Category: Wednesday

When a state is unable to discharge its responsibilities to the citizens, virtually every action of concerned individuals, groups, organizations, and other non-state actors provides a commentary on such deficiencies, either by seeking to fill the gaps or by taking advantage of them.

Such was the case last week, when Goodmus Learning Centre, in partnership with First New Generation Citadel, awarded prizes for the first edition of an academic competition. Ordinarily, such an event should have gone unnoticed. However, the GLC event stands out for its overt and covert recognition of notable deficits in university education in Nigeria, especially in public universities.

The competition aims at (a) detecting Nigerian students who attained excellence in their studies and (b) providing necessary mentoring and financial support that the government might deny them. What is more, the awardees are guided through admission into prestigious institutions at home and abroad. The competition and the award thus speak volume about the status and quality of university education in Nigeria today.

Although the criteria used were not disclosed, the awards were given to three candidates in order of merit. The best candidate was awarded a scholarship to study abroad—in the US, UK, or Turkey; the second to study in any African university; and the third to study in a Nigerian private university. The scholarships are on a scale—100 percent for the first place, 80 percent for second, and 50 percent for third. All three awards offer a commentary on the status and quality of university education in Nigeria, namely, that they are in shambles and of poor quality, so bad that they could not offer the best education to Nigerian best brains.

Accordingly, the first place awardee gets a full scholarship to study overseas, specifically in the United States, the United Kingdom, or Turkey. To be sure, the top-ranked universities in the world are in either the UK or the USA. However, the addition of Turkey by the scholarship sponsors reflects a Nigerian myth of Turkish academic excellence, popularised recently by the  attempt by Nigerian university vice-chancellors’ wives to attend a conference there. Yet, the highest ranked university in Turkey, namely, Istanbul University, ranks less than any of the three top Nigerian universities—University of Ibadan, University of Lagos, and Covenant University—according to the 2022 ranking by Times Higher Education.

The overseas orientation of the first place award speaks to the elite practice by which children are sent overseas for training. The practice began with university training but has since been extended to secondary education and even below for those who can afford it. This leads to significant capital flight, while also causing foreign exchange deficits realized in the scarcity of foreign currencies and the corresponding depreciation of the Naira. This is particularly noticeable around school resumption time in January and September.

The second awardee gets 80 percent scholarship to study in any reputable African university outside Nigeria. This not only admits that Nigerian universities are substandard; it also acknowledges that there are African universities, which offer better quality education than Nigerian universities could offer. This is of course true, especially of a number of universities in South Africa.

The third place award provides a direct indictment of public university education in Nigeria, by directing the awardee to private universities in the country. The GLC Director offers a cogent reason: “We deliberately chose private schools because we don’t want a situation whereby his education will be affected by government irregularities such as strike action”. To be sure, a few of the private universities are gradually climbing the ladder of global competitiveness, many of them still lag behind many of the public universities, especially in staff strength. Indeed, many of them rely on lecturers from nearly public universities, either as adjunct or sabbatical staff.

But who wouldn’t be wary of Nigerian public universities, when the Academic Staff Union of Universities has been on strike for one full year out of every five since 1999? This brings us to the ongoing strike now in its sixth month without an end in sight. What is worse, with an education budget hovering between 5 and 7 percent, the universities suffer shortage of funds, equipment, and infrastructure. On top of it all, university teachers are poorly and irregularly paid. To complicate matters, the government fails repeatedly to honour agreements it signed with the Union. This year alone, the government has repeatedly given its own agencies deadlines, all of which were never honoured, the latest being the 2-week deadline given to the Ministry of Education nearly a month ago. It remains to be seen whatever outcome will come out of it.

The GLC scholarship award is not the only recent event that brings the deficits in university education in Nigeria into sharper focus. There are other non-state actors coming to the government rescue on university education. About the same time as the GLC award, notable citizens of Ijesaland came together to pledge support for the new Ilesa University of Education recently established by the Governor Gboyega Oyetola administration of Osun State. In recognition of the state government’s dwindling financial resources, the Ijesa Development Group pledged financial support and partnership in the running of the university.

In Ogun State, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi has even gone further down the educational ladder by supporting the Yemi Ogunbiyi Anglican School, which comprises a creche, primary, and secondary institutions. Ogunbiyi has a lofty goal for the school: “I want to raise money for that school to become a major player in the education sector in Ogun State”.

It is high time Nigerian federal and state governments aimed at such an ideal for education in Nigerian public schools and universities. Otherwise, as the education industry sinks, so will Nigeria. As French Sociologist, Emile Durkheim, put it in his famous Education et Sociologie, education can do no more than reflect society.

Following Durkheim, I would advise the organizers of the Goodmus Learning Centre scholarship award to change the name of the award from Academic Idols to something else, such as Academic Icons or Academic Excellence Awards. The analogy of Nigerian Idols or American Idols is so striking as to make the academic award look like an entertainment gig. The hunt for academic talent should be distinguished from the search for entertainers.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy created the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, requiring that projects financed with federal funds “take affirmative action” to ensure that hiring and employment practices are free of racial bias. Kennedy’s foundational action laid the foundation for Kennedy’s Vice President and successor to sign the sweeping Civil Rights Act in 1964, which prohibits discrimination of all kinds based on race, colour, religion, or national origin.

