As a life-long subscriber to the ancient philosophy of the Stoics, I have never believed in self-gratification or self-commemoration. Whatever comes my way I take and whatever does not, I ignore.
Individuals may strive for excellence but what builds great societies and nations are collective excellence and national distinctions. This is why societies peopled by wild and untamed egos always come a sad cropper when in competition with more disciplined and self-regulating communities. The greatest capacity of genius is the capacity to mask genius.
Nevertheless, there is curious convergence of national destiny and individual trajectory about the events that have brought me standing before you this morning that is a tad short of the miraculous and which cannot be ignored. There is a seamless symmetry and a perfect synchrony about the way the events unfolded that is absolutely confounding and which points at the possibility of humanity itself being nothing but mere pawns at the mercy of some Higher Order.
Let me put it this way. Death has not been kind to many of my teachers in this great institution. Many of the great mentors who shaped the destiny of this illustrious institution with their academic sophistication and cutting edge intellect across various disciplines have since joined their maker. So many of my friends, acolytes and colleagues have disappeared, never to be seen again. Had this been a less brutal and more caring society, a few of them might have been here with us this morning.
I begin this convocation lecture by paying tributes to these avatars whose contributions to the development of learning and culture in this nation will be better appreciated by future generations. I do not intend to bore you. I have been told that there is always a correlation between the decline of a society and the decline of attention span. So let us cut quickly to the chase.
The Stalled Behemoth
From the title of this convocation lecture, we can isolate three contending imageries that capture the current circumstances of the university system in Nigeria. A stalled behemoth evokes the images of a massive sea mammal trapped by adverse developments in the depth of the ocean, probing and thrashing in different directions but still unable to move forward or break through the labyrinth of oceanic adversities.
But we must remember that this mammoth creature is not dead and is still very much alive. If it does not do something foolish or foolhardy, there is every possibility that it will be seaworthy again once it is able to figure out what has overwhelmed and trapped it in the icy shackles of the deep sea.
The other two images, re-imagining and repositioning, are redemptive tropes and images of regeneration which speak to how the university system can refashion itself once it is able to free itself from the multi-dimensional debris which is at once cultural, colonial and epistemological.
The fauna of failure can sometimes be located in the seeds of success. This is the paradox of human development. Even the great universities in other parts of the world that we sometimes look up to in awe and admiration did not crash on the global stage fully rehearsed. There was a lot of false dawns, stumbling, false cues and aborted dreams.
Consequent upon this evaluation, no history of this great university can proceed without first paying tributes to its visionary builders. The founders of this university were great dreamers, visionary architects who dared nature and human possibility. Hewn out of the same pristine forest from where Oduduwa was said to have first gathered his disparate people together in a federal enterprise, the university was intended to make a statement about the developmental possibilities of the Black race.
And it did. All over the world, this university is justly celebrated for its stunning landscape, its impressive architecture and majestic presence. It is what the Yoruba themselves call “a ri ma le lo” or something that arrests your attention on sighting. It is a pity that the sundry coalition of Yoruba talents which put all this together in the first progressive coalition of Yoruba people after the civil wars of the nineteenth century could not be sustained. That was perhaps inevitable.
There were three things the great pioneers of this university put in place which set it on the path of becoming a world class institution. First, they adopted a policy of admitting only the best and the brightest irrespective of ethnic origin, religion or region. And they stuck to their guns no matter whose ox was gored. This was at a time others took to ethnic sourcing and religious recruitment.
This policy was to provide a platform for elite bonding which would have served Nigeria well as post-independence contradictions and the fissiparous tendencies of a multi-ethnic nation took a firm grip of the polity. Decades later, the fruits of this nationalistic visionary policy became visible. There is no national institution, organization, multinational corporations both at home and abroad where you will not find an Ife product. Speaking the same language at that level makes social interaction much easier.
