Category: Saturday

Segun Ayobolu

His Worshipfull Majesty. That evocative title of T.M. Aluko’s novel about the clash between absolutist monarchy and emergent modernization was to have been the title of this piece. Dr Wale Babalakin, Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council, University of Lagos, appeared to me to be the absolutist ‘Kabiyesi”, he who must be obeyed, in the wake of the announcement in far away Abuja by the council he presides over, of the removal from office of the Vice Chancellor of the institution, Professor Toyin Ogundipe, for alleged gross misconduct. Could I be blamed for reaching such a conclusion along with many other members of the public?

Had the same Dr Babalakin not bared his fangs earlier in the year and caused the cancellation of the institution’s already advertized 2020 Convocation ceremonies to the obvious pain, inconveniences and possibly irreparable losses suffered by thousands of students and their parents? Even if the governing council had not been carried along by the university management headed by Professor Ogundipe in organizing the convocation, should the Pro-Chancellor not have acted with greater tact and wisdom given the serious negative consequences of a cancellation of the event for innocent students and parents?

A fall out of that incident was the further alienation of Babalakin from key stakeholders in the university leading to the University of Lagos branch of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) declaring him persona non grata on the campus. This obviously led to the last council meeting that purportedly sacked the VC holding in Abuja.

Before the Non Academic Staff Union (NASU) of the university undertook a 180 degree turn and declared its support for the actions of the Governing Council including the appointment of a new Acting VC for the institution, Professor Theophilus Omololu Soyombo, all key stakeholders at the university – ASUU, NASU, The Senate and the Alumni association had all opposed the removal of Ogundipe claiming due process was not followed. For an observer from outside, it thus appeared that Dr Babalakin was a lone voice bent on disemboweling the VC for reasons that seemed to go beyond the undoubtedly serious allegations leveled against Ogundipe. If indeed, Ogundipe had committed such grave infractions as alleged, surely it should not be difficult for the governing council to carry along the vast majority of the UNILAG community who are presumably rational beings?

That indeed was this columnist’s frame of mind until I read the full text of a statement by the Governing Council titled ‘Due process was followed in the removal of the former Vice Chancellor, Professor Oluwatoyin Ogundipe’ and published in two and a half pages of a national newspaper. The council leveled grave allegations of financial malfeasance and other misdemeanors against Ogundipe and insisted that he had been given opportunities to defend himself, which he did to the utter dissatisfaction of a majority of council members.

So weighty were the copiously stipulated allegations against the sacked VC that one finds it difficult to understand why the Pro chancellor and council appear to be in the minority as well as on the defensive as regards Ogundipe’s removal. As stated earlier, NASU has since made a U-turn although ASUU, the institution’s Senate as well as the Committee of Vice Chancellors of Universities remain firmly opposed to the VC’s removal on the grounds that due process was not followed.

According to a news report on the outcome of the probe of Ogundipe’s administration by a committee of the council, “According to the council, the Dr Saminu Dagara-led committee that probed Ogundipe reported that the VC and some members of his management team spent N57.9m on foreign trips, while they purchased two vehicles for N52.08m using “a contract splitting device that is very illegal.” The committee also reported that Ogundipe’s management allegedly spent N52.2m on waste management and janitorial services “in breach of procurement laws and practices”. The VC was also alleged to have spent N112.4m to renovate the official quarters of three principal staff, including the VC’s lodge, renovated with N49.4m.”

The report continued, “In the last six months, Prof. Ogundipe has recklessly been spending money without giving any accounts. For instance, while the council approved spending towards staff palliatives for COVID-19, he claimed he spent N67m on this without providing any breakdown of his spending, the council stated”.

There are several other damaging allegations made by the council against Ogundipe in its published statement. These are very serious and damaging allegations, which the University Council has put in the public domain. Professor Ogundipe should in my view be very eager to clear his name also in the public domain. This goes beyond just the issue of ensuring bureaucratic due process in the running of the institution’s administrative machinery. Professor Ogundipe is first and foremost an academic and scholar before he is a university administrator.

Adherence to truth and moral integrity are indivisible components of the definition of the intellectual. Even more important than Ogundipe retaining his job as VC is his protecting his image and ethical integrity as an intellectual. This requires that he also put in the public domain a rigorous detailed defense in response to the allegations against him just as the Governing Council has done.