Today in Nigeria, some (not all) leaders of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) are trying to roll back the hand of the clock on a local variation of affirmative action. Rather than ensure that the choice of a Vice-Presidential candidate by a party’s flag bearer is free of religious bias, they are arguing that the choice must be biased in favour of their own religion, namely, Christianity. In particular, they are opposed to the choice of a Muslim running mate by the flag bearer of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, himself a minority Muslim from the South, a predominantly Christian region.

Tinubu’s insistence that the choice of former Governor, now Senator, Kashim Shettima of Borno State, is based on his sterling qualifications-experience, competence, ability, vision, and readiness to work as a team player-mean nothing to CAN.

It also does not matter to CAN that the region from which the choice is being made is predominantly Muslim. There are nineteen states in the North, only 4 or 5 of which have a sizable Christian population. Of these Christian states, three are dominated by the Peoples Democratic Party with PDP Governors. Is CAN saying that the voting sensibilities of the remaining 14 or 15 Northern states, mostly APC states, do not matter? It also does not matter to CAN that the leading opposition candidates from the North are Muslim. If Northern Muslim voters follow CAN’s my-religion-only logic, they may all vote for the opposition Muslim candidates from their region. But the voters are much wiser than that. Above all, CAN seems to overlook the critical fact that Tinubu is a politician looking for a running mate that shares his vision of the country, not a Pope looking for a Camerlengo (Deputy).

CAN’s position on what has come to be known as the Muslim-Muslim ticket comes with far-reaching implications for identity politics and our democracy. First, it sets up a we/they dichotomy between Christians and Muslims, thus stoking hatred by reifying religious difference. By implication, it also sets up the predominantly Muslim North against the predominantly Christian South.

Second, CAN ignores the separation of Church and State, enshrined in the nation’s constitution, by openly bringing religion to politics. Some priests have even gone as far as urging church members to register and show evidence of their voter’s card, while others are openly canvassing for votes against a Muslim-Muslim ticket.

Third, the timing and intensity of CAN’s opposition to a Muslim-Muslim ticket accentuates the political orientation of its action. The critical question is: Why is it now that Tinubu chose a Muslim running mate that CAN is screaming and protesting on the streets? Where was CAN when the PDP flouted their party’s constitution and elected a Muslim flag bearer to succeed another Muslim, who would have completed eight years in office by May 2023? What sympathy did CAN extend to Governor Nyesome Wike, a Christian, who cried out against such injustice? Where was CAN when a Bishop was killed and a Christian student stoned to death by fellow Muslim students both in the North?

Why didn’t CAN demonstrate on the streets, like they did recently against Muslim-Muslim ticket, when over 40 church goers were massacred in cold blood inside a church on Pentecost Sunday just over a month ago? Or did CAN shelve protest at that time, because the Vice-President was a Christian Southerner, a pastor, and a member of CAN? Perhaps CAN realised then that the Vice-President actually holds no formal power but has now forgotten about that in the case of Shettima!

What is getting clearer and clearer from CAN’s opposition to a Muslim-Muslim ticket is its political undertone. In this regard, CAN’s opposition manifests major characteristics of a negative campaign. First, it is a diversionary campaign intended to achieve at least three related goals: (a) stoke the fear of neglect among Christians who may share their views; (b) aggravate existing religious fault lines in the country by setting up Christians against Muslims; and, above all, (c) put the APC ticket on the defensive, by diverting attention away from major national issues, such as security, economy, education, healthcare, youth employment, gender equity, and so on.

The second characteristic of negative campaign manifested in the CAN strategy is repetition for emphasis. CAN opposes every step Tinubu takes on the running mate issue, from announcing the name of the candidate to unveiling him officially by the party. CAN even imitated the political strategy of carrying a mock coffin in one of its protests as it was done against former President Goodluck Jonathan during the 2015 campaign.

What is really striking about CAN’s actions is how much they chorus, or are being chorused, by other political parties contesting for the office of President with the APC candidate. This is particularly true of the PDP, which would lead one to ask whether CAN is working for that political party.

To be fair, CAN has every reason to be agitated about the killings of Christians, including Bishops and priests as all Nigerians should. It will be unfair, however, to present such information to the world as if Muslims are not killed by the same criminals. Indeed, the data on killings since 1999 show that more Muslims than Christians have been, and are still being, killed, especially in the North.

There is no magic formula in a Muslim-Muslim ticket that will worsen security just as there is no guarantee that a Muslim-Christian ticket will improve it. Indeed, we have had a Christian-Muslim or Muslim-Christian ticket since 1999. Yet, the security situation in the country has been getting worse and worse. What CAN really needs to do is to negotiate security measures with all the candidates and note the one that has the best plan.

