A WORD-FOR-WORD INTERVIEW OF PROF NANA ABA APPIAH AMFO WITH REV. ALBERT OCRAN ON JOY 99.7 FM
Story by: Samuel K. Owusu
In a recent interview with Rev. Albert Ocran on Joy 99.7 FM's Springboard: The Virtual University, Prof. Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, the first female Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, discussed the theme "The Don's Conclave," the very first edition of the brand new series.
During the interview, she shared several insightful excerpts about the University of Ghana, Her life lessons, Education, leadership, and the future of higher education in Ghana
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Mr Ocran #AlbertNEOcran: With the role, you play, how hot is your seat as the Vice Chancellor?
With laughter in answering the first question, Prof. Nana Aba admitted to the fact that the seat she occupies as the vice chancellor is very hot, given the traditionally male-dominated nature of such positions in Ghanaian Universities. "It is very hot as you know. It is the nation's Premier University. I must say that it is the eye of the nation. Everyone thinks that they do have a stake at the University of Ghana rightly or wrongly. So it can be quite complicated. You have your internal stakeholders to satisfy, the students, staff, faculty, and parents. You, I mean, you also have other stakeholders, the government, literally everybody, everyone in Ghana feel some connection to the University of Ghana and we have grown over the years.
"Now we have four colleges, we have over 61,000 students, we have learning centres across the regions, we have our local and international partners, and we have our industry partners. So it can be quite complicated but by God's grace, we do preach a good job on that". How important and critical is this conversation about education and for that matter higher education and world-class education at a time like this? "I think that education is critical in the development of every nation. Right, and higher education is at the apex of it and so definitely from time to time, we need to talk about our education, the system, and his we are managing our teaching and learning processes. Because these directly feed into the human resource, then we are building for our nation and these are the people who will drive leadership in our nation. When we look at leadership space when we look at people in government, the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, managing big companies in this country, I mean the majority of these people have been through tertiary education, so we must get these things right. If we are going to build a prosperous and vibrant nation". Prof Nana Aba has said
Read also: PROF NANA ABA APPIAH AMFO ATTENDED THE GOLDEN JUBILEE CELEBRATIONS OF GOLDFIELDS SCHOOL COMPLEX IN TARKWA: https://skobureau.blogspot.com/2023/04/story-by-samuel-k.html
On Her Life Lessons:
Prof Nana Aba admonished her listeners based on five lessons from her life. This includes owning your personal and professional development, being unfazed by obstacles, looking out for talents and nurturing them, valuing teamwork, and understanding the authority you have
1. OWN YOUR PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
"If you are seeking to be at the top of your profession if you are seeking to make a mark within your profession, you should learn to build your personal capacity and you should let it be your responsibility. So for instance, I wanted to be a lecturer and I wanted to rise to the top, you know, be a professor, so I needed to understand for myself what that entailed, what I needed to do in order to become a professor. If you want to be an accountant, you need to find out for yourself, what first it means to be an accountant. Is it by acquiring a bachelor's and masters in accounting? or do I have to do some professional programs or do I have to get a combination of these, even while I do a professional program, do I need to get some practical training which will enable me to pass these exams in quicker and also be a good practitioner. So you need to understand that it is not everything that we can teach in the classroom, so you need to make it your personal responsibility, not your teacher's responsibility, not your mentor's responsibility, not your boss's responsibility, but your own personal responsibility.
"Everyone sees the end results but too often does not see the process and so only a few see the process. When the results are where we can all see it. Oh, she is the first female Vice Chancellor, everybody sees that but it is only a few who have been very close to you who have had the experience of at least appreciating the process that you have been through. So you need to spend time and effort developing yourself. A private prayer life was the key to a robust public ministry for the Lord Jesus Christ. So You need to invest time in developing yourself beyond the usual and the obvious"
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2. BE UNFAZED BY OBSTACLES
For Prof Nana Aba, "Obstacles are bound to come on your leadership journey or whatever journey you are on. You cannot get to the top if you break and back down at the least provocation. Everyone who has been at the top will tell you that they have their failures, and probably did not work the first time. As a researcher, I have had papers rejected by journals but that did not stop me from pressing on. There have been instances where people have felt that you should not be in this particular leadership space. You are probably running too fast and too ahead of yourself. People will thrive and sometimes settle but sometimes too obvious ways to sway you to put obstacles in your way. You should not be backed down. You should be unfazed. If you do not have a resilient spirit, it is going to be tough for you to get right to the top."
