Abraham has emerged as one of country’s most compelling academic voices to address the concerns.
As Chairman of Topfaith Group of Schools, in which Topfaith University is among, he speaks with a rare blend of intellectual rigour, strategic clarity, and measured optimism about the future of university education on the African continent.
Soft-spoken yet deeply persuasive, the 1981 Valedictorian of the University of Calabar is the kind of public thinker who does not merely answer questions, but intelligently interrogates assumptions, challenges conventions, and reframes complex national issues with uncommon intellectual depth.
In an interview with Straightnews newspapers, Dr. Abraham reflects on the evolving role of private universities particularly his Topfaith University, Mkpatak in Essien Udim Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State, in transforming Nigeria’s rural areas, the need for intensive research, and why education remains the most powerful instrument for societal transformation, among others.
Excerpts:
Gaps in Nigeria’s higher education system that motivated establishment of Topfaith University in rural community rather than in major urban city
Thank you so very much. I think you have hit the nail on the head because the philosophy and the establishment of Topfaith University was and is very, very intentional.
So, when you are asking of the kind of gap that necessitated this endeavour, you are basically asking me: what is the vision of the institution? As a matter of fact, the vision of Topfaith University and the foundation of its initiation is based from an intentional perspective. That is to satisfy three key elements of human development. Philosophically, we call it a 3D module: Talents discovery and discovery of talents; D1- Discovery, D2 – Development, and D3 – Deployment:
So, our intentional philosophy is to create an enabling environment where learners are intentionally nurtured for them to appreciate who and what they are. That is the process of discovery so that every programme is spiced with that self-discovery initiative.
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And that will endear the student to the programme he or she is doing. You know that sometimes people just go to school to just study anything because they want to acquire a degree even if that was the intention.
If somebody had come in without understanding the rationale behind the study of the programme, he or she has been enrolled, it is our responsibility, our duty, our intention to bring the psychology and the emotions of the student to align with the dictates, the philosophy, the emotions, the opportunities that the person will benefit from by studying that programme. That’s the first part of discovery. When a student is given this philosophy, he has been awakened to the importance of that programme, and therefore will surrender himself or herself for the development process. His or her curiosity will be sharpened.
By doing so, there’s an aim that the ultimate is: when I finish, where am I going to? What is in this programme for me? And we also have to punctuate this thinking with our basic fundamental entrepreneurial philosophy. All our programmes are spiced with such thinking, such that whatever programme you are studying, you must know that you have to engage yourself with the ultimate of utilising the knowledge embedded in that programme.
So, Topfaith University came as a promotion of a philosophy of functional education to create proper empowerment of the mindset of learners to generate thinking, not just thinking, creative thinking. When you are engaged in thinking, you will be able to generate ideas. And when you are able to generate ideas, you’ll be able to take advantage of entrepreneurial circumstances.
And when you are able to take advantage of entrepreneurial circumstances, you’ll be able to create, recreate, innovate, and then push yourself into the realm of an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is not just somebody who opens shop, an entrepreneur is somebody who creates value, markets value, and makes purposefully money out of it.
And that can happen in any dimension, in any programme. So, idea generation through thinking based on a 3D philosophy has been the vision of Topfaith University because we found that as a gap. Thirdly, most of the time you hear tertiary institutions during graduations, call up hundreds and thousands of graduates and say, you guys have been found worthy in character and learning.
Topfaith now says: how much of the character was intentionally made available to the learners? How much of it? And a review of that question reveals to us that not much of character formation was intentionally disbursed to the students.
Therefore, in Topfaith University, that is one very critical element of our learning, character education. In fact, it has been institutionalised as a course from level one to graduation in all the courses. It’s a General Studies course. We have taken the issue of character education as prime in the process of developing the students through our 3D philosophy. So, to address your question, I’d like to let you know that Topfaith University had intended, it is still intending to produce students who are emotionally stable, well-versed in critical thinking, functional in approach to life, skillful in ideas generation, and fully prepared as people of good character.
How Topfaith University balances global academic standards with local community to resolve indigenous knowledge system
Thank you very much. IKS means Indigenous Knowledge System. You heard me talk about entrepreneurial philosophy. The mistake part of our educational system makes is to get caught in what I usually call ‘intellectual brain drain.’
Intellectual brain drain is different from physical brain drain. You must be aware of the concept of brain drain. A situation where trained manpower, say in Nigeria, is shipped out to other parts of the world.
In Nigeria, it has been popularised as japa. Now, what you see is that somebody can stay in the local community, but thinks from the point of view irrelevant to the local community- thoroughly alien to the indigenous knowledge system. That itself is a tragedy.