The second policy pertains to the development of human capital. The Ife visionary pioneers put in place the best staff development programme that money could buy. All newly recruited members of staff were encouraged to go for the highest educational attainment possible in their fields. Internships were arranged abroad for those who needed international exposure in their various disciplines. I was a beneficiary of this scheme, having been sent to Sheffield and Buffalo for further training.
It was not a question of free lunch or paid holiday abroad. The scheme was subjected to rigorous and exhaustive monitoring and constant evaluation at the highest level. A friend of mine who had made the highest grade in his class and had applied to be trained in bookshop management got the surprise of his life when he was ushered to the austere presence of the then Vice Chancellor, Professor H.A Oluwasanmi and bluntly told to forget it.
He would be going to one of the best universities in the world in his field of specialization instead. He later became one of the celebrated professors in the English Language Department until he relocated abroad.
In their effort to secure the best teaching staff for the university, Oluwasanmi and his team sourced far and wide and scoured different corners of the globe. They were willing to make generous concessions to the exceptionally talented and no sacrifice was considered too great to bring the greatest brains to Ife.
This great human scaffolding and capacity building at the highest level of human endeavour laid the foundation for this great university and was to continue after Oluwasanmi left the scene and as Aboyade, the recently departed Cyril Onwumechili and Wande Abimbola took charge. They did not disappoint in terms of relentless capacity building. Ife is arguably the first Nigerian university consciously built to provide intellectual and cultural leadership for the Black race.
The liberal and humane ethos of its founding leadership made it a natural Mecca for adventurous scholars from abroad who found its pristine setting and sizzling intellectual ferment quite an alluring combination. Ife also became a destination of choice for distressed international students fleeing from chaos abroad.
At a point, Ife had students from India, Pakistan, Punjab, Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Namibia, Burundi, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and South Africa. This was in addition to many victims of internal persecution from the Nigerian university system who found solace and succour and a welcoming embrace from the university.
The world began to take note. Something truly new was coming out of Africa at last. A cultural and intellectual renaissance was well under way in Nigeria. Powered by a massive influx of petrol dollars and a prudent management of the economy which saw Nigeria through a crippling civil war without the country borrowing a dime, the country was on its way to fulfilling its manifest destiny as the first black superpower.
The glorious revival of a nation climaxed between the late seventies and the early eighties. As it usually happens in history, it was the moment that Nigeria reached the zenith of its glory that national contradictions that have been simmering under the surface began manifesting. The unresolved National Question began haunting the country again. The civil war turned out to be nothing but a battle for possession and occupation of the country among gun-toting military buccaneers.
As corruption buried its fangs deep into the entrails of the country, the military stepped in once again ostensibly to curb the monster. But the disease and its pathologies seemed to have grown worse. The university system succumbed to a deep decline from its high noon of excellence to become a hotbed of revolt and insurrection.
From the 1978 “Ali Must Go” students’ protest, Nigerian universities witnessed periodic bloodbaths which turned higher institutions into a theatre of mayhem and maiming. The audit of death and destruction is sobering and shaming. In the north where the social anomalies manifested in sharper and more graphic relief, the toll was quite prohibitive.
The reasons for these calamitous unrests in our higher institutions now appear in bold and damning relief. As unregulated growth and the absence of scientific population control impacted on the demographics of the country, dwindling resources as a result of corruption and mismanagement of national patrimony became the lot of the university system.
Unregulated growth and sharp increases in student population also became the norm in our university system as population explosion reflecting directly in an exponential increase in the number of students seeking university admission put pressure to bear on the university system.
Unfortunately and unaccustomed to dealing with this novel development, university authorities are unable to think out of the box of the famous feeding bottle paradigm with reliance on federal hand-outs thwarting innovative funding and new modes of fund-sourcing. Even the so called strategic intervention funds are not targeted at addressing infrastructural deficits but preoccupied with white elephant projects.
As the parlous economic condition bit harder and the university sank deeper into a cesspool of decay and detritus , the military authorities bared their fangs relying on the only method of control which they know very well. They had famously described themselves as professional managers of violence and the full weight of savage force was brought to bear on the university community.
