Category: Segun Ayobolu

Segun ayObolu

In what is a business and organizational politics equivalent to a novelistic thriller, Professor Femi Kayode’s book, ‘Managing Change in a Nigerian University Setting: The Ibadan Experiment’, is difficult to put down when you begin reading it. As renowned Emeritus Professor of Medicine, Professor O.O Akinkugbe, writes in the blurb to the book, “Professor Kayode’s forensic skills in moving from the general to the specific, and from the traditional rhetoric of academia into the real world of practical economics fill us with admiration. He recounts with characteristic candour his experiences as Coordinating Director of the University of Ibadan Centre for Resource Management and Consultancy (CEREMAC) in the 1980s and demonstrates with clarity the landmine situations that served as veritable impediments to sustained internal revenue generation”. The author paints vivid pictures of the pitched battles between entrenched status quo forces and those spearheading much needed innovative managerial and attitudinal changes at a critical period in the evolution of the university institution in Nigeria.

Given the intensity of the bitter opposition to his attempt to introduce viable business and financial management strategies within the rigid, bureaucratic administrative university structure all in a bid to fulfill his mandate of rejuvenating the revenue base of the university of Ibadan, professor Kayode’s dedication of his book “To all those who are hurt in the course of their commitment to positive change, but are still able to forgive and face the future with renewed vigour” speaks volumes of his character and humanness. Here was a man who was firm and unbending in the pursuit of whatever principles he strongly believed in yet with an admirable generosity of spirit to be charitable towards his adversaries as well as bounteous determination and optimism to confront new challenges despite past setbacks.

In his foreword to this book, the late eminent economist, Professor Pius Okigbo, notes that the tale of Nigeria’s university system was one of growth from infancy through adolescence to near maturity and finally to the onset of decadence all within a period of four short decades. He attributes the decline of the universities not just to the financial crisis that began in the late 1970s and worsened in the 1980s and 1990s but more importantly to the “loss by their leadership of the sense of mission of the institutions under their charge”. He continued, “Professor Kayode’s book is therefore strictly an essay on the Management of Universities in Nigeria in a period of rapid change using the University of Ibadan as a case study. Following the explosion of student numbers and the drastic fall in funding arising from the exponential growth in the number of universities, federal and state, the universities as a whole lost their focus, lost touch with the needs of the surrounding society and proved themselves incompetent to cope with the changing environment”.

The Centre for Resource Management and Consultancy (CEREMAC), which evolved from the Consultancy Services Unit of the university, was initiated during the tenure of Professor Tekena Tamuno as Vice Chancellor and was further consolidated under Professor S.O. Olayide who succeeded him. It was conceived to tap the rich human resource base of the institution to generate creative and bankable ideas that would reward individual skills and talents as well as diversify and strengthen the revenue base of the university. This was at a time when, as result of the creeping economic crisis that crippled the nation’s finances, the universities including Ibadan began to be characterized by irregular payment of salaries, suspension of capital projects and sharp decline in the capacity to maintain existing infrastructure or undertake research.

In order to enable it meet stipulated objectives, CEREMAC had a board of its own separate from the university and was also independent of the University Council in sourcing assignments, recruiting key personnel and fixing their remuneration. It was empowered to provide service to third parties and to identify profit centers in the university that could be professionally managed to relieve the institution’s burden of inadequate funding. It was, of course, only natural that this considerable autonomy granted CEREMAC would naturally evoke some envy and opposition by those who felt its modus operandi negated the traditional administrative norms of a university setting. Evident in this book throughout is professor Kayode’s belief that a university is endowed with sufficient human resource endowment to function as a self-sufficient financial entity akin to a business enterprise without compromising its institutional academic integrity and intellectual orientation.

He saw no necessarily inevitable nexus between the academic vocation and poverty insisting that a well structured and dynamically managed university consultancy outfit could enable creative academics profit from their skills while also strengthening the revenue base of the institutions. Thus, the book is with replete by strategies to revitalize and improve the revenue generating potentials of identified profit centers within the universities. These included the Consultancy Services Unit, University Bookshop Ltd, Ibadan University Press, Petrol Station, University Publishing House, Zoological Garden, UNIBADAN Performing Company, Internal Transport Service and UNIBADAN Agricultural enterprises.