University education is supposed to emphasise three key elements of humanity: Teaching, Learning, Research, and Community Development. Or, what we call community engagement. It has to do a lot of research. It has to do a lot of teaching. It has to engage with the community.
What we do is that one key thing that we engage our children and students with the indigenous exposure is that we have what we call Summer Vacation Attachment Programme – very novel in the process of tertiary education. What does that mean? What we call summer is a long vacation. The period between when you end the session and when you start the next session, which naturally is holiday.
Welcome to the phase of leaving our students for those 8, 9, 10 weeks of break without exposure to something relevant to their life and academics is a gap. So, we brought in this summer vacation attachment programme such that these students go to romance with the local community. What does that mean? Depending on the course of study, wherever any of our students leave, we have actually developed the data bank of partners, of organizations, basically indigenous and local, where these students go to do attachment- experiencing hands on operations of these local operators, relevant to their fields of study.
The idea here is to see how crude the methods are, how crude the system is. We also have this other tendency, where you have parents who do business or are professionals, who run entities and organizations? Most of the time, children don’t understand what their parents are doing.
We have enshrined that philosophy in our learning process. During those long vacations, we have identified the children whose parents have big-time trading organizations, factories, business entities, legal firms, engineering firms, newspaper houses, communication systems. We send them deliberately to their parents with a model that they have to study the dynamics of the businesses of their parents and return to the university with the report.
This is by imposing that on what they have learned in school and making suggestions. How do you improve your parents’ business? Let me tell you that feedback we’ve gotten from this strategy has been very encouraging. So, we are trying to be very functional and real.
And that tallies with our 3D philosophy of Discovery and Development and Deployment. So, we are not just philosophising for nothing. We are philosophising for practical application and the functionality of knowledge to solve problems.
That issue of attaching children of entrepreneurs to study their parents and report will lure the children to their parents’ businesses. One advantage is that it develops that business issue, thinking, engineering. If you have a parent that has engineering firm, we put you there.
Then for all other ones who don’t have people with professionals, we have organizations that these children go and do this attachment. Students in Law, they go to Law firms. Students in Medicine, they go to medical establishments. Students in Nursing, they go to medical establishments. Students in Medical Laboratories, they go to those kinds of places. Students in Public Health, they go to Public Health institutions.
And they come back with very fantastic report, trying to align same with what they learned in classroom. People in Accounting, go to accounting firms, financial institutions, banks, economics, business administration, the same thing. Then people in Mass communication, go to media houses- radio, television. Now, how do you relate with a local community? This is what we call community engagement. We sign them up.
Our students are made to interact with the community. In fact, I recall last week, I had a proposal in which the students in Mass Communication said they want to enter the local community in an attempt to establish the relationship between what happens there and what they call communication development. I think there’s a case like that, there’s a course like that in Mass Communication. So, this shows you how close they are.
But then, we have not lost touch with international standards because you have to benchmark. But we are not going to do intellectual brain drain. Rather, we are going to do a hybrid of international standard and exploration of local dynamics in the general Nigerian ecosystem.
That is our motto. That is our vision. That is our mission. That is our philosophy.
Framework that guides curriculum review process to ensure graduates remain industry relevant in emerging sectors like CyberSecurity, Renewable Energy, and Agri-tech
Thank you so very much. You heard when I talked about functionality. Fundamentally, a university in Nigeria bases its curriculum on what has been developed, approved, and adopted by the National Universities Commission. Currently, we call it CCMAS. CCMAS is supposed to stand for Core Curriculum Minimum Academic Standard (CCMAS). This is set to be the minimum, and it is to the credit of the educational managers at the tertiary level in Nigeria, especially in the university system, where the CCMAS allows us as a university to have mandatory 70% of what you teach in every programme, domiciled, under the CCMAS.
The education managers of this country allow you as a university to invent 30% of what should be the full-time credit requirement of every programme. So, each university has the 30% liberty, as I said, to invent. That is where creativity, innovation, functionality in curriculum development comes in.
And that is how we are able to key into emerging events and emerging dynamics commensurate with the 21st century requirements. In terms of 21st century requirements, there have been very specific skills that a learned or not uneducated human being from a university system should possess: should possess digital skill, communication skill, skill of being able to think creatively, be emotionally stable in every circumstance, be able to be analytical, these are very critical skills.
And of course, it’s not just by mouth. You have to basically demonstrate them through various programmes, basically tech programmes. We call that in our university: Soft Skills, Soft Life Skills programmes. And we have infused these critical life skill programmes into the curriculum under the 30% CCMAS allowance. So, we are up to date. We are very effective. We are deliberately focusing on developing 21st century skills.