To my utter disappointment, I rather saw visuals of Professor Ogundipe at the head of a demonstrating crowd of academic and non-academic staff protesting his removal. As the great economist, J. Schumpeter, famously noted, the individual tends to drop to a lower level of mental performance when acting as a member of a crowd. What is required now of Professor Ogundipe is a meticulous debunking of the allegations against him, which appeals to reason rather than seeking to appeal to emotion through unwarranted crowd action.

But then, what about Dr Babalakin? Is he without blame in the entire unfortunate scenario? I don’t think so. I am told, for instance, that a member of the Governing Council that he heads is also a staff in his law chambers. That is immoral and indefensible. Again, it is difficult to understand why he seemingly wants to single handedly foist a VC on the institution without regard to stipulated processes. His Acting VC, Professor T.O. Soyombo, is said to be a man of sterling academic standing with a long period of meritorious service in several key academic and administrative positions in the university spanning four decades.

That surely cannot preclude him from going through the rigorous stipulated processes to emerge as VC. At best, his appointment as Acting VC can only be validated by the doctrine of necessity while he must be subjected to the due competitive process to become a substantive occupant of the office.

In any case, in his maiden address to staff who gathered to welcome him at the University’s Senate building on Wednesday, Professor Soyombo said among others, “…We must encourage our staff; we must motivate our staff to work well. I can assure us that issues of staff welfare; issues of promotion will be well addressed. The resources we have are very limited. But I will also ensure that within the limitation of our resources we still explore the possibilities or avenues for generating more internal revenue. And the profits from this will be utilized more equitably for the generality of staff”.

Here we have it. Professor Soyombo will be a ‘welfarist’, ‘distributive’ VC.  He spoke more like a politician than a sober academic and reflective administrator. No wonder an impressed member of NASU responded thus, “I want to appreciate you; you started by saying our welfare will be very paramount. The welfare of members of staff, we are not going to joke with it. That is the only way we will know that the management recognizes us”. Now, all this talk of welfare, what does it really mean? Don’t the workers collect their stipulated salaries and allowances?

What I can surmise from all of this is that UNILAG reaps humongous amounts in Internally Generated Revenue, which Professor Soyombo plans to increase and expend largely on ‘welfare’ to appease workers and consolidate his hold on power. The haste with which he accepted the appointment in controversial circumstances and with the majority of his fellow professors in Senate still opposed to the action of the Governing Council is indecent. It shows that he is equally desperate for the job and it is not unreasonable to attribute this to the obvious juicy bounties associated with the office as revealed by the Babalakin/Ogundipe confrontation.

UNILAG is obviously very sick and is a mirror that reflects Nigeria’s rotten public university system as a whole. She needs an urgent Visitation Panel to undertake a redemptive surgical operation.

Segun Ayobolu

After negatively demolishing the logical bases for the perpetuation of the Gowon dictatorship in any guise, Professor Dudley then positively stated the case for the kind of societal and political arrangement he and the NPSA advocated for Nigeria. In doing so, he made a distinction between what he calls a ‘closed society’ and an ‘open, competitive’ society. According to him, “The politics of the closed society, and by definition any society which is not open and competitive is closed, is the politics of deceit and sycophancy. It is the politics which dehumanizes the individual person and enslaves the intellect. For a Nigeria which is self-avowedly committed to change and development, the politics of the closed society hardly can be an acceptable option”.

Professor Dudley contended that he was advocating the return to an open competitive system not because “I have an idealistic attachment to the ballot box and competitive electoral politics”. Rather, “I do so because, first, it is the only form of politics which in principle, gives every citizen of the State an even chance…Second, it is the only form of politics which enshrines the principle that it is the right of the electorate to choose its own leaders unfettered by contrived constraints and attempts to maximize the right. Third, if we accept that leadership qualities are randomly distributed throughout the society…then we must also accept, that in principle, no other system can be better calculated to generate the leadership which Nigeria needs than an open, competitive political system”.

But it would appear that neither in the first, second, third nor this fourth republic has Professor Dudley’s thesis been proved right in Nigeria leading to the country’s protracted crisis of democracy and underdevelopment. In this dispensation, for instance, it cannot be said that since 1999, the democratic process has thrown up the best materials for leadership at all levels and has been a vehicle for promoting development in any meaningful sense.

Money, for instance, plays an inordinate role in the electoral process such that only very wealthy persons or those backed by the proverbial ‘moneybags’ can contest and win elections. Even winning local government chairmanship elections requires investment running into hundreds of millions of Naira. The gross poverty in which the vast majority of Nigerians are immersed makes them vulnerable to selling their votes to the highest bidder in elections. Those who win elections, in turn, utilize state power to recoup their investment through massive looting of public resources, which again retards development and worsens mass poverty.