The sheer number of innovations initiated by the Project Development Unit of CEREMAC indicates the rich potentials of a vibrant consultancy structure to benefit from the ample resource endowment of the university system. Some of  these projects which were different stages of gestation and emergent commercial viability include the Anaerobic Digester Project, Borehole Division, CEREMAC Construction Company, Dog Project, Fish Farm Project, Furniture Project, Iyan (Pounded Yam) Project, Jam Project, Landscape Division, Publishing Consultants Division and waste Glass Project. As Professor Kayode put it, “Development Projects were designed to mobilize unused human and physical resources in pursuit of our philosophy of ‘shifting of frontiers’ by turning ideas into projects and thereby generating funds for the university while at the same time increasing the relevance of the institution to the larger society”.

Unfortunately, with the intense opposition to the CEREMAC experiment within the university and the internal institutional intrigues and power play, the consultancy initiative was scrapped when another Vice Chancellor, Professor Ayo Banjo, succeeded Professor Olayide and that brought an end to a unique experiment in tapping university resources for financial autonomy at Ibadan. As Professor Okigbo writes in his foreword, “With the change of leadership in the University in 1984, the new Vice-Chancellor and the pro-Chancellor both probably saw in CEREMAC a challenge to, and a detraction from, their powers to appoint, promote and dismiss staff. They replaced it with the University of Ibadan Ventures Ltd, more within their control and, therefore, essentially an extension of the patronage system in the University. In his own book on his stewardship in the University of Ibadan, ‘In the Saddle’, Professor Ayo Banjo derided the relevance of CEREMAC as inconsistent with the standard organization of a university”.

CEREMAC was an bold initiative to think outside the box and find alternative avenues to funding viable universities at a time when dependence on government funding had become increasingly unfeasible and unrealistic. There is no doubt that Professor Kayode courageously gave his best in a difficult assignment and many of his experiences recounted in this book still remain relevant in Nigeria’s quest for a well funded, viable, productive and affordable public university system.

Segun Ayobolu

In a scathing interview published in the 1970s, in which he responded to the academic critics of his novels and short stories, that masterly chronicler of the fun, foibles and follies particularly of urban city life, Cyprian Ekwensi, urged those with negative perceptions of his literary themes and style to ‘quit their cloistered ivory towers and live’. He thus inferred that a secluded academic life may insulate the reclusive scholar from the realities of life and living so vividly captured in many of his works such as ‘Jagua Nana’, ‘People of the City’, ‘Beautiful Feathers’, ‘Restless City and Christmas Gold’ or ‘Lokotown’. Indeed, the same advice can easily be given to many academic economists, whose preoccupation with the cold logic and mathematical as well as analytic rigidities of their discipline, make their theories far removed fom the existential realities of millions of people whose material well being it is supposedly the lot of the economist to enhance.

The same thing can certainly not be said of the frontline economist, Professor Mathew Femi Kayode, who passed on to eternal life on August 10, 2020, in Ibadan, the famous city where he rose to become professor of economics at the University of Ibadan in a productive career spanning four decades. An indigene of Egbe in Kogi state, Professor Kayode had his primary and secondary education at the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) primary school, Egbe, and the illustrious Abdulazeez Attah Memorial College, Okene, respectively. He obtained his Higher School Certificate (HSC) at the prestigious Kings College, Lagos, showing early intellectual promise by winning the school’s economics prizes in 1961.

Graduating with a Second Class Upper Honours degree in economics from the University of Ibadan’s Economics Department in 1965, Professor Kayode thereafter obtained postgraduate degrees in the discipline from the London School of Economics and the Harvard Business School, Cambridge. In 1972, he earned a PhD degree in Economics from UI becoming the first doctoral graduate of the institution’s economics department. With this sterling academic grounding in his beloved discipline, one would have expected Professor Kayode to delight in the often arcane and obscurantist theorizing as well as esoteric discourse intelligible to only fellow members of the disciplinary cult.

But what do two of his students and mentees who later became professors in the discipline tell us about Professor Kayode’s philosophy of and approach to economics? In the words of Professors Abdul-Ganiyu Ajani Garba and Kassey Garba,“Professor Kayode made economics more real to man and much livelier than the abstract body of thought that economics has been designed to be. He always cared more about how the issues in economics affected people. He was never content with the very abstract nature of the discipline and would often distinguish between the letters and the spirit as he mapped out a range of options using ‘scenario analysis’. He would often look for different ways in which economic phenomena could have a human face”.

