For nearly two decades, Nigeria’s public university system existed in a state of uncertainty—never fully open, never fully closed. Each strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), “without a scintilla of doubt the country’s most disciplined, most serious, and absolutely most focussed Labour Union”(columnist), emptied campuses, fractured academic calendars, and reinforced a national sense of déjà vu: agreements signed, hopes raised, promises broken”- channels TV.com
If you have not been able to put your hands on the problem with Nigeria, it must be because you have never really put your mind to it as it is so easy to know. It is simply that of a blessed country, home to some of the best and brightest on the surface of the earth but which have, unfortunately, seen several hundreds of thousands of its citizens voted with their feet, out of the country, simply because it has been ruled at the topmost level, like for ever, by its 3rd Eleven – those you will, with considerable justification, describe as emergency, or amateur politicians. It was worse with the military. That, of course, was until the coming into office of the incumbent, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Please come with me as I navigate this obvious truism.
Prof Richard Adeboye Olaniyan is one teacher of mine I respect hugely. He taught me History at the University of Ife, Ile – Ife. He had arrived the University from the U.S, during my graduating year, after earning a Ph.D. from Georgetown University,
Washington D.C.
A President’s Scholar, and Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, he is the author of several books, among them, ‘IFE: Holy City Of The Yorubas’.
Today is not about him; rather it is about the highly thought provoking piece he sent me sometime ago; and for him to share a WhatsApp post, it must have been worth its weight in gold.
That post became the theme of my article of 4 June, 2021 about which the new FG – ASUU renegotiated agreement pungently reminds me. It was titled: Cry The Beleaguered Country.
It becomes germane now that President Tinubu is on the way to returning our Universities, and higher institutions generally, to an era of sanity and stability again, reminiscent of what he did with the scandalously corrupt Nigerian oil industry when, on his first day in office, he put paid to fuel subsidy, a ruinous sink hole.
Happy reading.
Smartest People, Mediocre Nation – The Irony of Nigeria.
British Nobel laureate,Dorothy Hodgkin, once noted that the University of Lagos was one of the world’s centres of expertise in her field of chemical crystallography.
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria had the first world class computer centre in Africa while the University of Ife had a notable pool of expertise in nuclear Physics. Our premier University of Ibadan had an international reputation as a leading centre of excellence in tropical medicine, development economics and the historical sciences. It is no news that the Saudi Royal family used to frequent the UCH, Ibadan, for medical treatment in the sixties.
The engineering scientist, Ayodele Awojobi, a graduate of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, was a reputed genius. He tragically died of frustration because our environment could not contain, let alone utilise, his huge talents.
Ishaya Shuaibu Audu, pioneer Nigerian Vice-Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello, Zaria, collected all the prizes at St. Mary’s University Medical School London. His successor in Zaria, Iya Abubakar, was a highly talented Cambridge mathematician who became a professor at 28 and was a noted consultant to NASA. Alexander Animalu was a gifted MIT physicist who did work of original importance in superconductivity. His book, Intermediate Quantum Theory of Crystalline Solids, has been translated into several languages, Russian inclusive.
Renowned mathematician, Chike Obi solved Fermat’s 200-year old conjecture, with pencil and paper, while the Cambridge mathematician, John Wiles, achieved same with the help of a computer, working over a decade.
After the harsh environment of the 1980’s IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programme, the Babangida military dictatorship undertook massive budgetary cutbacks in higher education in Nigeria.
Our best and brightest fled abroad.
Today, Nigerian doctors, scientists, engineers etc are making incalculable contributions in Europe and North America.
Philip Emeagwali won the 1989 Gordon Bell Award for his work in super-computing. Jelani Aliyu designed the first electric car for American automobile giant, General Motors. Olufunmilayo Olopede, Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, won the McArthur Genius Award for her work on cancer.
Winston Soboyejo, who earned a Cambridge doctorate at 23, is a Princeton engineering professor, laurelled for his contributions to materials research. He is Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Washington University biomedical engineering professor Samuel Achilefu received the St. Louis Award for his invention of cancer-seeing glasses that is a major advance in radiology.
Kunle Olukotun of Stanford University did work of original importance on multi-processors.
National Merit laureate Omowunmi Sadik of State University of Binghamton owns patents for biosensors technology. Young Nigerians are also recording stellar performances abroad.
A Nigerian family, the Imafidons, were voted “the smartest family in Britain” in 2015.
Anne marie Imafidon earned her Oxford Masters’ in Mathematics and Computer Science when she was only 19. Today, she sits on several corporate boards and was awarded an MBE in 2017 for services to Science. Recently, Benue State University mathematician Atovigba Michael Vershima solved the two centuries’ old Riemann Conjecture that has defied giants such as Gauss, Minkowski and Polya.
Another young man, Hallowed Olaoluwa, was one of a dozen “future Einstein”, awarded postdoctoral fellowships by Harvard University. He completed a remarkable doctorate in mathematical physics at the University of Lagos, aged 21. While at Harvard he aims at focussing on solving problems relating to “quantum ergodicity and quantum chaos”, with applications to medical imaging and robotics.
Another University of lagos alumnus, Ayodele Dada, graduated with a perfect 5.0 GPA, an unprecedented feat in a Nigerian university. Victor Olalusi recently graduated with such stellar performance at the Russian Medical Research University, Moscow, and was feted as the best graduate throughout the Russian Federation. Habiba Daggash, daughter of Senator Sanusi Daggash, recently graduated with a starred first in Engineering at Oxford.
