I will not influence choice of my successor- Unical VC

From Judex Okoro, Calabar••• AS the battle over who becomes the next Vice- Chancellor of University of Calabar gathers momen­tum, the out-going chief executive of the institution, Prof. James Epoke, has stat­ed that he will not influence the choice of his successor. Epoke, who disclosed this in Calabar during an interactive session with newsmen at the weekend, said insinuations that he has a preferred candidate for the coveted position is totally untrue and should be disregarded by the univer­sity community. The rumour mills have been agog that the outgoing VC has endorsed one of the aspirants, fuelling specula­tion that he may influence the processes of selection. According to him, the university authority merely opened up competition for the position of the vice chancellorship in order to accommodate more quali­fied aspirants. “It is extremely unfair to say that I am partisan. What council has done is to bring it to a level that everybody can contest. “I have not endorsed any­body, neither do I intend to influence the choice of who succeeds me; they are all going to face the screening interview. “I only opened the land­scape to be more accommo­dating,” Epoke said. Describing his tenure as very successful, he said the university under his leader­ship attained higher heights in both academics and infra­structural developments. The outgoing Vice Chan­cellor disclosed that his ad­ministration inherited a uni­versity that was lacking not only in infrastructure and staff just as students’ disci­pline was at its lowest level. He said, “We met a landscape with issues of cultism; certificate rack­eteering; examination mal­practices; lack of infrastruc­ture; exam sorting; lack of staff discipline and so on,” adding that “today, we have been able to clear all these problems and I can tell you that, since my assumption we have graduated over 50,000. “We have provided func­tional classrooms, and our ICT center has done very well; we have a robust web­site and our online registra­tion is thriving well. “The university has now moved from its position of 56th to 9th among the best universities in Nigeria and 43rd in Africa. “So I can say that we have tried our best in the landscape we met.’’ He attributed his success in infrastructural develop­ment in the university to the intervention of Tertiary Ed­ucation Trust Fund (TET­Fund) and other funding institutions.