It is perhaps not surprising that Professor Kayode specialized in Business and Management Economics, which enabled him to make practical and enduring contributions to the real world of business and added tremendous value as a consultant and/or member of the board of diverse public and private sector organizations. I have heard post graduate students of economics and Business management fulsomely praise his magnum opus, ‘The Art of Project Evaluation’, published in 1979 by the Ibadan University of Ibadan Press and which is considered an indispensable Bible for students of Business and Management Economics particularly with specialization in project management. Although I have not read the book myself, its subject matter indicates the more pragmatic and practical rather than essentially theoretical bent of the professor’s scholarly orientation.

Professor Kayode was one of the country’s foremost exponents and exemplars of productive interaction between the scholarly gown and the societal or communal town. No wonder, President Muhammadu Buhari, in his tribute to the late economist, commended him for his “willingness to leave the university to share knowledge, wisdom and experience with governments’. Apart from serving as a Special Adviser to the President on economic matters between 1988 and 1992, Professor Kayode served on the boards of several bodies adding tremendous value to their operations. At various times, he served as Chairman, Kwara State Investment Company (1985-1987), Member, National Revenue Allocation, Mobilization and Fiscal Commission (1988-1992), Chairman, Think Tank Committee for Strategic Projects, National Raw Material Development Council (1989-1992), Member, National Capital Issues Commission (1976-1978), Member, Technical Committee, Vision 2010, (1997), Member, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Board of Directors (1999-2007) and Chairman, Board of Trustees, Foundation for Economics Education, (1975 – 1981).

Other committees and boards of organizations on which Professor Kayode served at various times include Afribank Economic and Financial Review, Nigerian Association of Management Education and Training (NASMET), Kwara State Government Planning Council, Broad Express Nigeria Limited, Trade Bank PLC, African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), Nairobi, Kenya and National Hospital Insurance Fund for the Kenyan Government. On the academic terrain, he was at various times, Head of the Department of Economics, University of Ibadan, President, Nigerian Economic Society (NES), and Editor, Nigerian Journal of Economic and Social Studies (1975-1981).

Given his essentially non -rigidly ideological disposition to scholarship, I was surprised that Professor Kayode was one of the speakers at the proceedings of the Third Memorial Programme in honour of the late Professor Claude Ake, organized by the Centre for Advanced Social Science (CASS) in conjunction with the African Centre for Democratic Governance (AFRIGOV) in November 1999. The theme of the programme was ‘Ideology and African Development’ and the paper delivered by Professor Kayode was titled ‘African Development and the Ideological Sword’.

Summarizing Professor Kayode’s presentation, the organizers wrote, “While not dismissing the relevance of ideology to African development, Kayode believes that “the key to eventually overcoming the ideologically imposed burden of African underdevelopment does not amount to using any single known ideological brand”. He stresses the need for a development strategy that would not only bring out the best in the individual, but also engender the competitive and community spirit in every African. Such ideology is one that positively drives a dynamic and mixed economy. It is one that accommodates both private initiatives and public interests, he argues”.

The concluding part of this tribute will focus on the book, ‘Managing Change in a Nigerian University Setting: The Ibadan Experiment’ published by the Ibadan University Press in Y2000 and in which Professor Kayode recounts his experiences as the pioneer Director of the Consultancy Services Unit of the University of Ibadan as well as the pioneer Director of the university’s Centre for Resource Management and Consultancy (CEREMAC), which managed all the institution’s profit centres between 1979 and 1984.

By Segun Ayobolu

It should now be obvious that within the context of the logic of our post-independence development policy trajectory, the incessant increases in the unit rates of critical commodities like fuel and electricity, with serious bearing on the welfare of the vast majority of Nigerians, is well nigh inevitable. During its intense campaign to unseat the then incumbent Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the run up to the 2015 general elections, the key elements of the then nascent All Progressives Congress (APC), vehemently opposed the fuel price hike announced in 2012 by the former President Goodluck Jonathan administration and supported labour and civil society groups in their massive demonstrations against the removal of the fuel subsidy. Now that it is in power, the ruling APC has also found it imperative to remove the controversial subsidies not just on fuel but also on electricity citing the same reasons that previous administrations have given for doing so.