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3. LOOK OUT FOR TALENT AND NURTURE SUCH
A leader is not necessarily the one who will go all over the place doing everything but he or she is the one who can identify the strengths of their team members and harness these for the benefit of the organisation that they are doing. I love to write and I believe that I am a reasonably good writer so I do not have a problem putting my writing together, speeches and so on but with the kind of work that I do, there is a lot of writing that is required, a lot of speeches that you have to put together, a lot of reports. If you do not have team members who are good at that, who will help you to do this, you will not be able to catch up with the demand of the job.
"You need people with different skills on your team that you use to enhance your work, and essentially use them to your benefit. So you should be able to identify talents and build them up so that you move up with these people. You cannot simply don't alone. You need a strong team to support you," Prof Nana Aba has said
Mr Ocran: How do you deal with people who by virtue of your elevation, your position, you can see how good they can become and you literally wish you could jolt them out of their slumber and push them but under the constraint of organisational hierarchy and bureaucracy?
You are working within a system but helping that person, there is not necessarily mean bringing that person on to your immediate team. Within the roles that they are playing,
Mr Ocran: How critical is stakeholder engagement?
"Stakeholder engagement is absolutely necessary. I do not think you can succeed as a University leader without adequate stakeholder consultations. I also believe that our younger people, Even our students, have a worth of ideas. Sometimes they are over-exuberant and do not channel their energies in the right direction but you can help them to channel their energies in the right direction. You should provide avenues for listening to them.
"Last year, for instance, we had the SRC DAY WITH THE VC and that was the day I made myself available at the Cedi Conference Center. The students were there, the auditorium was full, and I was on the spot for the students to ask whatever questions they want. Explained some of the programs that we were trying to put in place. You allow yourself to be heard and then you give them the opportunity to also voice their concerns ad their contributions. So stakeholder engagements, it is absolutely critical at various levels. You need to do that. You need to let the people that you are leading come along with you otherwise you will keep going and when you look behind there will be no one following you"
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4. VALUE TEAMWORK
"You need to work harmoniously with everyone, with every member of the team yet you need to know your allies. When you come into leadership, they are people who are enthusiastic about you, your ideas, and what you bring on board. and are willing to go to all lengths to support you to succeed. Then there will be those who will be sitting on the fence, let us see how things will go and they are those who sometimes will make the attempt to sabotage you.
"There are people who are not eager to see you succeed. You cannot come and just start to put people in different boxes and decide that I am going to work with this set of people and not work with this set of people, not when you are in an organisation. Open up, and give people the opportunity to prove themselves. That is why I said, work harmoniously with everyone but know your allies, know people that you give them setting critical assignment"
"When you open up and give people the opportunity, you will even realise the worth of talent that you have. I always say that at the University of Ghana, there is a worth of talents there and it is my responsibility as a leader to just identify the talents and provide them with a conducive environment for these talents to flourish when it works I take the credit"
5. UNDERSTAND THE AUTHORITY THAT YOU HAVE
"Keep your heads low. Positions do not last forever. So you use the opportunity that you have now to build a relationship that will endure beyond the tenure of your office. When you are in positions, people are ready to serve you, open doors for you, carry your bags for you, and do all kinds of things for you. But do not let that get too much into your head. As I mentioned earlier, it is not about you, it is about your position. It is about your office and you need to know that you will not be there forever"
"We have seen that happen in Africa, Presidents who stay in power for years, sometimes even decades, but they eventually get out of office. Especially when you are in a position like mine you know well that there is a cap on your tenure, if you are the President of the nation, you know that the maximum you can it go beyond 8 years"
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On her five top prescriptions for world-class education in Ghana:
Prof. Nana Aba emphasized the importance of education: She says, to promote a World Class Education, we need to; Focus on critical thinking and analytical skills, Encourage creativity and innovation, Encourage life-long learning, Make use of technology, and Cultivate global perspectives grounded in the local context.
Prof. Nana Aba discussed the role of education in shaping the future of Ghana. She emphasized the need for education to be relevant to the needs of society, and for universities to be proactive in identifying and addressing the challenges facing Ghana. She also discussed the importance of collaboration between universities and other stakeholders, such as government and industry, in order to ensure that education is aligned with the needs of society.
1. FOCUS ON CRITICAL THINKING AND ANALYTICAL SKILLS
"Students should be encouraged to critically analyse information from a variety of sources. We must direct them to look for information and critically engage with such. Rote learning has not helped us. She said this based on a video she watched recently. In the video, the teacher was speaking and the students just repeated after the teacher. 'The book is under the table. The book is on the table. The students repeated these words severally. The teacher then asked, where is the book?. The students responded, where is the book?. The teacher struggled to let them know that this is a question that I want them to respond to because they were just operating and repeating everything that the teacher said. Unfortunately, we do quite a bit of that in our system. We need to show from. The shift has to start right from the basic level through the Secondary to the tertiary level"
Mr Ocran: As a researcher, all these points are self-evident. Would you see your work as a researcher had influenced this point becoming your number one?
