By Jide Osuntokun

News about the deaths of Nigeria’s academics particularly professors have been rather frightening and depressing in these days. There is no doubt that many of our people are succumbing to the ravages of Covid-19. This is a personal tragedy for me because some of the people dying are personal friends, colleagues or younger brothers in the African sense. It’s not every one of them who passed on that is coronavirus victim. Some are dying of old age because of wear and tear after years of work in environment that is not conducive to mental exertion and with very little material earthly things to show for it. Some are also victims of depression after seeing their life’s work fall apart or into decay because of government policies characterized by lack of consistency and continuity.

I have sometimes looked in bewilderment at the state of collapse in places where I have worked in my youth and adult lives go into disrepair and disrepute in the present dispensation which pays little attention to merit, integrity or excellence. It is very difficult for anybody of my age not to wonder if life has been worth living with all we worked for going to the dogs with those in authority unable or unprepared or incapable of doing something about it.

When I discuss these issues with my friends, we all share the same feelings of despair and disappointment. If you are also a thinking person and who is aware what is in offing for black peoples in the future, the ignorance of people in government who seem to worry more about their bellies and their pockets and about who is in or who is out and what ethnic group, persons holding office belongs to or who are engaged in perpetual permutation about offices they intend to hold in the future, you realize that our people have lost their senses and our future as a country and a race is a lost cause. How many of our people are aware of the whispering discussion about reduction of the population of the world and getting rid of the useless part of it which they suggest are Africans. One tends to dismiss these talks as hoax but there is no smoke without fire. This is why the gradual withering of our country’s intelligentsia is a cause for concern. The total lack of preparedness for all future eventualities is frightening.

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For example Nigerian newspapers reported that Nigeria is expecting 100,000 Covid-19 vaccines soon. I hope this is not true! Isn’t Nigeria said to have an estimated population of 200 million?. What fraction of our population will the expected vaccines take care of bearing in mind that two doses are expected for a person . What a joke of a country. Is this country not sufficiently endowed in knowledge and wherewithal to have assembled its own scientific community to produce this vaccine even if we had to import the manufacturing equipment from abroad? Iran is doing this, so are India and Pakistan. When are we going to stop being journeymen in the grand journey of human history? The answer is blowing in the wind! Until a Black country is successful others in the secret covens of white supremacists who deny the humanity of black peoples will be planning and targeting Africa as an experimental field of drastically reducing human population through sterilization or scientifically or secretly poisoning them under the guise of controlling diseases which invariably seem to come from Africa as erroneously propagated by the racist Western and Eastern press. The swirling dangers surrounding the black man is unfortunately matched by the woeful ignorance of the black governmental leadership on the African continent. It is not a matter of self-protection only  that eternal vigilance is required always but it is a matter of life and death for a whole people and unless we wake up now it will be too late before we  are all led like sheep into slaughter houses at least metaphorically speaking .

On a personal level, the loss of our intelligentsia is doubly painful because of the threat against us as a people. When I heard the death of Femi Odekunle, I felt it as a personal loss. Femi was a person who will ask why not when everybody was saying why? One does not have to subscribe to Hegelian dialectics to realize that scientific truth can only be attained through conflict of ideas. In positioning himself this way, Femi nearly lost his life to the Abacha terror. I shared this unfortunate experience with him in my incarceration in military detention for six months under Abacha for speaking truth to power. But for the sudden death of Abacha, Femi would have been executed along with General Oladipo Diya for knowledge about a phantom coup! This is why it is so painful seeing him dying in harness while serving his country to the coronavirus pandemic. His father died when he was over 100 years old. Longevity was in his gene. It was at the burial of the old man that I last saw Femi. I feel sorry for his family and his relatively young wife Ruki .

Oye Ibidapo- Obe was my junior brother through his marriage to the sister my departed friend  Segun Ojutalayo. I watched his meteoric rise from lecturer to professor and vice chancellor. He was vice chancellor when I retired from the University of Lagos. He comes from a family in Ilesha whose ancestors fought alongside my great grandfather in the Ekiti parapo war of 1876 to 1893. He had always been close to me. He was always full of life and his services were in high demand everywhere. In spite of this, he was highly principled. I was impressed that he opposed President Jonathan’s decision to rename University of Lagos Moshood Abiola University as political move to curry Yoruba votes. God knows Abiola deserves monuments in his honour but not an old institution with traditions and long history like University of Lagos or University of Ibadan. Oye stood his ground despite the fact he was serving as one of the vice chancellors of Jonathan’s  12 “democratic dividend “ universities hurriedly put together without planning about staff or financial cost.