As the students’ populace came under the military hammer, it was perhaps inevitable that their teachers and professors would also find themselves within the optics of the telescopic rifle. The stage for confrontation was set when a high-ranking government official accused university lecturers of teaching what they were not paid to teach. Not long after this, massive retrenchments, mass sackings, summary dismissals and the odd deportation followed.
This was straight out of some medieval script of authoritarian tyranny. It is unthinkable in a modern society. But it was a reflection of the hegemonic culture in the nation. In America, Noam Chomsky, the crusty old contrarian, continues to spew his anti-establishment expletives from his M.I.T redoubt with nobody disturbing his peace. When Charles de Gaulle was asked to put Jean Paul Sartre away for being an intellectual nuisance, the great man retorted that Sartre was also France.
Consequently, as a result of the severe economic downturn, lack of job satisfaction and the culture of intolerance, university teachers began deserting their beat in droves. Today, it will be an understatement to say that the intellectual workforce of the university system is badly depleted. Morale is low. The system is in a bad shape.
But it has managed to stay afloat. This is quite a remarkable achievement in the face of overwhelming adversity. We must single out for commendation the current set of youthful and energetic administrators who are keeping the old Ife can-do spirit alive.
How then do we begin to slog our way back to universal reckoning and to the old civilization where the Nigerian university system was held in high esteem and where this iconic university was regarded as a citadel of higher learning and pedagogic excellence?
The picture we have painted so far is of unrelieved gloom; a catastrophic systemic collapse with mutually reinforcing factors. In nautical terms it is known as a perfect storm where and when everything combines and conspires to take a system or an organization down. In a remarkable irony, not even the much lionized and universally rhapsodized Ife franchise escaped some fraying at the edges.
There were allegations of a hegemonic sub-ethnic formation dominating every aspects of life in the university. Professor Ojetunji Aboyade was later to be accused of surrounding himself with a cabal of partridge-hunting cronies, an allegation which brought out the full umbrage of the old literary lion WS in a piece titled “Of the Aparo Mafia”. (Aparo is the Yoruba word for partridge).
As a result of its origins in war and numerous hostilities, the Yoruba faction of the Nigerian elite formation has always been less cohesive more brittle than its Igbo and Hausa/Fulani competitors. This fundamental handicap was also to play out in the politics of Ife. It is the way of all human groups in competition for increasingly scarce resources.
In charting the way forward, let us remember that it has not been a tale of unremitting doom and gloom. Despite everything, let us recall with William Shakespeare that there is still some architecture in the ruins. There are many of our friends who insist that there can be no question of re-imagining and repositioning the university system until Nigeria itself is re-imagined and repositioned.
Others maintain that until the Colonial Question is resolved, a situation in which our entire epistemological criteria particularly knowledge of our own history and our own culture are trapped within the discursive formation of the imperialist masters, there can no question of anything being reimagined not to talk of being repositioned.
According to this school of thought, the Chinese, Indians and Japanese had a head start on us despite being equally subjugated because they refused to surrender their culture and civilization, particularly their religion, belief system and its fundamental worldview. The result is that these sturdy Orientals deal with the west with aplomb and superior flair, knowing fully well that civilizational advance is a revolving door and not the exclusive preserve of a particular people.
To reimagine and reposition our university system
First, there must be a wholesale revaluation and revalidation of our entire university curricular system to give it a cutting edge in an increasingly competitive and knowledge driven world. All colonial courses must give way to newer realities. Such newer realities suggest that emergent master-cultures and languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Javanese and modern Arabic should be incorporated into the curriculum for the purpose serious engagement.
Second, universities must encourage the multi-disciplinary perspective, a situation in which several fields and their unusual insights converge on a single issue making it more amenable to greater understanding. The current narrow disciplines and the equally narrow specialism they foster can only yield fragmented and isolated insights which cannot be building blocks for any honest and holistic inquiry into the plight of the continent.