Primordial considerations such as ethnic and regional origin as well as religious affiliation of contestants for public office also have considerable influence on voter behavior to the detriment of merit and again with negative consequences for development. There is thus a huge hiatus between Nigeria’s immense resource endowment, particularly the humongous amounts she has reaped from oil exports over the years, and her level of socio-economic and infrastructural transformation.

The civil liberties and human rights that liberal democracy promotes and protects are negated by the mass poverty, gross inequality and ever deepening underdevelopment that are the consequences of the perpetuation of a neo-colonial order since attainment of nominal independence in 1960. No one who watches the tragicomedy of the massive looting of the resources of the Niger Delta through the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), for instance, which is just one example of the ongoing plundering of public resources by members of the ruling class across the board can nurse any hope that liberal democracy can be a vehicle for eradicating poverty and transcending underdevelopment in post-colonial Nigeria.

One of the most far reaching attempts to eliminate or, at least, drastically minimize the ills which militate against the practice of wholesome, development-promoting politics in Nigeria was undertaken by the military President, General Ibrahim Babangida’s comprehensive and convoluted Political Transition Programme between 1985 and 1993. The regime banned those it described as ‘old breed’ politicians from politics, encouraged the entry into politics of those it described as ‘new breed’ political actors and even created brand new political parties, the defunct National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP) located a little to the right and left, respectively, of the regime’s neo-liberal ideological centre.

Incidentally several leading Nigerian political scientists including Professor Sam Oyovbaire, Professor Adele Jinadu, the late Professor Eme Awa, late Professor Omo Omoruyi, Dr Tunji Olagunju, Professor Humphrey Nwosu and Professor Isawa Elaigwu among others were active designers of and participants in different aspects of the regime’s political transition programme.  Long before the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential elections that brought IBB’s long winded political transition programme to an end, Professor Aaron Gana of the Department of Political Science, University of Jos, however, had foreseen the inevitable failure of the enterprise.

In the Convocation Lecture he delivered at the University in 1991 titled ‘The Limits of Political Engineering: A Critique of the Transition Programme’, the radical scholar disagreed with three of his colleagues who, in a recent book had written that “The IBB era is a radical departure from the state of the nation during the first two and a half decades of independence…The commitment of the administration is to what it believes to be the proper path to true independence, unity and progress of the country, and it has, despite the vagaries, turbulence and contradictions of the nation, adhered doggedly to this commitment”.

Offering a differing view, Professor Gana, who incidentally was a Nupe man like IBB but from Kwara state declared, “I have no doubt in my mind as regards the commitment of the administration, and in particular, the President to pull this country through the quagmire of a deepening economic crisis and chronic political instability. I am however skeptical about the efficacy of the instruments chosen to effect this transformation from dependent capitalism into an auto-centric and self-reliant economy…What I seem to see is the erection of structures whose foundations are rooted in the same institutional matrix of the first and second republics”.

With remarkable boldness for a dictatorial military dispensation, Professor Gana declared “The political visibility given to some of the most prominent in the discredited Shagari administration; the decoration of prominent members of the ruling class (whose track records as public servants are known to border on criminality) with the highest honours of the land, and above all the perversion of justice by men and women entrusted with the sacred duty of managing public affairs, all provide a background to 1992 and beyond that does not instill confidence in the future. Indeed Orwell’s 1984 has descended on us with full force, wherein we have ministries of information that specialize in dis-information and mis-information, ministries of agriculture that promote hunger, nay, ministries of justice that specialize in the subversion of justice.”

After an exhaustive analysis of the country’s political trajectory from colonization to federation as well as examining what he described as the dialectics of the transition, Professor Gana was unable to recommend Dudley’s ‘open, competitive’ liberal democratic politics as the path to the future. Rather, he averred that “for us to transcend the present neo-colonial order, and move towards a truly democratic polity, we must lay the foundations for the construction of a socialist society. For the peoples of the third world, Nigeria inclusive, there is just no alternative if we want to remain in perpetual serfdom to the industrialized nations”.

When we consider the massive corruption in contemporary Nigeria, the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the executive, the profligacy and venality of the legislature, the moral degeneracy of the judiciary, the institutional fragility and philosophical barrenness of the political parties and the sheer inability of the vast majority of the people to identify and pursue what is in their own best interest, is it disputable that the prevalent diseased liberal democratic, neo-colonial order has reached a developmental dead-end?