Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin, North Central Nigeria will be graduating 8,350 students today at the 29th convocation ceremony of the institute.
They include 3,000 HND graduates, and 5,350 OND graduates, while part-time graduates of the institution would be graduating during the convocation.
The Rector of the institution, Engineer Abdul Jimoh Muhammed who disclosed this while addressing newsmen in Ilorin, the state capital, said a total of 102 graduates bagged distinctions and upper credits in the 2022/2023 academic session.
Engineer Muhammed used the event to also appeal to the state government to, among other things, stop the selling of the institution’s land by land grabbers lamenting that unauthorised structures have been springing up on both sides of the road leading to the main gate of the institution and constitute a great challenge to the security of the school.
Jimoh decried the problem of funding facing the institution, explaining that millions of naira were required each time the school faced accreditation and re-accreditation of its academic programmes and rehabilitation of obsolete structures.
The rector said the institution was investing huge sums of money in partnering with various security agencies in the area of provision of security as a result of encroachment on its land.
He appealed to the government, the alumni association of the institution and philanthropists to come to the rescue of the school by constructing a security fence around the polytechnic.
The Rector therefore appealed to the state government to assist the institution in terms of adequate funding to make it perform optimally.
According to him, the institution was only able to make modest achievements despite the current economic situation of the country and ever-increasing running costs, ranging from staff salaries to other recurrent expenses, because of the prudent management of limited resources.
“Like any other institution, the polytechnic has problems with funding”, he said.
The rector, who said that the polytechnic needed a huge sum of money for accreditation of programmes and rehabilitation of aging infrastructure, called on the state government to come to the aid of the school.
He disclosed that on accreditation of programmes, quite a huge sum of money, running into millions of Naira, is needed each time the Polytechnic faces accreditation or re-accreditation of its National Diploma and Higher National Diploma programmes
The team from the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) he explained further has always insisted on meeting the minimum requirements to sail through each accreditation exercise.
“Meeting these requirements is always a serious financial challenge for the institution. I, therefore, appeal to the government to come to the aid of the institution whenever the need arises” he stated.
“On aging structures, many of the buildings in the Polytechnic are very old, as old as the institution itself. Although renovation takes place from time to time, lack of sufficient funds makes it difficult to carry out comprehensive renovation and rehabilitation of the obsolete structures”, the Rector explained further.
The rector, however, appreciated the state commissioner, Ministry of Tertiary Education, Dr. (Mrs.) Mary Ronke Arinde, for her support and said that “we felt her impact within a short time of her assumption of office”.
Among projects to be inaugurated during the convocation is a 33Kv injection sub-station power project funded by the institute Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) which is now providing electricity to six Federal Government agencies and four communities.
Dominica Nwabufo
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