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By Onyekachi Eze<\/p>\n
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The atmosphere of academic excellence and institutional accomplishment will take centre stage on Saturday, September 5, 2026, as the University of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences (UAES), Umuagwo, Imo State, holds its maiden Convocation Ceremony, marking a historic milestone in the young university\u2019s journey.<\/p>\n
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In a pre-convocation press conference held at the Senate Chamber of the institution on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, by the Vice Chancellor, Professor Christopher Chiedozie Eze, no fewer than 505 graduands are expected to receive their degrees, with 20 emerging as First Class graduates, in what promises to be a defining moment in the institution\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
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The epoch-making ceremony is not merely a celebration of graduating students; it is a powerful testament to the resilience, vision and steady transformation of an institution determined to carve a distinctive niche in Nigeria\u2019s higher education landscape, said the VC.<\/p>\n
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Satisfied with the level of progress attained so far, Prof. Eze disclosed that from its formative years, UAES has continued to evolve as a university with a clear mandate to blend academic knowledge, agricultural innovation and environmental sustainability in addressing contemporary development challenges.<\/p>\n
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Full text of the press conference reads thus;<\/p>\n
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“REMARKS BY PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER CHIEDOZIE EZE, Vice-Chancellor, University of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, Umuagwo<\/p>\n
AT A PRESS CONFERENCE AHEAD OF THE MAIDEN CONVOCATION CEREMONY<\/p>\n
Wednesday, 2nd September 2026<\/p>\n
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PROTOCOL<\/p>\n
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Gentlemen and ladies of the Fourth Estate, good morning, and thank you for honouring this invitation on such short notice. I recognise the presence of editors, correspondents and media executives representing the print, broadcast and digital press across Imo State and beyond. I recognise, too, my colleagues on this day: the Ag. Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), Dr. Obinna C. U. Adumanya; the Ag. Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Administration), Dr. Emmanuel Ezenwa Uzodimma; the Ag. Registrar, Dr (Mrs) Olachi Chinyere Ihejirika; the Ag. Bursar, Dr. Iwunna Ada Remi; the University Librarian, Professor Chidi C. Nwosu; and members of Management present with me this morning. You are all welcome.<\/p>\n
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OPENING REMARKS<\/p>\n
I have asked to meet with you today, three days ahead of a ceremony that this University has waited seven years to hold, because I believe the story we are about to tell on Saturday deserves to be told properly, and told first to you. On Saturday, 5th September 2026, the University of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, Umuagwo will hold its Maiden Convocation Ceremony. It is a young university’s first opportunity to stand before the public and say, with evidence rather than promise: this is what we set out to build, and this is what we have built. I did not want that evidence to be confined to the convocation arena. I wanted it placed, first, in your hands, and through you, in the hands of every Nigerian who has ever wondered whether a specialised university founded in 2019 could, within so short a time, produce graduates, patents, research grants and infrastructure worthy of an older institution. This morning, I intend to answer that question fully.<\/p>\n
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WHO WE ARE, AND HOW FAR WE HAVE COME<\/p>\n
Let me begin with our identity. UAES was established by law on 6th February 2019 and opened its doors to academic work on 6th May 2021. I was privileged to be appointed the University’s second substantive Vice-Chancellor on 23rd November 2022, and it is from that vantage point that I report to you today. We are a specialised, agriculture & Environment -anchored university, but our reach is deliberately broader than agriculture and environment alone: we have five Faculties: Agriculture; Environmental Sciences; Science and Computing; Engineering; and Arts, Management and Social Sciences spread across thirty-one Departments, because we were established to look at the whole chain that runs from the soil to the science that protects it, and from the environment we depend on to the enterprise systems that determine whether that dependence is sustainable.<\/p>\n
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That academic mandate is carried by a workforce of 689 staff: 284 academic and 405 non-academic, and by a student population that has grown every single session without interruption: from 291 pioneer undergraduates in 2021\/2022 to 584 in the current 2025\/2026 session, a cumulative total of 2,355 students admitted since inception, with roughly 2,237 students on our campus today. It is a modest number by the standards of older universities, but its unbroken, year-on-year growth is, I believe, the more important story.<\/p>\n
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THE PIONEER HARVEST<\/p>\n
On Saturday, we will confer degrees on our first two graduating sets. The 2024\/2025 session produced 115 graduates from fourteen Departments, six of whom earned First Class Honours. The 2025\/2026 session produced 390 graduates from twenty-four Departments, fourteen of whom earned First Class Honours, a stronger showing, at the highest level of academic distinction, from our second graduating set. In total, 505 pioneer graduates will take part in the convocation procession on Saturday. I wish to place on record, ahead of the ceremony, our Overall Best Graduating Students: Miss Alfred Ugochi Juliet of the Department of Business Administration, who graduated with a Cumulative Grade Point Average of 4.92 for the 2024\/2025 session, and Mr. Oji Shedrach Ozeum of the Department of Marketing, who graduated with a CGPA of 4.90 for the 2025\/2026 session. These young Nigerians accepted the burden of being pioneers in a university with no precedent to lean on, and they have discharged that burden with distinction.<\/p>\n
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A CERTIFICATE WORTH THE PAPER IT IS PRINTED ON<\/p>\n
I am aware that the first question any discerning parent, employer or media house asks of a young university is a simple one: is the certificate credible? I place our accreditation record before you without embellishment. Twenty-four of our academic programmes currently hold full accreditation, with four others on interim status and under active improvement, a trajectory that has steadily improved through every accreditation cycle since 2022\/2023. That upward movement, cycle after cycle, is the surest evidence that what we confer on Saturday is a certificate of genuine, verifiable value. One thing standing out for our graduates is the ability to engage\/ receive training in courses like agriculture, environment and entrepreneurship before graduation.<\/p>\n
