THE University of Calabar has now subscribed to a $26,000 research package with Research Africa for students and staff of the University.

Chatting with some newsmen in Calabar recently, the Vice Chancellor of the University Professor James Epoke said “research needs funding, a lot of funds are outside which are untapped, we have now started bringing funding agents to come and teach our staff on how to secure these funds.”

He said: “As I am talking here, we now subscribe to research Africa for two years to get any grants for students and staff, for them to do their research. This is quite encouraging.

He revealed: “We’ve paid up to $13,000 and Step B programme paid another $13,000 for all of us to have that subscription. It is a good subscription and any student and staff can now fit in there for researching.”

“In doing this research we also realise we need some cleansing as well, we observed that because we demand for foreign papers for promotion, that subscribers were now compromising the foreignness of their paper. We went into to that to look at it carefully, so we have now said that for your paper to be adjudged to be foreign or International, we must see it on the Internet, either goggle or scruple.”

The university don further revealed: “Because of the situation where some staff may bring hard copies of a foreign paper, then print it and plagiarise it and fit it in their paper and bring it out for us to promote them was terrible and that you will not see in internet. We have noticed a few cases and we are wiping that out and curbing that. I can now say that in the area of research and teaching we are moving on very well”.

He said: “ Within the year we also hosted both 29 local and international conferences. The reason is simple. Calabar is now the bride of the nation, so every conferences and every society meetings will like to hold in Calabar.”

“We have been bubbling in the area of teaching and research, we have tried as much as possible to improve the landscape and we know that these things will not go on with adequate infrastructure, so we are lucky.”

On infrastructure, Epoke said, “we have been able to win special intervention by check or Third fund in the South South, each geo-political region and one University at a time, and this year University of Calabar was chosen, so we are expecting N3 billion to improve our infrastructure, this we already have thought of where to put it wisely.”

“Our University runs some hospital based courses like Medicine and Surgery, Radiography, Medical Laboratory Science, Nursing and Public Health. The Teaching Hospital was all along at Moore road and during the past 30 years, they have been building a permanent site of teaching hospital that is being built by the Ministry of Health and unfortunately the Ministry of Education has been folding its hands, even with five hospital-based courses we are running, not even one building was put there for our medical students and for those people that should be in the hospital.”

He further revealedd: “We are just happy that we have been given “Tertiary Education Trust” funds, we hope to now build a Faculty of Clinical Sciences and a Faculty of Allied Medical Sciences near the hospital so that we can have classrooms and the lecturers can have space at the teaching hospital site.

“I can confidently say that we are almost finishing our planning and if you go down the campus, you will see a lot of activities, the Faculty of Education, Law and Animal House are up and various other building are coming up”.