In fact, we have a certain power that 21st Century is almost fast spent, just a few more years before 21st Century is gone. We should be looking at, as a matter of fact, we should therefore be looking at things that will take us to the 22nd century. And therefore, the orientation that we give our students in all our programmes is that while you are getting yourself fit for 21st Century, you guys have the luck that you are going to live beyond 21st Century, into 22nd Century.
So, think of what you can think through that will bring good innovation and creativity that will be prominent as you step into the 22nd century. So, we in Topfaith University have already started thinking into 22nd Century because we may not be too sure that it is still very far away. This is 2026. In another 70 something years, you are in the 22nd century. That’s not too far.
Rural universities in Nigeria should prioritise for national development
Thank you very much. The universities like our own are very much into research that’s expected to improve the nutritional element of the rural dwellers. In terms of attitude, in terms of capacity, in terms of knowledge, in terms of availability of things that dictate nutritional sufficiency. Another area of research that I know that our Nursing Department is doing very, very well is attitude to childbirth.
This is how to go about because at the rural community, there’s limited information, and therefore it creates casualty. So, it brings about both maternal and child mortality due out of ignorance. So, the research is what do we do to improve campaign, improve knowledge base, improve attitude, response to things like this when a typical rural person is pregnant. How do you create the enabling environment for knowledge and attitude to change so that you reduce child mortality, reduce maternal mortality in the rural communities? Our Engineering Department is also very intentional in trying to see how they could bring up some mechanical approaches to farming arrangement.
How do you handle land development? How do we metamorphose from the usual machete-and-hoe technology to something that is less cumbersome? Such research becomes very prominent in the process of enhancing and solving rural problems as they are. The other area is potable water. That has to do with health.
These areas require good research that will create opportunity. Now, you can’t finish and do things without energy. How do you generate energy that is affordable? There’s also the housing element. We have an architectural department. So, we’re looking at a situation: how do you encourage the rural dweller to believe that he can get an accommodation that is decent, that is safe, that is functional, that is healthy? So, those are a few I can recall because we have a typical research fund- research development unit.
And of course, I have to be on top of funds that have to fund these things. So many of us, lecturers, are engaged in research across board in terms of what can we do to solve societal problems. What can we do to solve human problems? That’s basically what universities stand for.
Some of our lecturers are researching into why a specie of cocoa yam itches a someone’s anus or tongue
It’s one of the areas they’re gathering facts. One good thing and what I’ve come to discover and what I encourage our researchers to do is that research is not an event. It is a process.
It can fail. Failing in the first instance does not connote stoppage. It means that you have to go back to the drawing board, draw the scheme again, remodel it, recalibrate and move forward. So, the process is on.
Plans to establish specialised research centres focused on rural innovation
One, public health. Okay, you’ve talked about this. Of course, yes, I mentioned you talk about food security, digital transformation. I think you’ve talked about this. So, needless of going there.
Funding of research projects considering the private universities have no access to TETFUND interventions.
As a matter of fact, private universities are not beneficiaries of TETFUND programmes. But that does not mean private universities should not engage in research.
In Topfaith University, we have a very highly active research department headed by a renowned Research Director. It is the intention of the university to be a research university. And as such, resources have been deliberately and intentionally been appropriated for purpose of research.
And so, like I said, a lot of us have already beneficiaries of the research funds to initiate researches into these various areas I’ve highlighted before and more. So for us, research is taken as a project. It is as important as building any edifice in the university.
Because we take research as fundamental to me. And so like I said, a lot of us have already beneficiaries of the research funds to initiate researches into these various areas I’ve highlighted before and more.
So for us, research is taken as a project. It is as important as building any edifice in the university because we take research as fundamental, very important. And our aim is to ensure that Topfaith University does not just exist in name.
It contributes to solutions to human and societal problems. That is the approach. So, we do not play fit to research.
We budget for it, we appropriate it and we make it available to researchers intentionally.
Staff development policies available for lecturers pursuing Doctoral Studies, Certifications or International Fellowships in the university
We have a very functional staff development arrangement and programmes for our lecturers. We have quite a number of our lecturers who are undergoing doctoral degree programmes in various universities under our support and they’re very deliberate about it.
So that is, we have a very aggressive staff development plan both locally, we have some that are outside the country even as of now that are undergoing some fellowship programmes and Doctoral programmes in various fields that are relevant to the programmes and courses in our university.
To be concluded
