So frightening that, not long ago, the country was aghast when a radical Professor of Political Science declared in an interview with The Punch that if he had the resources, he would not allow his children to attend Nigerian universities. Of course, the country was aghast but for the wrong reason since that was the same thing Chief Awolowo said in the 1980 when reporters quizzed him on why he was not flying Nigeria Airways. Describing the question as rude, he said he bought the best whenever he went to the market. From the benefit of hindsight, he might have sensed the onset of this peculiarly Nigerian attitude that a plane can be managed in the air. We all know where that landed the country in terms of distressful aviation disasters in the last two decades. Again, the logic here is that escapism is not an answer. Don’t start invoking or demanding nationalism from citizens when the state fails in such a very spectacular manner to meet up. The answer is to meet up. In the case of the universities, meeting up ought not to have been such a puzzle.
It has been a puzzle because, like in all other things, the Nigerian State simply lacked the clarity on how to go about it. It wouldn’t have been if when the government was faced with a challenge that the ABU, Zaria School of History or the Department of Economics at the University of Ibadan or the Engineering Faculty at one of ex-President Jonathan’s universities could best handle, it called that university or Department to look into the challenge and give it the plausible options. And this had happened in a way before when, for instance, the late Mahmud Tukur, i. e the former President of Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU) wrote a minority report on the problem of what to do with State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in 1984 which the government at that time found to be better than the main report. If that approach had been implemented, Nigeria would, by now, have multinational corporations with excellent mastery of the intricacies of international business and we might not have been opting for a ‘rapid-result’ approach in forming Transcorps two decades or so later.
This is why universities elsewhere are ‘profitable’ because not only the government but also oil companies or big business, in short as well as the military establishment, the service sector, among others, take their puzzles to the universities to research for answers for a fee. Nigerian universities are financially handicapped in an extraordinary manner because that is not happening in Nigeria. It is not happening for three reasons. The government is compelled to look for the answers to its puzzles from the IMF and the World Bank even though the IMF and the World Bank have no good idea of Nigeria beyond their discursive data. Two, by the manner we have pursued deregulation in Nigeria, the country has already robbed itself of the benefits of own transnational corporations that would have been consulting the universities and paying for such researches. Three, the outcome of one and two is a university system that is so humbled as to even contemplate asserting itself beyond the exertions of ASUU. But how many people even understand the argument ASUU is making? Even within ASUU, many do not get the point beyond the salary increase component. So, the country suffers in terms of a thinking core that is not constrained by the vagaries of politics and power.
It is, indeed, a miracle that we have survived. For, up to the Second Republic, there were no political parties that formed governments in Nigeria that didn’t have own intellectuals. In the First Republic, if you take the NEPU to which I am biased, it had the Ahmadu Jalingos and Dandatti Abdulkadirs, among many others. I am not sure about this but I think it was Aminu Kano who sent the late Professor Ahmadu Jalingo to Oxford and the University of Edinburgh through his connections with the British labour establishment, showing the extent to which real parties went to produce their own intellectuals. In the Second Republic, the PRP, NEPU’s successor, had a coterie of scholars symbolised by the Bala Usmans, Bala Mohammeds and the Uche Chukwumerijes, all late now. This was also the case with both the Action Group and the Unity Party of Nigeria, (UPN) whose best intellectual symbol must be the truly knowledgeable Professor Sam Aluko. The National Party of Nigeria, (NPN) had the Adamu Ciromas, Chuba Okadigbos and Suleiman Takumas. These three even wrote a book titled, The Mission of the NPN. All these contrast with the crisis today whereby parties have no intellectuals through whom everyone can see the party come alive in their choice of words, imageries and binaries when they take the floor anywhere.
The PDP which started very well in this regard to the extent that set up a party school regressed into a caricature of intellectualised party politics with its over-population by tin-gods and hook up to mindless prebendalism while the few intellectuals in the APC are so divided that there is clearly no core there yet. This is what one concludes from a recent clash, for example, between a party mandarin like Audu Ogbeh who though got it absolutely right by brilliantly framing the problem in terms of a power elite without a consensus on national development strategy and the imperative for a developmental state (See The Punch, June 28, 2015) was, nevertheless, challenged by the energetic but self-possessed Pat Utomi, for example, who argued for removal of fuel subsidy, citing examples that just do not add up. What a party!
The biggest of the problems of meeting up would always be that of presidential power. Now, it can be said that Nigeria has got that right at the moment in the sense that Buhari is not into cuwa-cuwa, mago-mago or transactional leadership. But Buhari is a president and most presidents are actually in jail. In other words, the problems are down stairs where, as Nigerians have it, a lot of the bad, bad things happen, far away from the radius of presidential eyes and ears. Except IBB, through his assembly of scholars in the cabinet and the Presidential Advisory Council, (PAC) and Umaru Yar’Adua who insisted on a back-channel meeting with ASUU, very few Nigerian leaders overcome this. And that must be a major reason why they can rarely figure out, for example, that there is now a contradiction between the concept of university councils and the universities. Answer: experiment with a university system without councils for some time and let’s see where that takes us.
This is without prejudice to yesterday’s exemption or any major program of reform that the government might already be putting in place, embracing the entire university system, irrespective of ownership, particularly on the very urgent task: Grabbing all the members of the outgoing generation of Nigerian scholars to re-write a ‘Research Methodology’ module or Course Unit in which ‘Philosophy of Science’ would be dominant. And encompassing how the teaching of that aspect in particular would be brought down from Heaven to earth for every students in every Nigerian university. In the humanities, for example, one can think of names to be fished out to include the Asobies, Dlakwas, Ibrahim Gambaris, Paul Izahs, Isawa Elaigus, Okey Ibeanus, Eghosa Osaghaes, Ibrahim Bello Kanos, Shola Olorunyomis, Jibrin Ibrahims, Ayo Olukotuns, Y.Z Y’aus, Abu Momohs, Etanibi Alemikas, Okello Oculis, Ogo Alubos (just to mention those I can remember immediately as there are many brilliant younger methodology guys in the system about whom I might be ignorant) to produce such a module outline for the entire system. One wouldn’t also not know the great methodology names in the sciences complex or Engineering, Architecture, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and so on.
But, without doing something about ‘Research Methodology’ which would enable our students to domesticate the ‘Philosophy of Science’ component there, we would substantially be wasting our time as far as producing graduates who can help themselves critically rather than as cultural zombies, not to talk of thinking strategically for the society. When they master that much, then they can ‘complete’ the rest in the real world since universities do not have monopoly of knowledge. It is a mystery that the much talked about NUC Accreditation wager is not about this.
The author is reachable via [email protected]
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