Emmanuel Ohuabunwa earned a GPA of 3.98 out of a possible 4.0 as the best overall graduate of the Ivy-League Johns Hopkins University. Stewart Hendry, Johns Hopkins Professor of Neuroscience, described the young man as having “an intellect so rare that it touches on the unique…a personality that is once-in-a-life-time”.
There is also young Yemi Adesokan, postdoctoral fellow of Harvard Medical School who patented procedures for tracking the spread of viral epidemics in developing countries.
Ufot Ekong recently solved a 50-year mathematical riddle at Tokai University in Japan and was voted the most outstanding graduate of the institution. He currently works as an engineer for Nissan, having pocketed two patents in his discipline. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
If our system were not so inclement to talent we would be celebrating a bountiful harvest of geniuses in all the fields of human endeavour from our home Universities. This is why the correlates between our gene-pool and national development are so diametrically opposed; so bad Nigeria is almost becoming a failed state.
We punch miserably below our weight in the hierarchy of world economics and politics. None of our institutions come near the top 500 in the World Universities League Table. Almost 50% of our people live in extreme poverty. Youth unemployment hovers around 45 percent ;70% and above, for the far-North.
The poverty is heartbreaking. Our per capita GDP is less than $3,000 as compared to Singapore’s $55,252. We have the worst road carnage record in the world, with more than 20,000 lost to road accidents annually.
We wasted some $16 billion on the power sector during the Obasanjo years and our people still live in darkness, decades after, though he has forgotten all that debacle grandstanding, and sermonising, all over the place.
Many state governments, before the removal of fuel subsidy by President Tinubu, were literally bankrupt, and could hardly pay their staff salaries.
With stability now sure to return to our higher education – and government must extend this sanity to all levels of the country’s educational system – we shl.ould be able to invest in science and innovation, both of which are the way to our future development.
Without science and innovation we will be unable to overcome our underdevelopment, and millennial servitude.
Leveraging on our Universities,
we should be able to incentivise all-round talent while building a merit-based society.
In Brazil, a Nobel laureate is entitled, by statute, to the same pension rights as a former President. Society must adequately recognise, and reward, all men and women of excellence.
Our government should keep a roster of all super-achievers of Nigerian origin whose brains we should tap to build this country”.
The first thing to note in the above is that no part of Nigeria is left out of this sheer embarrassment of riches. So I ask: why do we remain this pathetic?
As I indicated earlier, the problem lies in our political leadership recruitment process.
We continue to see opposition politicians berrating President Tinubu for the bold measures he took at the beginning of his administration, and since, whereas without them, as recently cogently argued by Tunde Lemo, a former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank, the Nigerian economy would since have gone south. Afterall, Venezuela has far more oil reserves than Nigeria can ever dream of. Yet it was in tatters before U. S President Trump’s recent assault on its sovereignty.
Some even argue that governance has nothing to do with education, but I’d say that is nothing but gross ignorance.
Judging by how past governments messed up our Universities, as a result of which many of our best brains migrated abroad, the place and role of leadership and governance should be more than obvious.
Nigerians must, therefore, be very careful in our choice of leaders, going into the 2027 Presidential election.
There is this apocryphal story of the Heads of state of the UK, U.S and some other developed countries going to God to remonstrate against His many blessings on Nigeria in human and material resources, whereupon God was reported to have told them, to go and look at Nigeria’s leadership cadre, whereupon the visitors left happier than they arrived.
Was it by chance that not a single Nigerian former Head of state, came prepared for office? All that the much revered Sir Tafawa Balewa wanted to be was a teacher, perhaps a school headmaster. Even President Obasanjo, to whom some development could be credited, was only an accidental military Head of state who became President only because some people wanted to profit from military “espirit de corps”.
Do we have a single Nigerian Head of state one can compare with Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the way he equipped, and prepared, himself for political leadership? Wasn’t that why on his death, a British Prime Minister said he could, effortlessly, have been the British Prime Minister?
How can Nigeria ever develop with our present political architecture in which some members of our legislative houses are barely literate?
Yes, many will ask legitimate questions as to how well political appointees from within our universities performed in office?
The saying that “fish rots from the head down” fully encapsulates the Nigerian condition. It confirms the fact that leadership is key to organisations, qua organisation, be it a country, a company, or even family.
The consequences of our political leadership failure are legion. For instance,
the word, “Andrew” assumed a new meaning in Nigeria when President Obasanjo, as military Head of state, descended on University lecturers, ordering them out of their accommodation on campus. Many like Professor Isaac Adewole, the former Minister of Health, knew that they had to rapidly bid the country bye.
Today, not just the family head, but entire households, are fleeing town – Japa – ing, as they now call it, presenting Nigeria like a beleaguered country with its people, including top salary earners, with their entire families, thronging Airports, to check out before the apocalypse.
This is happening especially in areas of the country where people value their children and would not simply throw them to the elements, or at the mercy of marauding terrorists.
The above, and much more, is where puerile political leadership, which neither “incentivises talent”, nor concerns itself with “building a merit-based society”, has landed Nigeria while her best continue to illumine the outside world.
One needs not dwell on the need for members of ASUU and those other unions that will similarly be impacted, to make the best use of this opportunity for the greater good of Nigeria