"Oh, absolutely. How can you become an effective researcher when you cannot look at data and identify patterns in there, you cannot identify outliers, and you cannot critically engage with literature and data, that is a very important skill for researchers and it is not just for researchers. Literally, anybody who seeks to be in a leadership or management position needs to be able to think critically."
2. ENCOURAGE CREATIVITY (AND INNOVATION)
"We need to create avenues for students to explore their creative sides, music, and art performance. We tend to focus too much on the academic side of things and very often we are actually testing how much you can remember and not even apply. A world-class education should be utilitarian. It is even a bad thing to punish students for getting things wrong"
Prof Nana Aba recounted how 'mental' was so critical in the basic schools in her earlier days. She said that some students hated some subjects and as such were not coming to school because of 'mental' since they were afraid of being beaten up for a wrong answer. She proceeded to say that, these students may have had a creative side and if we had provided the environment, and the needed support, they would have excelled, once we allow their creative side to thrive.
Mr Ocran also made an example of learning challenges when he interviewed the renowned musician, Okyeame Kwame. He struggled in school during his earlier days in education. He was apparently dyslexic so he could not relate to some subjects. Meanwhile, his father was a chief accountant. So the father was not getting it. How can his son not relate to maths? According to Mr Ocran, Okyeame Kwane said, he was significantly abused by his teacher with both of his parents. The parents wanted him to do well and the more they related to him, the more he hated education. Until he chanced on someone who try to convert his learnings into music, and artistic ways. He flourished so well haven previously done poorly in his exam because someone could adapt to his way of processing and helped him
Mr Ocran: How do we provide for people with learning challenges and learning difficulties?
"So several things must be considered, we need to look at the training of our teachers at all levels. Because, especially at the lower levels, the pupils have a lot of confidence in their teachers. I do not know whether you have attempted to correct some wrongs that a teacher is teaching your child. You may come up against an argument with your child that my teacher says so'.
"Teachers play a critical role in shaping and moulding the knowledge systems of our children. So we need to look at how we are training these teachers. We need to look at the way that we teach in class to get to be more interactive and that also has to do with resources because the smaller your class, the more interactive you can make it become. If you have large classes, there is a limit to the interaction that you can allow to happen in class"
"We need to also in our ways of assessing, we should not just assess based on memory. We should have a range of it. We should also allow a kind of assessment that will allow students to apply and exhibit their analytical skills. We need to invest a lot more in education. We need to make it appealing and lucrative for people who would love to teach to come unto teaching". People would wish to be in the teaching profession but they do not see it as lucrative.
Even their parents could encourage them to do something else. Prof Nana Aba tells a story in which a maid of hers wanted to go into teaching. The mother of the lady who is a flourishing trader at Makola, said to her daughter, "Me da wo ase w) me sika a w'ama mas3e no" To wit, I thank you for letting my money go wasted.
"We need to get our brightest and best in teaching. We need to also provide a conducive environment. If you have smaller classes then you can pay more attention to students who have special needs. At the University of Ghana, for instance, one if the things we do to enhance our student's experience is to equip our assistive technology lab so that our students with visual impairment, are not left behind in our technological drive, drive to use more technology in our teaching and learn in. So all of these things cost money and we need to plan for that and put in our resources"
3. ENCOURAGE LIFE-LONG LEARNING
"I must say that learning should not be confined to the classroom, not to the period of one's studentship. Albert, I am sure that, a lot of skills that we are using now and a lot of knowledge that you are using now, you probably did not learn then you were in the classroom. But if you decided to stop learning the day you left school I will say that was a day that you become intellectually dead"
4. MAKE USE OF TECHNOLOGY
"Anybody who has followed me since I became the Vice Chancellor knows that the two concepts driving my leadership are technology and humanism. So we are in a technological age and so for me, irrespective of discipline, our graduates should be technologically adept. We need to incorporate technology in our teaching and learning and small and bigger ways. For instance, since I became Dean, I will not accept a letter from a student which is handwritten. No way! I mean, that is a basic, go and type it. Who receives a handwritten letter on this day? That is very basic. You force yourself to insist that your students should type their assignments. That is very basic
Me Ocran: Are there ways that allow students to type their exams on computers?
"Oh yes yes, l mean, so for instance, we have a Learning Management System (Sakai) that we are using and you can take the text on the computers. There are various options for students to do that and we're promoting that. Last year April, I launched the Vice Chancellors Program to enhance the UG student's experience and technology is central to that. So we are seeking to...
Me Ocran: So what is the program do?
