Taiwo Popoola
The University of Calabar, UNICAL, has been unable to retain all of its first-class graduates in its employ in the last couple of years due to the operations of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, IPPIS.
The Vice-Chancellor of UNICAL, Prof Florence Obi, stated this at a media briefing to announce various programmes for the one-week event that will culminate in the convocation ceremony of 13,786 graduates this weekend.
The VC said it was the policy of her administration to retain all graduands who made first-class grades as academic staff in the school.
She lamented that the operations of IPPIS have hindered the implementation of the policy.
“I am very glad to mention that we have a total of 13,786 students who will be graduating this weekend from our university. Among them are 66 first-class graduands. This is the highest in the school so far. A total of 3,143 have made second-class upper, 7,527 made second-class lower, while 925 made third-class, etc.
“As you know, we have a policy to retain all first-class graduates in our school’s employ. However, the operations of IPPIS have hindered us.
“We’re intending to recruit 350 staff. We’re expecting approval from the Head of Service. When it comes, we hope to include all the first-class students, including previous ones, for engagement.”
Obi disclosed that in 50 years, 168,786 students have graduated from UNICAL.