If you are born poor, It is not your mistake If you die poor, it is your mistake. —Bill Gates

Two of Professor Oladipo Adamolekun’s exceptional traits are his power of recall and his penchant for excellence. The power of recall has propelled him to the pinnacle of the academic profession, beginning with a First Class degree in French at the University of Ibadan to an outstanding DPhil (Oxford’s equivalent of a PhD) in Administration at Oxford University. After an outstanding academic career at the University Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), where he rose to the deanship, he joined the World Bank in Washington, D.C., in the United States for another distinguished career.

I have known Ladi, as he is fondly known among his close associates, since his secondary school days at Oyemekun Grammar School, Akure, and followed him from a distance through Christ School, Ado-Ekiti, and the University of Ibadan. For his doctorate, he went to Oxford University in England. He had completed his doctorate before I embarked on mine at the University of California at Berkeley, USA.

We never went to the same schools but we were contemporaries. However, he was always ahead of me. His father’s early embrace of literacy education gave him a head-start. So, while he was sent to Elementary School, as Primary School was then called, I was apprenticed to a diviner to acquire the secrets of Ifa divination. The gap in our years in school came partly from differences in the early paths to which our parents directed us and partly from my three-year affliction by the yaws (ògòdò) epidemic of the 1940s to early 1950s. Yaws was eventually eradicated in Nigeria by penicillin, after it became widely used in the mid fifties.

Although Ladi and I only knew about each other during these years, it was only at Ife that we met in the early 1970s as lecturers. Even then, we were never close. Our friendship grew only in our retirement years, when he moved to Iju and I to Idanre, via Akure. Since then, we’ve been exchanging visits. We even developed a monthly lunch date with our common friend, Professor Kole Omotoso.

Today, we exchange ideas virtually on a daily basis, via phone calls, email, and WhatsApp to keep us both socially and intellectually engaged. He promptly responds to any and all messages from me, while I struggle to catch up with him!

It is to his power of recall and penchant for excellence that I dedicate this tribute today, July 20, 2022, as he turns 80.

We tend to tie the idea of remembering with the act of recalling the past. We normally do this by digging into the store of data in our memory. But we know that memory can fail, especially as we age. The ancient Sumerians and Egyptians were the first to provide alternative to cognitive recall. They devised a means for externalizing memory, by inventing writing. The Sumerians used reeds to record on clay surface about the same time that the Egyptians were also developing hieroglyphic writing. One of the earliest uses of writing was for list making for commercial and administrative purposes.

With advances in technology and the advent of electronic (digital) writing, we began to store information on disk or a local or distant server (otherwise known as the cloud). Bill Gates, author of the above quote, and the late Steve Jobs were among the earliest developers of electronic writing and the cloud for storing data.

One of the early devices used for storing information for long-term use is the diary in which events and notable developments are recorded, using manual writing. Among my circle of friends, Professor Ladi Adamolekun is the best user of the diary for record keeping, a trait he apparently inherited from his father. In recent years, he has been employing digital writing for the same purpose.

His autobiography, I Remember (2016), employed, among others, data from introspection (memory recall) and diaries, notes, and letters. A keen sense of observation and involvement also aided the recall of specific events. The first set of diaries was kept by his father and by his mother. His father was only minimally literate, while the mother was completely non-literate. But she employed scribes to record in notebooks important information about her children and notes on her trading activities.

The second set of diaries was his own, which he started keeping in 1962 at age 19. To enhance his diary-keeping habits, he moved from yearly to 5-year diaries in 1986. As he finally embarked on writing I Remember (2016) Adamolekun decided to write 52 weekly recollections from January to December 2013. His new monograph, Nigeria and I, being launched today to mark his 80th birthday, may well have used the diary as a source of data.

Diaries and other devices used for storing information are useful not only for remembering the past but also for planning for the future. Diaries are like looking back to see where, why, and how you fell in order to prevent a reoccurrence in the future. It is in this sense that diaries are also about remembering the future, as indicated in the title of the above title.

Even more importantly, Ladi has used the art of remembering to excel in school and in the workplace in order to secure a profitable future for himself. In other words, he has ensured that he would not make the mistake of dying poor.

Ladi’s knack for excellence came from various sources, including domestic discipline, attending the best schools, and working in the best environments. His punctuality and sense of responsibility come from his penchant for excellence. It is no wonder then that he has always been among the few outstanding achievers, wherever he went to school or worked.

It is heartwarming, therefore, that Nigeria recognizes him as an outstanding and productive scholar, by awarding him the Nigerian National Order of Merit. As of February 2022, only 79 Nigerians have been so recognized since the Award was established 43 years ago.

No one should be surprised, therefore, that Ladi is intolerant of failure, tardiness, and avoidable loose edges, although he understands that they happen.

Finally, I thank Yemi Adamolekun for inviting me to contribute to a book of Tributes, which gave rise to this contribution. Here’s to my friend’s toast as I wish him many more years of healthy, peaceful, restful, and productive life.