These narrow subjects which are the offshoots of the constricted thought-process bequeathed to us by colonial masters and their facile philosophy of Empiricism do not allow the mind to exercise its full sovereignty over contending issues. Consequently, centres for multidisciplinary studies which are a rarity on our campuses must now be encouraged to flourish as a booster station for individual departments and for cutting edge research in global developments.
Finally, scientific developments and technological innovations always require new disciplinary perspectives. For example, the development of drone technology and Artificial Intelligence both for offensive and agricultural purposes requires novel engineering directives from our various faculties of technology. If we need to recall, Computer Science as we know it today is a direct offshoot of military experimentation on the battle field.
It is heart-warming to report that barely three years after one lamented the dearth of the deployment of Artificial Intelligence in current university experimentation in a convocation lecture at FUNNAB, the situation has improved considerably with several universities, including this one, latching on to the new frontiers of human civilization. It cannot be a perfect start, given the critical lack of resources and in the absence of the cross-fertilization of ideas that comes with global exposure.
With that, we now come to the contentious issue of adequate funding for the university system. Given the epic waste and mismanagement that has gone on, it should now be obvious to even the most starry-eyed idealists that we cannot return to the El Dorado of the past when the university was awash in cash and virtually everything was free including meal and tuition. In retrospect, it can now be seen that this was an unsustainable mirage based on the illusion of wealth.
The reality has turned out to be more dismal and distressing for the nation. Given the parlous state of the country, this era is unlikely to return for the foreseeable future. But it is the bounden duty of every responsible state to guarantee maximum education for all its citizens while ameliorating the crushing financial burden particularly for the underprivileged.
The question of adequate funding for the university has created an ethical conundrum for many older Nigerian citizens. There are many who bear the moral anguish of having to tell contemporary undergraduates to bear with the government and their straitened circumstances when they themselves passed through the same system a generation or two earlier with virtually all their needs provided for by the government.
Yet there are others who could not be bothered by this moral quandary even where silence means complicity with the failure of the postcolonial state and the abdication of civic responsibility. But the impasse has to be resolved. While government must be nudged in the right direction to avoid ostentation and fiscal malfeasance, the university administration must recognize the fact that it is time to think out of the box and come up with a new paradigm of university funding. I will now enumerate a few of the steps that could be taken.
· A means-tested loan scheme catering for the most indigent and the distressed middle class deportees must be immediately put in place. These loans must be backed by philanthropic organizations, churches, schools and even international bodies. Repayment must kick in immediately after graduation pending a period of humanitarian grace.
· University authorities must revamp and expand the current consultancy units into a proper bureau of wealth creation. The mandate of this bureau which should be headed by a top university administrator is to aggressively create wealth for the institution through large scale farming, fishing, low-level industries and the manufacturing of modern agricultural implements, etc. The university can also act as a commodity purchasing board for local farmers.
· Donations, funds, grants, international loans and subventions must be actively sought. The era of university administrators as salesmen is upon us. In this regard, the university must put its best foot forward. In America, the most decorated and garlanded professors are often recruited by their universities for this purpose. Paul de Man, the great Yale literary critic, once wrote of how he fell asleep on a sofa in a giant New York corporation while waiting to see the chairman as part of a university team.
· The issue of Diaspora donations cannot be taken lightly. There are so many concerned alumni in the Diaspora who are willing to give something back to their beloved alma mater provided there is accountability and transparency. If each of these eager donors is made to pledge a thousand dollars each, that will be a cool one billion from a thousand of them. It may well be time for our university system to create a department of Diaspora Affairs. Fortuitously, the Chairman of the diaspora commission is an old student of this university and a proud alumnus at that.
Mr chairman, distinguished audience and our graduands, I am happy to report that most of these measures are already in place in many of our universities. But they need to be deepened and intensified. The ebullience and resilience of the Nigerian spirit are such that it can survive any adversity and surmount any obstacle. It is with this redemptive trope of national durability that I sign off this morning. I thank you all.
