From the personal and email responses that I got from my review of Professor Emeritus Ayo Banjo’s autobiographical book, Morning by Morning, last week, one thing almost immediately became clear to me: meritocracy is not much discussed, let alone thought about in our country. Most of those who responded to me knew what the word or term meant, but only in a general sense, not as something that applies to Nigeria now or, indeed, in the past. This revelation took me by surprise if only because in my review of the book, I had assumed that at the very least, people of my generation and the generation(s) older than mine, would immediately connect with my assumption that at one time in this country, a meritocracy based on education, talent and achievement did exist. This is the assumption that I wish to explore in this postscript to last week’s piece in this column.
For a start, think, compatriots, of a remark that I made central to my reflections on Morning by Morning. What was this? It is the observation that I had never before encountered in any other book the “parade” of meritocratic values and achievements as I did in the book. It is important to clarify what I mean by this observation. At its most comprehensive as a social phenomenon, meritocracy is government or the holding of power on the basis of education, skill and achievement rather than birth, wealth or class. But this particular definition does not exhaust the range of definitions and meanings in our term, This is because in much more flexible usages of the term, meritocracy also refers to very influential people who do not govern or exercise power directly.
Britain is one of the best examples in the world of this looser form of meritocracy: for centuries now, the country’s public affairs have been dominated by people who went to the best schools, people who, on the basis of their education and talent, have more or less been preponderant in governmental administration, the armed forces, the Church, the Law and Education. The monarchy and the wealthy, these are the two groups or institutions that exercised real power over the centuries in Britain, the meritocracy playing second or even third fiddle to them, with enormous prestige of course but without control of the real levers of power. This is the tradition that serves as a model for the sort of meritocracy that is celebrated in Morning by Morning, specifically in the period between the early 1950s to the mid-1970s.
But there is an important twist to the celebration. In Emeritus Professor Banjo’s account or “celebration”, the emphasis is on individuals, not the group. This may be because in the British experience of meritocracy, we are talking of centuries of evolution and consolidation, not the span of a few decades as in the Nigerian/African case that we encounter in Morning by Morning. Beyond this factor, I think that the real explanation of the difference from the British meritocratic order is the fact that Professor Banjo in his book is talking about individuals he personally met or knew about. These individuals went to the best schools in the country, had the best teachers and the best examination results and went on to influential positions in education, the clergy, law, business, diplomacy and even the officer corps of the armed forces. But remarkably, the emphasis of the author is on the individual, every single one of them, not the consolidated weight of their collective identity as Nigeria’s own homegrown meritocratic order. This is why the term “meritocracy”, together with its adjectival form, “meritocratic”, never appears in the book. Let me rephrase this observation: though the word, “merit”, together with its cognate form, “excellence” appears many times in the book, there is not a single direct invocation of “meritocracy” in the book, none at all.
Was I unfair to impute to the book a word, a term of great historical and social import that it never even mentions? I don’t think so. Indeed, I categorically deny this charge – which, by the way, none of those who responded to my review of the book levelled at me. But why bring up a charge that nobody has levelled at me? Is it to preempt possible future expression of this charge of unfairness? Again, my answer is no, I am not anticipating that somewhere down the line, someone will make the charge. Simply stated, this is my reason for bringing up this matter of unfairness: although the word used extensively and repeatedly in Morning by Morning is merit, meritocracy comes into play in the book because the author explicitly links the excellence of the best schools in the country, together with the excellence of the products of these schools (and the one university then in existence in the country) to the influential positions that they went on to occupy in all areas of public affairs in the country. In other words, though merit constitutes the center of narration and reflection in the book, meritocracy memorably enters into the discussion because the author, quite correctly in my view, implicitly links it to meritocracy. This is the issue that I wish to make the center of my discussion in this postscript to my review of the book. Incidentally, this is the idea behind the title that I gave to my review of Morning by Morning in last week’s column, “Merit without a meritocracy, can you have one without the other?”
