Interview with Professor Ibrahim Hassan Garba: Vice Chancellor, ATBU Bauchi

In this exclusive interview, we engage with Professor Ibrahim Hassan Garba, the current Vice Chancellor of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University...

In this exclusive interview, we engage with Professor Ibrahim Hassan Garba, the current Vice Chancellor of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi. A seasoned academic and administrator with a distinguished career in biochemistry and higher education leadership, Professor Garba shares his vision and strategic plans for sustainable research, development, and academic excellence at the university. From revitalizing infrastructure to strengthening community engagement and fostering innovation, he outlines key priorities that aim to position ATBU as a center of excellence both nationally and globally. The conversation also delves into the critical role of TETFund, stakeholder collaboration, and his personal journey through academia and leadership.

What are your leadership plans in ensuring sustainable research and development within the university?

VC: Good afternoon, thank you very much for the opportunity. Our plans for ensuring that we have a viable, sustainable, and impactful university rest on three tripods: one is to totally bring in the culture of teaching and learning and also the total rehabilitation of the teaching and learning environment, refocusing and rededicating ourselves towards the culture of learning. How are we supposed to achieve this? The teaching and learning environment encompasses a lot of things. First, the students themselves and the mentality you want to see in students—are they well-trained? Here, we’re training potential leaders.

Secondly, for you to be able to achieve this, we have to look at the environment where the students stay—the hostel facilities themselves, the nature of the hostels, and what services are expected to be provided in the hostels—because the hostel is the content of the university and is supposed to give you all-round protection.

The hostel is one of the areas where we have taken a critical look at, total rehabilitation of the hostel as part of the environment. Secondly, we’re also focusing on total refurbishing and reactivation of the classrooms and equipping them to be able to compete with modern global universities in techniques of learning. If you take a survey or go around to see the extent of dilapidation of the laboratories and workshops, these are the areas where we’re giving much principal attention so that we can reactivate the classrooms, laboratories, and workshops by totally rehabilitating them and bringing in critical elements of modern teaching methods—using smart boards, for example, where we have large theaters or lecture halls, we must use modern microphones to deliver lectures.

And then, of course, for more effective teaching and learning to equally take place, and at the same time, you cannot ignore the working conditions of the staff. So, as part of rehabilitation and learning, we are also upgrading and refocusing our attention on providing decent office equipment for our teeming staff; because offices must be conducive for all staff to inspire students to be more productive and decent in terms of learning the required effective skills.

So, and the culture of doing practicals—not just theory of practicals—the culture of reinstating real capacity building of staff, you must provide them with adequate capacity-building training because knowledge is dynamic. We’re also looking at building capacity and providing mentorship to academic staff in tune with global trends in learning regardless of whatever fields or professions. Because it’s not going to be an easy thing, it requires a huge commitment and resources to implement those items I mentioned above.

The university should also be able to thrive innovatively on how to put the university on sound financial footing to sustain the path of development. The problem of funding doesn’t only affect ATBU in Nigeria, but it’s part of our own responsibilities to create ways of sustaining the university and create reliable and sustainable solutions to our problems. We’re also internally looking at how best we can use what we have in developing the university—creating initiatives and avenues for generating funds for the university.

Thirdly, community relations are very important. There are several aspects of it. How do we relate with our staff and students? Very important—because this will help so much in instilling discipline and training in the university. Therefore, it’s going to be a key determinant for the actions of the students in the future—improving the students within the confines of the laws, establishing relationships between staff and students, as an institution or university where we have zero tolerance for any indecent relationship whether it’s male or female.

Then, how do we relate with the neighboring communities where the university is located? It’s sad for you to hear that in the neighboring community where Gubi Campus is located, 20 km away from Bauchi, the highest qualification among the members of the community is NCE. It’s a worrisome and disturbing trend that they are not feeling the impact of the university. Either we’re not doing the right thing in terms of our relationship with them, or they’re not doing the right thing by understanding our mission—or both of us are not doing the right thing. But on our part, we are committed to doing whatever is necessary.

We’re also interfacing with them, and we see this university as an avenue for development in their community. We want to see the host community obtaining certificates from the university. We’re also in open conversations with some other development partners and we’re trying to establish or organize livelihood-related courses for the university host communities.

