TOPFAITH UNIVERSITY, WE BUILD CHARACTER FOR LEADERSHIP AND ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE – DR. EMMANUEL ABRAHAM
Before September 2002, Mkpatak, an agrarian community in Essien Udim Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State was her shadow self, encircled with untamed palm tree plantations, which offered the villagers the main enterprise of manually extracting red palm oil for nearby Obo Annang market – a popular market that draws traders within and without the State.
Travelling to Mkpatak was horrendous. You have to take the risk of clutching on a rusted bike that would not only intermittently ‘throw you up and down,’ as the rider roughed it through the weather-beaten road, either from Ikot Ekpene or Abak town. Those nightmarish experiences are now history, Mkpatak is now a fast growing city, with beautiful tarred roads and contemporary buildings springing up daily, adding up to the development trajectory of the community.
It is a story of how one man’s dream translates a sleepy agrarian community into a city, whose skyline is now decked with modern architecture and residences for workers, as small businesses dot the communities.
Topfaith group of schools have built a gigantic image of an institution with a touch of excellence. One of the eye-popping facilities of Topfaith University is the library complex, which houses four different sections with large assemblage of books from renowned authors in the sciences, engineering and humanities. The well-equipped libraries have been professionally variegated to aid students and other library users easily locate authors they need.
To assuage your quest for e-learning, the institution has equipped her digital library with top-notch digital technology to drive students’ unyielding craving for academic excellence. Top faith University understands the importance of academic development of its products and has made its facilities equal to none in private university, South South of Nigeria.
So, if you are searching for an institution that would help fit the young ones into the right mould for a tripartite harvest of academic laurels, value-driven leadership and morally sound and vibrant graduates – TopFaith is it!
There are a lot of lessons to take home from the TopFaith Group’s experience. The Chairman of the group, Dr. Emmanuel Abraham is an entrepreneur with years of exposure in the fields of management, banking and educational development before birthing an institution that now enjoys not just national recognition but high global rating. Topfaith brand is deeply founded on the passion for creativity, excellence, innovation and the wisdom of God.
This is why its watchword is: “Wisdom, the greatest!” While the institution’s mission is “to diligently teach knowledge, wisdom, skills and character to enhance learning without borders,” all its academic and social activities aim at excellence.
The Chairman, Board of Governors, Dr. Emmanuel Thomas Abraham, shares his thoughts on the dream, growth and success of the Topfaith University so far, with Ima Nkanta and Eme Arthur -Oso. Excerpts
You are one creative leader who has been able to live his dreams, not just dreaming for others to activate, you dream and you put up the architecture and you build that dream to fruition. Do you really have enough time to sleep?
Yes, I sleep, I sleep perfectly well and as well dream, and as soon as I wake up with the dream, I share the dream with my team. Basically, what you’ve seen here is teamwork. It’s teamwork and of course, you need to communicate the dream to the team and then sell the dream to them to begin to own it, if not owning all the dreams, the team should own a substantial part of the dream. That is why, whether I’m here or not, the dream keeps manifesting sequentially and logically.
Some of the things I dream of, members of my team also bring in their ideas to restructure the architecture of my thoughts. So, it’s not a total one-man idea. What is paramount is my willingness to share my dreams and the capacity to communicate and then the need to persuade team members to buy into my dreams.
And you’ve done this successfully for years. At the start of Topfaith Dream, it didn’t look like this, I mean coming into the jungle, what gave you that kind of boldness?
Actually, it was the jungle that emboldened me. I remember precisely on the 28th of September, 2002, when we inaugurated the Topfaith International Secondary Schools in the jungle, the crowd was huge. They found their ways into the jungle, because they actually wanted to see what was going on in the jungle. So, the people came with some levels of expectations and curiosities. And when I was addressing the crowd, I told the people in clear terms that, ‘I remember some of my lessons in economics, when my professors used to teach me certain things like the concept of Growth Poles, a location where development is attracted. And they also taught me some things about what they call rural-urban migration, where young people, energetic, rather than stay in the rural communities, because of lack of amenities and some emotional philosophy, they move physically to the urban centres for ‘greener pastures,’ as it is normally said. Rural-urban migration is characterised by people moving from the rural community to the urban centres. I told the crowd that by my own thinking and philosophy, given the fact that the Topfaith Dream was being put to practice in a rural community, call it jungle; that I am predicting, and prophetically declaring that by the time we begin to move into the vision, we will actually reverse that order of rural-urban migration, it would rather become urban-rural migration. I’m happy that I’m living to witness the manifestation of that prophecy, because, for example, when I see people like you, who come in from big urban centres, who find their ways to this place, and I remember that my prophecy in 2002, I’m fulfilled. There are many people who have become ‘victims’ of that prophecy, so you are one of them, you have to come from the urban area to this place.
Now, I’m talking about urban-rural migration, not on temporary basis, but permanent basis. We have developed from the secondary school to the Montessori to the University. In the last analysis in the secondary school, we had students from more than 18 states of this country, including Abuja. In terms of staff structure, we have people in more than 12 states represented, they come from various parts of Nigeria, various languages and culture. That is at the secondary school level, and of course, the university, we have expanded outside the country. In fact, we just concluded a research collaboration with St. Catherine University in Chicago, US.