There was a time when the best secondary schools and the one university in Nigeria, University College, Ibadan (later the University of Ibadan) were the equal of the best schools and universities in the English-speaking world. But since that is gone now, how can we regain the excellence of those schools and that one university in some, if not all of our schools and universities? In an incredibly original and memorable manner, this is the question above all others that Morning by Morning sets itself, of course within the life story of the author. There are many books, monographs and articles that have taken up and expounded on this question. What sets Ayo Banjo’s book apart from all these other books and articles is his total and unwavering focus on excellence as the foundation, almost as an end in itself. There is also the matter of the link between excellence or merit in the education with influential positions in law, medicine, administration and other jobs in the elite professions. But this is secondary to the focus of this book on excellence and merit as the foundation. I confess that this was the point of my most powerful emotional identification with the book: once in my own life, at the University of Ibadan and under the tutelage of the author of this book and his fellow lecturers, I had myself thrilled to the experience of education of the intellect as an end in itself, with almost no thought of what I would do or where I would go with the training.
You must train the intellect first, almost as an end in itself; if you do that successfully, you can go on to train the person in any subject or discipline that she or he wishes to take up as a profession or a specialization. That is the absolutely uncompromising stand of the author of Morning by Morning. I mean, by his own admission, he was going to read ancient Greek classics in language and literature for his university degree, knowing that of all the subjects in the humanities, this subject had the least justifiable rationale with any practical connection to a job, a profession beyond teaching Greek itself. The only reason he switched to English and linguistics was because it would have taken him five years instead of four to complete his education at his university, the ancient, famous and prestigious St Andrews in Glasgow, Scotland. Yes, the author would go on to become lecturer, professor, dean of arts and humanities and vice chancellor, but the foundation of it all was the sound training of the mind or the intellect, almost as an end in itself. I can add here, as I have done on other occasions and in other contexts, that as my teacher at UI, the author of Morning by Morning was central to my own experience at that university of the pursuit of learning, of knowledge as an end itself. This was as big, if not bigger, than my encounter with Marxism in graduate school in America, an experience that I usually recount as the biggest intellectual event in my attainment of intellectual adulthood.
If you no longer have “best schools” that stand out from all other schools in the country, if no university now stands as the incontestable benchmark in quality and excellence as UI once did for all Nigerian universities, then of course it becomes difficult, if not merely nostalgic and even reactionary, to talk about the Igbobi Colleges, the Government Colleges, the Kings Colleges and Queens Colleges and Schools, the Christ Schools and the Ibadan Grammar Schools of the past. And what of the tutorial system at UI, replaced by the course system barely three to four years after my set left in 1970? No one talks about it any longer; the deed is done, let the dead bury the dead!
To all these, Morning by Morning says no; we must recover as much of these seemingly vanished institutions and practices of inculcating excellence and merit in our schools and universities, as many of them as feasible. Again and again in his book, Professor Emeritus Banjo observes that in other parts of the world, the traditions and practices that made UCI/UCI, together with the best secondary schools in Nigeria have outlasted a millennium of evolution and change. Thus, if our own experience of first-rate education in secondary and higher education lasted less than a century, is this not an aberration rather than a world-historical norm? In my years at Cornell and Harvard, this was a question I was forever wrestling with: why have excellent teaching and research lasted for centuries there when it lasted only for a few decades in my own country? Morning by Morning is, as far as I am aware, the first book-length exploration of this problem in the mode of a self-authorizing autobiography.
Emeritus Professor Banjo characteristically chooses in his book not to name and perhaps thus shame the person responsible for one of the most controversial acts in the destruction of merit and meritocracy in the secondary school system of the then Western Nigeria by drastically reducing the funding and the infrastructural adequacy of the “best schools” in the region in order to make room for more students from poorer economic backgrounds. Everyone knows that it was Bola Ige, himself a product of one of such “best schools” and otherwise a lion of progressivism in politics and ideology. That act of the levelling of all schools downward, not upward or even laterally, marked for the author one of the fateful steps in the drastic reduction of quality in secondary school education in the region, an act crying to be undone And this is but only one of the many suggestions, many proposals to at the very least recreate oases of excellence and merit in the vastness of substandard and inferior education in our country today and far beyond into the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.
What next beyond the short glory decades of excellent and meritorious education in our country? Morning by Morning has set the terms of the debate. Read the book and be instructed by the magisterial authority of its writer on this crucial subject.