Understandably, the APC has not found it funny that the opposition PDP and several vocal individuals and groups within labour and civil society have vigorously condemned the decision of the Buhari administration in this regard and demanded a reversion of the policy. The administration has not only congratulated itself on what it regards as its courage in taking a decision that is in the best interest of the country no matter how unpopular. Of course, it is a familiar story; a route well travelled severally. Over three decades ago, as a university undergraduate, I recall that I participated in demonstrations against the then military President, General Ibrahim Babangida regime’s decision to remove the notorious subsidy and increase the pump price of fuel.

That was indeed one of the key conditionalities of the International Financial Institutions for supporting the country financially to weather the serious economic crisis that necessitated the imposition of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). Successive governments – military and civilian – have toed the same line, opposing the removal of the subsidy when seeking power but also unhesitatingly announcing its removal once comfortably ensconced in office. It has been no different with the PMB administration.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has just like spokesmen of previous governments rigorously advanced reasons why the new price regimes in the fuel and electricity sectors are inevitable. It is always a basically economic argument. If the cost price of producing or making these commodities available are far below the price at which they are sold to the consumer, a subsidy necessarily arises which government must bridge. This short fall between production cost and supply prices, which government fills is not just a drain on the parlous revenues of government, it is also a disincentive against fresh investment in these sectors as the potential investor is not a philanthropist but a hardnosed businessman.

Matters have been worsened by the discovery particularly under the Jonathan administration that the so called fuel subsidy was nothing but substantially a huge scam through which unscrupulous fuel importers smiled to the banks without importing any fuel. The retort of those opposed to subsidy removal is that government has all the powers and resources to detect and bring to book dubious and fraudulent fuel importers who feed fat on criminal subsidy payments if it is minded to do so.

Alhaji Lai Mohammed argues that over N10 trillion have been expended in purported subsidy payments between 2006 and 2019. This particularly in this gruesome period of the rampaging coronavirus pandemic, he contends, is absolutely unaffordable and unsustainable. President Muhammadu Buhari in his address at the retreat to mark one year of his Ministers in office this week, stressed that there has been a shortfall of about 60% in revenues accruing to government in the wake of the pandemic. This means that the funds to pay humongous subsidies on fuel and electricity consumption are simply no more there.

To be fair to the administration, as I pointed out last week, it has committed huge amounts of resources to offer palliatives to the poor and vulnerable, cushion and strengthen critical sectors of the economy to tide through the pandemic-induced stormy economic weather while also expending huge sums particularly on our practically comatose and long neglected health sector in response to the health emergency. Much of these expenditures were unanticipated. Even then, it is, in my view wrong of the President and his Information Minister to characterize those activists and groups opposed to the hike in the unit prices of these commodities as being actuated by mischief and needless confrontation.

It is important that the administration does not underestimate the gross negative implications of these critical price increases for the cost of living particularly as regards food and transport costs, accommodation, health care, education among others for the majority of the people. And this is especially at a time when large numbers of people have been rendered jobless. What it needs more than ever before now is compassionate rather than adversarial government public relations.

I believe that the response of majority of Nigerians to the hike in fuel and electricity rates has been rather tame in comparison to under previous administrations because the PMB administration has been relatively more restrained, disciplined and responsible in the husbandry and utilization of public resources particularly in contrast to the preceding Goodluck administration. The ascetic and austere disposition of PMB himself is a major factor in this regard. Even then, embarrassing revelations of industrial scale fraud at the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) or the National Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF); the humongous and opaque allowances which our legislators continue to draw or the still unwieldy number of aircraft in the presidential fleet contrary to the APC’s electoral promises in 2015 show that there is a still a long way to go as regards government cutting costs and tightening its belt as it requires Nigerians to do.

In any case, this administration cannot be spared the allegation against its predecessors that when they trumpet the inevitability of removal of subsidies and hike in the rates of critical commodities like fuel and electricity, they are really punishing millions of Nigerians for the incompetence and irresponsibility of the governing or political class. This case was made most pungently by a former General Secretary of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Mr. Owei Lakemfa in his reaction to the current fuel price increase. As he put it, “When you import fuel and you pay at international price, you pay for refining abroad, they will add their profit as well, and you pay for freight to move the product to Nigeria. When the product arrives Nigeria, you pay for discharge, a lot of time, the ships are out there in the ocean and they call them mother vessels”.