This team came here and stayed in our Guest houses, engaging with our students on research. They were doing research on stress among undergraduate students of universities carried out here in Topfaith University. We’re also having a collaborative discussion with Western Kentucky University.
The Deputy Vice Chancellor of Western Kentucky University and his team were here for one week for us to talk on issues of collaboration. So technically and operationally, we are operating locally with international dimensions. And therefore, my prophecy of urban-rural migration is being fulfilled.
Topfaith University ambience shows both academic and tourism hub; is tourism part of the considerations, given the beautiful serene environment?
The concept of tourism seems to be propagating itself. If you were here a fortnight ago, you would have enjoyed the company of the team of the Nigerian Super Eagles captain, William Troost-Ekong. They were here for the whole of last week. He came here with his team. He has a foundation where he is training and motivating some young people who are eager and excited about football. So, he brought a lot of people who stayed here, played football on our field, did athletics, did some readings in the library, did some lectures in our various halls, and it was a very wonderful experience. So, that is an aspect of tourism that the ambience of our environment attracts. We are very open, very homely and very secure – the air is free!
How many faculties now so far?
We have five faculties in the university. We have faculty of management and social sciences, we have five programmes there, all accredited by NUC and various professional bodies. We have accounting, business administration, economics, criminology and security studies, mass communication; that constitutes management and social sciences. We have faculty of engineering; we have eight programmes there. We have electrical electronics engineering, mechanical engineering, mechatronics engineering, computer engineering, petroleum and gas engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering. Then we have faculty of computing and applied sciences; seven programmes. We also have biochemistry, biotechnology, cyber security, computer science, software engineering, mathematics, physics with electronics, and architecture. Then we have faculty of law, for lawyers. We have the big ones, College of Medical Sciences. In College of Medical Sciences, we have medicine and surgery, nursing science, medical lab science and public health. So, we have in total 26 programmes in five faculties.
Do you have enough lecturers to man these programmes?
We have, because we are very competitive. If you were to have enough time, I would have taken you to a place called Mango Estate. Mango Estate is where we accommodate our lecturers, within the campus. It’s about a kilometre away from the main campus. There, we accommodate all our professors. So, it is part of the index of attraction and that has helped us to garner support from very highly rated academics, so we have more than enough.
Let me take on one of the programmes Petroleum and Gas, Akwa Ibom is a gas and petroleum producing State. What has been the response of students towards it?
Very well. Of course, our facilities speak for itself; one of the days I went to the petroleum and gas laboratory in the university here, I saw something called a mini refinery and then there’s some aspect of gas emission and gas control, it looks interesting. I’m not a science man, but I get attracted. And once in a while, I wonder why we (Nigerians) cannot definitely run our refineries.
They teach the students production, exploration, geological issues and all that. So, I think that we are much focused and given some practical exposure of our children who go on training in physical fields and specialized areas, I think we definitely can produce. We have not graduated anybody yet, because that’s a five-year programme and we are simply on the fourth year now. We are intensifying efforts to make that programme and many others as practical and as functional as possible.
Is there any collaboration with some of these oil and gas giants?
We have not had a formal collaboration. I would like to say it’s informal because we send our students to these oil areas – oil services companies and the Port Harcourt refineries, a lot of our students go there. In fact, the whole summer long vacation none of our students will be at home; we have our students allocated to their various fields of studies for their industrial attachment. When they return in October, they will have to submit their reports, we have a full team that supervises them. As we speak, they have been allocated to various collaborators, that’s how we want them to be functional and engaging. In fact, the law students, we find them in law firms, they even go to court to observe what is happening.
That sounds very expensive, how do they do with the funding?
What we do is that we have collaborators in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ikot Ekpene, Uyo, Eket, etc. Where you reside, we allocate you to an organisation relevant to your field of study within the vicinity of your residence during this long vacation. Of course, we have an agreement with the parents, the parents make it possible for them to attend those sessions. They have the record daily of what they do, what they experience, how they compare with what they’ve been taught, what they can suggest. So we have all that, we call it Summer Vacation Attachment Programme and it’s compulsory to every student.
Academics apart; what is the school doing about character development, morals and leadership skills?
That’s a very serious matter; it’s a project on its own, Character and leadership development skills. We have a course that spans from year one to year four, alongside the other statutory courses that make up their programmes. This course known as Character and Leadership Education is compulsory to everybody, no matter what you learn. Whether you’re in science, arts, law, engineering, architecture, or anything. That is meant to touch the heart, we say our own philosophy is 3D. We Discover, we Develop and Deploy. One of the key elements of deployment is character, what do you become after you have acquired all the pedagogy of your own talent and assignment?
You are a journalist, we have the Department of Mass Communication. After you have got a degree in Mass Communication, what becomes of you in terms of attitude, in terms of character, in terms of leadership perspective? So, we intentionally, consciously ask students to understand the fact that character determines everything. So we do that intentionally. We employ people, we’ve got the right modules that have to do with character development and we teach them thoroughly intentionally, our counsellor co-studies the modules.
