AMERICAN-NIGERIAN UNIVERSITY

The meaning of the abbreviation ICT, I am sure, you know too well (Information and Communication Technology), but how about CS? You have no idea of what it means? Well, for the pregnant mother waiting in a labour room to be delivered of her baby through surgery or medical operation, it may mean caesarian section (CS) but at the American University of Nigeria (AUN), Yola, CS stands for Community Service. Tagged SSS, abbreviation initials it shares with Nigeria’s State Security Service or Senior Secondary School, at AUN, SSS stands for Students Serving Society. A totally new concept in the university- community relationship, endorsed by the President of the university, Dr. Margee Ensign, the spirit behind it seems to be driving every student and staff that you see on the university campus to go looking for whatever help they can offer to make themselves relevant in the lives of the people of their community. Such services include teaching the local school pupils, painting their schools, coaching them on some sporting skills, and lending financial help to indigent students where necessary, etc. “There was one school we went to, Miss Hashiya Sanusi-Bayero, grand- daughter of the Ado Bayero of Kano, recalls in a chat with Education Review. “The teachers there did not have enough chalk to write with. In fact, the situation was such that the whole school had only one packet of chalk, to which the teachers returned the rest of the chalk they wrote with at the end of the school day; otherwise they would not see the chalk to write with, the following day. We bought for the school enough packets of chalk to go round the classrooms. Coming from a fairly comfortable environment, this community service of a thing has opened my eyes to see the sufferings that others are going through and to see the way I can help. I find the experience very exciting.” “For me it is very exciting to see our students take to a programme that says you are not here in this planet just for yourself; you are here to share with others what you have,” Dr. Margee Ensign, President of AUN, remarks. “The vision here is to never have a separation between knowledge for own sake; the knowledge we have should be applied to make things better. So we are talking about reorienting our programmes to connect the theory with the application. The Social Entrepreneurship programme is a vehicle for doing that. “When I first came here I was told, ‘oh, Nigerian students didn’t do community service.’ It is not something they might be interested in. To the contrary, once we really opened up opportunities for AUN students they liked it. I think it is one of the exciting things on campus – our students serving society. They go into the community on Fridays. Last semester 270 students worked half of the day every Friday for the entire semester.” In Yola, the natives are grateful for the much-needed help they’ve receiving through the AUN’s community service. It was such Macedonian call for help that propelled Ebuka Ukwa, majoring in Communications, to, in October, last year, donate over N30,000 to 15 indigent orphans studying at Government Day Secondary School, Yola. Ukwa told AUN NEWSLETTER, an in-house publication of the university, that he was inspired to make the donation following a trip to the school where he was moved by the inability of the orphaned students to pay their school fees standing in arrears for two years. The beneficiaries, who are all in the Junior School cadre (JSS), were on the verge of withdrawing because of their parents’ incapacity to pay their fees. Ukwa said the donation was meant to clear the outstanding fees and pay in advance for another full academic session. “I think the community is really thrilled with these new initiatives,” Ensign said. “We have tremendous economic power in this community. We need to reach out more and I think the community is responding very favourably. So I see very positive reactions in what the students are doing.” “Impressions about us are beginning to change as they see a lot of our students going to do community service,” Abubakar Abba Tahir, Director of PR and Communications, adds. There’s another angle to the Social Entrepreneurship or the SSS philosophy and that is the angle of fellow students engaging in whatever menial job they can do or social services they can render, this time, for a fee, in order to raise money to, collectively, take care of the financial needs (including tuition and boarding fees) of indigent students among them. Sometimes, the more buoyant ones task themselves to raise some money from their pocket money, in order to help. “We are like one big family here,” Sanusi-Bayero, quips. Education Review discovered this to be true the week it visited the campus. Pasted by AUNHS (American University of Nigeria Honours Society), on one of the notice boards in Peter Okocha’s Hall was this notice. “Members of the AUN Faculty will be cycling from Numan to Yola on the 26th of February, in order to raise money for the AUNHS Scholarship fund for AUN students”, a part of it read. “Join us in creating the AUNHS SCHOLARSHIP FUND!!! 1 mile = 1.609km =N500. Then it adds that “donations are accepted per mile. No contribution is too small.” In case you don’t understand what you’ve just read, what the notice is saying in a nutshell is that financial proceeds from the “Cycling for Charity” event will be used to take care of the financial needs of indigent AUN students. In fact, sources say 10 per cent of the internally gen