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RESEARCH, INNOVATION AND GLOBAL RECOGNITION<\/p>\n
A university fulfils its mission most completely when it also generates knowledge and applies that knowledge to society’s problems. In the short span since inception, UAES researchers have attracted a portfolio of funded projects that would be respectable even for a much older institution, projects backed by the European Union, the United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, a consortium of European governments, and the Gates Foundation, delivered through RTI International and RUFORUM. Domestically, we have won a TETFund National Research Fund grant in each of the last three consecutive cycles.<\/p>\n
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I am especially proud to report that in 2025, a UAES team was selected among only eleven institutions nationwide and the only university from the South-East to compete in the TETFund Alliance for Innovative Research(TETFAIR). Their entry, a hybrid solar-battery powered multi-crop drying system which the team named the AgroNova Dryer, did not merely participate; it emerged Overall Champion and also won the Pitch Deck Champion award, and was formally patented by the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment in November 2025. Somewhere in Nigeria today, a farmer’s harvest dries safely and cheaply because a team from this young university decided a problem was worth solving. RUFORUM has, further, entrusted UAES with curriculum design work at a continental level for its Neglected and Underutilised Species programme, a recognition that, five years after admitting our first student, I do not take lightly.<\/p>\n
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BUILDING WHILE TEACHING<\/p>\n
Every institution founded from scratch faces the same dilemma: how do you teach students today in a campus you are still constructing? Between November 2022 and August 2026, we addressed that dilemma through more than 160 discrete projects of construction, repair, rehabilitation and procurement, funded by TETFund, the Imo State Government and our own internally generated revenue, including a renovated Faculty of Engineering complex, a 500-capacity lecture hall, a rehabilitated Medical Centre, improved hostel and laboratory facilities, and solar lighting across our student hostels. Alongside this, we have invested deliberately in our staff: 144 members of staff sponsored to conferences since 2023 at a cost exceeding one hundred million naira, 288 supported through TETFund-sponsored training, 105 through Institution-Based Research Grants, and 55 currently on TETFund doctoral scholarships.<\/p>\n
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Another 289 staff have benefited from FUTO Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Procurement, Environmental and Social Standards free of charge including 40 staff who received Diplomas in the three areas of CE-SPESS training. A university is only as current as the training of the people who run it, and we have treated that training as a budget line, not an afterthought.<\/p>\n
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AN APPEAL TO PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS<\/p>\n
To every young Nigerian weighing where to study, I say this: come and see what a five-year-old university has already made possible for its pioneers. Our graduates leave here trained not only in their chosen discipline but also in agriculture, environmental sciences and entrepreneurship as well, equipped to be job creators rather than job seekers.<\/p>\n
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Admission into our 2026\/2027 session is ongoing, and I invite prospective students and their parents to trust us.<\/p>\n
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AN APPEAL TO DONORS AND PARTNERS<\/p>\n
To our donors, past and prospective: this convocation would not be what it is without the goodwill of individuals, families, corporate friends and sister institutions who have given of themselves, in scholarships, in library books, in economic trees planted under our Donate-Plant-Nurture initiative, and in kind. A university is built not by government subvention alone but by a community that believes in what it is building. I invite more of that goodwill, directed toward scholarships for our high-flying students, toward hostel and laboratory expansion, and toward our library.<\/p>\n
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To research institutions, development agencies and industry: I extend an open hand of partnership. We have shown, through the AgroNova Dryer and through our international research portfolio, that this University can deliver credible, fundable, patentable work. We are ready to do more of it, with more partners, at greater scale.<\/p>\n
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CONCLUSION<\/p>\n
Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I have not come to you this morning to claim perfection. A young university’s needs in funding, in staffing, in infrastructure, in security are never fully met, and I will continue to place those needs honestly before Government and before the public. But I have come to show you, in facts and figures rather than sentiment, that the resources entrusted to this administration have been spent on the ground, brick by brick, and that the trust our pioneer students and their parents placed in a young institution is being honoured, this Saturday, with the graduation of 505 students, including twenty First Class graduates.<\/p>\n
I thank you for your time this morning, and I look forward to your presence and your fair and accurate reporting at our Maiden Convocation Ceremony on Saturday, 5th September 2026. Thank you, and God bless the University of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, Umuagwo.<\/p>\n
Professor Christopher Chiedozie Eze<\/p>\n
Vice-Chancellor”.<\/p>\n
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Meanwhile, at the heart of this unfolding institutional story is the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Eze, whose administration has placed premium on academic excellence, infrastructural development, research, innovation, staff development and strategic partnerships.<\/p>\n
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As the university prepares to celebrate its maiden set of graduates, the Vice-Chancellor is expected to unveil a comprehensive five-year trajectory designed to consolidate UAES\u2019 gains, strengthen its academic standing and position the institution as a formidable centre of learning, research and innovation.<\/p>\n
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With 20 First Class graduates among the 505 graduands, the maiden convocation offers more than a ceremonial passage into the next chapter of the students\u2019 lives; it presents a compelling scorecard of what UAES has achieved within a relatively short period. It is against this backdrop that Professor Eze\u2019s five-year vision assumes significance, offering a glimpse into an ambitious roadmap aimed at taking the university from a promising young institution to a nationally and internationally competitive citadel of knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
UAES Sets September 5th 2026 For Maiden Convocation Ceremony Of 505 Students, 20 First Class<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-frontpage"],"yoast_head":"\n