He continues, “It takes days for smaller vessels to go bring the product. All these things cost money. Then you store them in tank farms. The freight has demurrage; there is cost for the movement to Atlas Cove and tank farm. A lot of them would then be moved by road from the tanks to all parts of the country, including Maiduguri. Of course, the prices are likely to be very high…What we are witnessing in the name of subsidy is transferring government incompetence to the people”.

The question, which has been asked over and over again, and to which there has been no satisfactory answer over the years is why should we export our crude oil and import refined petroleum with all the attendant costs? Is building local refineries to process our crude oil for the internal market such rocket science? Is it normal for a whole country to be waiting on the take off of the Dangote refineries for its crude oil to be refined locally? Is Dangote a philanthropist or a businessman? Now that the Buhari administration has decided that the pump price of fuel will be determined by the vagaries of the market, we seem to be faced with a fait accompli and it should ensure that more refineries come on stream to allow for competitive and affordable pricing of fuel.

Again, the shady and shoddy privatization of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) to the extant Distribution and Generating Companies is another manifestation of ruling class venality and irresponsibility. Despite government pumping in humongous amounts of public resources to shore up these outfits, which are clearly ill-equipped to meet their legal responsibilities, the sector remains as epileptic as ever. It is amazing that it is after approving the hike in electricity tariff that the government announced that mass metering of consumers will commence. Government at least has a responsibility to ensure that, with the new tariff the period of continued resort to estimated billing is as short lived as possible.

Segun Ayobolu

My instinctive reaction to the Federal Government’s new Special Works Programme (SWP), designed to create 774,000 new jobs for 1000 unemployed persons from each of the country’s 774 local government areas, who will receive N20,000 per month for three months, was to dismiss it as another grandiose scheme aimed at  corrupt material enrichment as is all too often the case with our governing elite across party divides. This perception was strengthened by the seemingly needless squabble between the members of the National Assembly and the Minister of State for Labour, Mr. Festus Keyamo (SAN), on the mode of implementation of the programme. Much more important than the method of the programme’s implementation, I thought, the legislature ought to have raised fundamental questions about the rationale for the SWP in the first place.

It appeared to me that the PDP caucus in the House of Representatives, in a statement by Hon. Kingsley Chinda, made an important point when it said that the rationale for the programme “flies in the face of reason and common sense as this government insists on expending enormous resources for the implementation of a politically motivated transient programme dubiously shrouded as “employment” having no empowering or enduring benefit to ordinary Nigerians especially when several viable and veritable job and wealth creating alternatives exist”.

Continuing, he said “Elementary division of the approved programme budget of N52 billion by 774 local government areas in Nigeria implies expenditure of N67.184 million (about $150,000) in each local government area, which if applied judicially and transparently will suffice for the establishment of a viable industry in each local government area that for several years to come will provide gainful, enduring and sustainable direct and indirect employment for more than 100 skilled and unskilled poor unemployed Nigerians per local government area…”.

Well, it is only that the PDP did not set any example in this regard even though the country earned enormously more revenue during its 16 years tenancy in power than the present administration does. Yet, it is this administration that is frenetically working on the completion of scores of infrastructural projects across the country that had been abandoned by the previous ruling party. Surely, it’s better to spend public funds on this kind of SPW programme than the obscene and blatant sharing among public office holders of public funds as happened under the PDP. Further research for this article showed that the SWP has indeed been more carefully thought out and the ground laid for its meticulous implementation than supposed.

The SWP had indeed earlier started as a pilot project in five local governments each in eight states. Over 40,000 transient jobs were created in the eight states, namely Adamawa, Borno, Ebonyi, Edo, Ekiti Jigawa, Katsina and Kwara during the period. The beneficiaries were employed to carry out various tasks in traffic control, drainage digging and clearance, irrigation canals clearance, rural and feeder roads maintenance, street cleaning and cleaning of public infrastructures as well as maintenance of the Great Green Wall nurseries in Borno, Jigawa and Katsina states.