We ban illegal cutting down of trees for charcoal because of environmental degradation. We’re also negotiating with some other external partners to bring courses that have to do with alternative sources of livelihood to the host communities. We are also talking with partners in the United Kingdom on empowerment training initiatives for youth and women—more especially widows and married women—in ICT skills, to learn the basic skills of Information Technology. And we are about to sign an MOU toward this as part of the community service the university will provide across the nineteen northern states of Nigeria.

We are also working to set up a foundation for human development and sustainable research across the university, and you will not be able to set this foundation successfully where there is no respect for the rule of law. Our focus is to ensure that there is complete respect for the rule of law according to appropriate leadership rankings.

How do you see the effects of TETFund in your institution?

VC: Go round—there is no building that you see here that was not built by TETFund intervention. Without TETFund, we wouldn’t have viable universities in Nigeria, with the exception of our library built by NNPC. Beyond the buildings, TETFund has been doing many other things. All the scholars that we currently have in various departments were sponsored by TETFund for their postgraduate education—PhD or MSc with TETFund sponsorship. There is no exception. In fact, in the last 20 years, TETFund has been doing this. So without TETFund, you can imagine who would be able to send scholars to further their research in postgraduate studies in large numbers to different universities across the world—in diverse fields of engineering, agriculture, medical sciences, computing, management sciences, among others. They equally sponsored us to international conferences. TETFund uses annual interventions for library development—deliberately for libraries to become fully developed. They also budget for ICT interventions to advance ICT infrastructure, and for journals, to set up career centers for interfacing with students and giving them guidance by way of career options in their future.

The university is currently negotiating with other potential partners in this perspective to provide short courses for entrepreneurship development. So, scrapping TETFund will be a bad idea for development.

How did you reach out to stakeholders with regard to bringing more positive impact to the university?

VC: We’re working tirelessly in promoting productivity and development by reaching out to serious stakeholders across the divides to bring more sustainable development initiatives across the university.

What do you want to be remembered for?

VC: To leave a legacy of excellence, research, and innovation development during my tenure as Vice Chancellor of the university.

Please, sir, can you tell us about your brief biography?

VC: Born 55 years ago, I started my primary school education in Maiduguri—then the North-Eastern region. By the time I reached Primary Five, they created Bauchi State. I finished my primary education at Yelwa Practicing School, my secondary education in 1981. I went to G.S.S. Warji from Form 1 to 3. By the time I got to Form 3, the government created science and technical secondary schools, so we sat for science exams, and we passed, and I was transferred to Government Science Secondary School, Kumo, until I finished secondary school in 1984.

In 1987, I went to the School of Basic Studies, Zaria (ABU) for my A-level. I got admission at the University of Maiduguri as a Direct Entry candidate in 1989 to 1992 and graduated from the University of Maiduguri with a first-class degree in Biochemistry.

I did my NYSC in the newly created Delta State, then at NNPC. When the June 12 political crisis started, I later joined the services of ATBU Bauchi on April 8th, 1994, as a Graduate Assistant and rose to the rank of Professor of Biochemistry in 2012. Since I joined ATBU, I never went anywhere on sabbatical. I was two-term Deputy Dean for the Faculty of Sciences. After my time, I was also appointed as DVC Administration, where I served for two terms. I have written various research proposals at the Center for Science and Entrepreneurship Development and was later appointed Vice Chancellor of the university on October 9th, 2024.

I have gone to Europe, India, and quite a number of countries in Africa for about two years during my post-doctoral research in 2010, mostly in one of the finest laboratories in Molecular Medicine in Europe. Two years later, I got funded by the EU to the English-speaking part of Cameroon as a health research fellow to study their health systems. Thereafter, I went to Cape Town in South Africa—still part of the grant—and worked on Cancer Biology there. I then moved to Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Infection, Berlin.

Prior to that, I was a health systems research fellow in Northwestern Cameroon. I also worked at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, on Cancer Biology, specializing in Biochemistry and disease infection, with a focus on HIV in particular, Malaria, and TB—fully sponsored by the European Union. My work in Germany focused on the biochemical mechanisms of TB and Malaria—all funded by the European Union.

I also ventured outside science with a special passion for project management, monitoring, and operational management, among others.

Happily married with kids.