I knew Professor Ajeyalemi at the University of Lagos. I knew him at a distance so to say but he related to me as a big brother. Academics is a leveller and there is no feeling of senior or junior in the university system. One earned the respect of others if one merited it. Ajeyalemi was one of those who earned the respect of others.

Of course it’s not all the professors who died in recent times that died of Covid-19. Some died as a result of age and ailments associated with aging. Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin , the famous historian of the Western Sudan, I believe died of natural causes. He will be remembered for his erudition and scholarship. For a man who did not go through secondary school but rather a teachers’ college to achieve all he achieved is a mark of perseverance and distinction. He served for several years as editor of the academic journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria. He also edited publications of the Nigerian Academy of Letters before subsequently becoming the president of the academy a position which he held with passion, dedication and dignity.

Prof Olu Longe, former head of computer science department in the University of Ibadan was a quiet and deep man knowledge-wise. He passed on due to old age. He was the first professor of Computer Science in Nigeria. He was also a distinguished old boy of that city on the hill, Christ’s School Ado – Ekiti.

There are many other professors who crossed the line of Divide between this earthly place of weariness and wickedness to the other side beyond the pearly gates of heaven. I know of professors Ekeh and Onwundiwe and others. I know them by their reputation which will remain imperishable.

I remember what Professor Gerald Graham, emeritus professor of Imperial History at the University College London and one of my mentors and supervisors of giants like JF Ade Ajayi and Kenneth Onwuka Dike told me in the University of Western Ontario, Canada in 1971 when we were both on the staff of the Department of History of that university. He said an academic never dies as long as he has published books which will serve as a permanent memorial to his name wherever there are libraries in the world. This is absolutely true of such recently departed professors like Ladipo Akinkugbe and others.

Monuments may be destroyed or wear out; the words on marble will always remain. If this will serve as a consolation to the families of departed academics, I commend this tradition and belief that academics just like ideas don’t die. In any case, we are destined to die one day and as masquerades in my home town of Okemesi, are wont to say on the last day of Egungun festivals when they are on their way back to heaven as people pretend to believe, they would say “Heaven needs not be in a hurry because we are all going there”.

How philosophical!

By Jide Osuntokun

Great Britain finally exited the European Union after being in the Union for almost half a century since sir Edward Heath, the prime minister, took the country into the European Economic Community (EEC) which it joined along with Denmark and the Irish Republic in 1973. The EU’s population is 447,706,209 with a GDP of $18.377 trillion in 2020 compared with the USA’s 328 million people and GDP of $20.54 trillion, China’s population of 1.4 billion people and a GDP of $13. 61 trillion and Japan’s population of 93 million people and a GDP of $4.971 trillion. On the other hand, the population of Britain is 66 million and a GDP of $2.83 trillion. The UK has the sixth largest economy after the US, China, Japan Germany and India. Germany, the dominant economy in the European Union has a population of 83 .2 million and a GDP of $3.8 trillion. From these comparative figures it is doubtful if Britain made the right choice in leaving the second greatest economic union in the world with what it offers to industrial concerns which care much about economy of scale in terms of viability and profitability of investment. Although the government of Boris Johnson managed to strike a deal that guarantees free trade between Britain and the European Union, but this does not cover financial services and insurance where Britain has always had comparative advantages with the position of London as a major capital of global capitalism. I understand that this aspect of the withdrawal deal may be negotiated in the future. But the uncertainty it creates cannot be in the interest of Great Britain. In the years preceding the eventual withdrawal of Britain on December 31, 2020, many of the international banks and financial institutions and other multinational companies moved their headquarters to such places as Frankfurt, Paris and Dublin with consequences on employment in London in particular. There was also a decline in property values in London and the greater London area. Although Boris Johnson and his Conservative and Unionist party had during the campaign for severance of ties with Europe said it was a question of psychological satisfaction for the British to know they were totally in charge of their own affairs as a sovereign independent country, but when people begin to count the costs, questions are going to be asked on how leaving the EU puts food on the table of the average Briton. In a world of interdependence, as seen in the new economic integration in Asia/ Pacific region and in the economic integration of Mexico the USA and Canada, one doubts the wisdom of Britain leaving the EU on mere psychological satisfaction. Even here in Africa, we are moving towards African free trade area however putative our efforts may be. It however signals the future trajectory of economic relations on the African continent.