In the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, announced on Monday, April 6, 2020, that presidential approval had been received to extend the scheme to the 36 states of the country and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja. This time around, its main focus will be on agriculture and its value chains. The unnecessary altercation between Keyamo and the National Assembly gave the impression that this was just another scheme for political office holders to share job slots among themselves for their cronies.

But there is absolutely nothing abnormal or illegitimate about the 15% (116,000) slots allocated to members of the executive and legislature at the federal and state levels. The important thing is that the beneficiaries are Nigerians and it will offer some succor for them in these tough times. It is difficult to understand what the PDP means when, in its words, it “rejects the resort to political godfatherism as well as underhand measures in the allocation of the Federal Government’s 774,000 jobs to cronies of political holders instead of an open process that will accommodate every Nigerian”. The party describes the programme’s mode of implementation as “an injustice to the generality of unemployed Nigerians who do not have political office holders and are not affiliated to any political party”.

But how is this so? To the best of my knowledge, every state in the country, irrespective of the party in power there, is to benefit from the exercise. The important thing is that 1000 unemployed Nigerians in all 774 Local Government Areas will enjoy the N20,000 stipend for an initial period of three months with the possibility, as Mr. Keyamo has said, of being extended beyond the three-month timeline or being made an annual event. This should have considerable stimulus effect on the grassroots economy.

It appears that Mr. Keyamo has gone to quite some length to ensure that the programme is implemented as transparently as possible as well as ensure a reasonable measure of fairness in selecting the participants. This is evident in the composition of the programme’s State Selection Committees, which have 20 members each. The Chairman and Vice Chairman of the State Selection Committees must be indigenes of and ordinarily resident in the state. The state coordinator of the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) will serve as secretary to the committee, which means that the agency is a key part of the implementation process.

Other members of the State Selection Committees include representatives of the governor, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), traditional rulers, youth organizations, Civil Society Organizations s well as special interest groups. The Minister says that this composition of the committees is “to ensure that majority of Nigerians who do not belong to any of the political divides benefit from the programme”.

Of course, the PDP does have a point when it says that investing in programmes and initiatives that create permanent and sustainable jobs are preferable to the SWP’s focus on three-month transient jobs. But the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has announced several initiatives to cushion diverse sectors of the economy, particularly Small and Medium Scale businesses, to enable them tide through the pandemic, reduce job losses and possibly even employ new workers. This is in addition to the administration’s enormous investment in the last five years in diversifying the economy especially with reviving agriculture and its immense job creation potentials along its various value chains. The SWP does not negate efforts along that line but offers succor to a large number of indigent unemployment persons even as the economy gradually picks up with time and absorbs larger number of people into the workforce.

One critical thing that the minister and all those involved in the implementation of the programme must guard against is the injection of ghost names into the list by unscrupulous officials, intent on defrauding the system. Hopefully, the payment of the stipend directly to the bank accounts of beneficiaries will aid transparency and prevent duplication of payments to accounts as a result of the Bank Verification Number. Again, the administration should also consider value re-orientation programmes for beneficiaries of the SWP. For instance, it really will not be beneficial both to the individual or the society if the stipend earned for the three months is expended on dangerous drugs or other socially harmful practices.

The SPW programme marks another major step in the Buhari administration’s efforts over the last five years to transfer resources directly to the poor and underprivileged through its various cash conditional transfers and Social Intervention Programmes (SIP). It is no exaggeration to say that direct transfer of funds by the Buhari administration to the poor to fight poverty, boost small and micro businesses as well as stimulate job creation is unprecedented in the country’s history. At least the huge amounts so transferred to the weak and vulnerable cannot be available to be shared by the governing elite as was the norm under the PDP.

Does that mean that corruption is not still going on right now in government at all levels? That would be a fraudulent claim. But what is indisputable is that the scale has greatly reduced. This is certainly one of the reasons why the administration has been able to spend heavily on its Social Intervention Programmes while at the same time accelerating work on major infrastructure projects nationwide even though the country’s revenue has crashed to only a minuscule proportion of what it was for most of the PDP years. Even as it spends on these poverty alleviation initiatives, however, the government must also ensure continuous scientific impact assessment of these programmes to determine how much they are actually reducing poverty levels in order to continuously streamline, modify and strengthen them for greater efficacy.

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?