"oh very quickly, they are three components. There is a Class Room Modernisation in which we are equipping our classrooms, putting in the needed projectors and interactive boards. Even makes it possible if you travel for a conference as a lecturer, you can be there and deliver your lecture. We can have students outside of the lectures or some of the classrooms, they could tune in. The second one is the One Student One Lap Top (1S1L) where we seek to use innovative ways to provide our students with laptops. The third one is the Hot Spot Confort Zones"
"Albert when you were in Legon, everywhere was close to everywhere. They were only five halls close to the teaching areas. But now we have expanded. We even have none residents students. Students come to campus and in between the e lectures, they do not have comfortable places to stay at. So we want to create these comfort lines, they are hot spot enabled, so you can go there in between your lectures to relax. You can finish up an assignment. You can do your quick reading before going into your next lesson"
Mr Ocran: Will there be a day when having provided students with One Student One Laptop, students can write their exams with laptops as part of technology instead of writing with pen and paper?
"Yes, oh yes, and it is happening now in some instances. The only thing is that we need to upscale these, get proctoring software so that students, you know proctoring software allow for remote invigilation. I wish we would not have to do that to safeguard the integrity of our exams"
5. CULTIVATE A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE GROUNDED IN TGE LOCAL CONTEXT
"We need to make our students understand the connectedness of today's world. While appreciating the uniqueness of our specific environment. So if I can give an example, the use of technology in healthcare delivery. Advanced countries are seeking to use technology to enhance healthcare delivery to even do diagnosis. That is a brilliant idea and there are applications allowing them to do that. We also have to think like that. Now, if we are going to bring something like that into our context, we need to appreciate the nature of the population that we have. The literacy levels that we have. The access to sophisticated phones that we have. Then, we have to tailor make a solution to our context. We need to also understand priorities. Maybe for us, sitting in front of the doctor and having that chat alone is like fifty per cent of your sickness gone. So if you are going to provide a totally faceless system, is that going to work in our context? To what extent can we use all of those technological innovations? We need to appreciate our context. We need to encourage our societies to be efficient in whatever we do but do not need to discount the cultural and societal specificities
Mr Ocran: Which of your achievements in the past few months as the VC gives you the most fulfilment?
"What gives me the most fulfilment is providing the technological devices for our students. Look, I can tell you of the student who was one of the very first recipients. In fact, this person sent an email to my office. He said he did not even think that we were going to respond let alone provide that need and he is forever indebted. When we did our first disbursement of the laptop for the needy students, some of the students who receive the emails said, they thought it was a scam. So generally providing that environment that enhances our student's experience, because, I believe that the committed anam starts with the satisfied student"
Mr Ocran: You talked about two pillars that drive your work as VC being Technology and Humanism. What do you mean by Humanism?
"Sometimes when you are browsed in all that we do we tend to forget that, the center or the core of all that we do is the Human Being, is the Student. University education for that matter is for the public good. It is to ensure that the life of that person's access to education is improved and then it affects the person's relations and the person's community. So as we set out our policies, as we set out our plans, I always want my staff and my faculty to keep the students at the center of it. To keep human beings at the center of it, not just the student, but also the staff. What can we do to ensure that students are comfortable, what can we do to ensure that our staff are comfortable and they will do the things that they have to do without compulsion"
The Vice-Chancellor ended her interview by appealing to individuals, and corporate bodies to come and support her vision and support the VC Initiative on the university website. The Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor is in charge of the fund
Mr Ocran: Why Legon and no place else?
"For the past 75 years #UGIS75, the University of Ghana has been engaged in training top quality human resource for the nation, the continent, and indeed the world. We have also been engaged in cutting-edge research which has contributed to the advancement and development, not just of our nation but also of the continent. These are things that we do best and we do that in a holistic environment where we try to nurture not just the intellectual potential of our students but also we are creative and spitting potential. The University of Ghana is the place to go, nowhere else. We are in our 75th year and we have gotten finer and better and that is where you have to come to"
On the future of higher education:
Prof. Nana Aba discussed the challenges facing higher education in Ghana and the need for universities to adapt to changing circumstances. She emphasized the importance of innovation and the need for universities to be proactive in responding to changes in the global landscape. She also discussed the need for universities to focus on the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which she sees as essential for the future of Ghana
Click to watch the Facebook video of the full interview: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1245943406311567
Overall, Prof. Nana Aba Appiah Amfo's interview on Joy 99.7 FM's Springboard: The Virtual University provided valuable insights into the role of leadership and education in shaping the future of Ghana. Her views on the importance of world-class education, how to address learning challenges, relevance, technology and innovation provide a useful framework for anyone interested in higher education in Ghana and beyond
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