There is also the lack of clear majority for brexiteers in the UK. The people of Northern Ireland voted against it just as the people of Scotland remains opposed to leaving the European Union. Only the Welsh and the English in the four nations that make up the UK voted for Brexit. Even there, the majority of the young people were opposed to leaving the EU. Leaving will cost universities in the UK the loss of billions of Euros in research and innovation funds which most of the young academics and students benefit from. Jobs in the Union will no longer be opened to the young people of the UK because their certificates will not automatically be recognized as before in the European Union. They will also not be able to bid for consultancies in the European Union. There is also the inconvenience of having to apply for visas. The government of Scotland has now indicated that it will again call for independence referendum in Scotland to take it out of the UK and for it to seek admission into the European Union on its own. For sectarian religious reasons, Northern Ireland is not likely to secede soon from the UK and join the Irish Republic. But how long Ireland will remain divided remains a moot question. The small island was divided in May 1921 strictly on the sectarian basis of the south belonging to the Catholics while the Protestant unionists maintain their hold on the north which remained and still forms part of the UK. The other aspect is that the majority in the north were mostly descendants of Scottish and English settlers. To complicate the issue, the Catholics in the north have now outbred the Protestants and are probably now in the majority and if there is a referendum they will vote to join the Republic of Ireland.

The point I am making is that the decision to leave the European Union may lead to the unravelling of the United Kingdom itself. Brexit may therefore turn out to be politically costly for Britain. Even though Britain will remain in the North Atlantic Organization (NATO) but it will not have the same voice as it would have had if it were still part of Europe. The result is that Britain will gradually remain at the apron strings of the United States untrusted by the EU and with no influence in the United States and in the world generally. Of course it is too late to start crying after spilt milk. Boris Johnson and his Conservative and Unionist Party will just have to find their way out of the multitude of their self-inflicted problems. No one is of course saying there were no reasons for Brexit. The campaign to leave hinged on the question of immigration. Too many people were flooding into the United Kingdom from Europe especially when the Union was opened to former communist countries in Central Europe. Britain witnessed millions of people coming in from Poland, Bulgaria and Rumania. The fear of millions of Turks flooding in from Muslim Turkey which for political and strategic reasons was being seriously considered for membership of the Union convinced many working class people who had chaffed under the pressure of immigrants from former British colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Cultural and racial reasons drove the British into voting against remaining in the European Union irrespective of what economists and British intelligentsia might have felt.

This paranoia reminds me of the colourful British Conservative MP, Enoch Powell, a former professor of classics and minister who warned his people against the flood of South Asian immigrants particularly Pakistanis whom he surmised might lead to blood flowing on the streets of Britain. He was dismissed as an alarmist but the spate of terrorists in Britain mouthing Islamic slogans has made the British to remember Enoch Powell.

During the stay or leave campaign, Prime minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama as a friend of Britain advised against it . Boris Johnson branded Obama’s advice as coming from a Kenyan descendant who was unlikely to be a friend of the British after the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s and its brutal suppression by the British army. Nigel Farage, the leader of the “little Englanders” and founder of the nationalist UK Independence Party (UKIP) insulted both British and foreign friends of the British if they merely pointed out the possible economic and political consequences of leaving the European Union. Now chicken has come home to roost and the British people would just have to make do with their choice. The campaign that Britain was sending billions of pounds sterling to help backward areas of Europe with nothing in return is not true. The reason why Northern Ireland and Scotland wanted to remain was because of the huge transfer of resources from Europe to the distressed parts of the UK notably the Celtic nations of Scotland, Wales and Ireland as a whole. The remarkable physical development noticeable in Belfast, the whole of Wales, Edinburgh and Glasgow and the infrastructural modernization of the Irish Republic could not have been done without the European Union.

It is of course true that the rich countries of Europe like Germany, France,  the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium and the Nordic countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland bore the brunt of providing funds for their less developed member states in southern and Central Europe. But the plan was that this was for some time and that in a future prosperous Europe, everyone would be a winner. The complaint of economic burden was also very loud in Germany which provided about 35% of the European budget. Germany and France because of their history of course know that the cost of peace was nothing when compared with the cost of the ruinous wars that devastated Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is not surprising that the European Union has been rather very generous to Britain in allowing her to enjoy free trade without free movement of people with the Union. But this cuts both ways because Britain would continue to be a huge market for German automobiles, pharmaceutical and chemical products. Europe cannot really be hostile to Britain because Britain will always remain an important European country whether in or outside the European Union but its exit would probably make bureaucrats in Brussels and hard headed monetarists and advocate of a hard euro in Berlin and Frankfurt be more flexible when considering the economic performance of laggards in Southern Europe and the Balkans where for a considerable  length of time, the European Union’s economic support will continue to be needed and where  it would be prudent not to push  too hard for economic success and prudent management of resources which nearly drove financially challenged Greece and even Italy out of the Union.