In a sojourn of more than five decades in the classroom and the newsroom and as a member of the audience for news and public affairs, I have had my full share of commencement addresses delivered by persons of great specific gravity to young men and women about to enter the world after a period of study in their cloistered environment.
Like you, dear reader, few of their edifying messages cling in my memory.
I have no doubt that at my graduation from the University of Lagos, what the chancellor and former president of Nigeria, and later the Owelle of Onitsha, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, and the vice chancellor, the distinguished historian Professor JF-Ade. Ajayi commended to the class and commended with stirring eloquence was nothing less than a distillation of the wisdom of the ages. Yet, weeks later, I would have found it difficult to recall their exhortation with confidence.
The commencement speaker at the School of Journalism the year I graduated from Columbia was Garry Wills, author (Nixon Agonistes) and Pulitzer prize-winning historian. He must have spoken with great earnestness about the obligations of American journalists and the media in the post-Watergate era. But I have no memory of his oration.
I remember that the leader – and sole Member of Parliament for the anti-apartheid Liberal Party of South Africa, Helen Suzman, was among those honored at the larger University Commencement but I cannot now tell whether she gave a speech. If she did, I have entirely forgotten whatever she said.
All is not lost, however. I do recall a few commencement speeches, but mostly for the wrong reason. I cite two memorable instances here.
The first was at the 1991 post-graduate Convocation of the University of Lagos. I was as attending as guest of my wife, who was due to receive the MSc(Ed), and of course as a newspaper reporter. A one-time Naval chief was standing in for the Visitor, military president Ibrahim Babangida. His speechwriters had apparently determined that this was a chance to show all those condescending lecturers and their misguided wards that the Ivory Tower has no monopoly on learning.
In his solemn address before the assembled audience, the Guest Speaker recalled the “subventions, extra-budgetary grants and mass transit vehicles” the Federal Government had availed the university the previous year.
These measures, he said, were “predicated on our belief that the ambience of our tertiary institutions should be ameliorated, to facilitate the teaching and learning process.”
Fund raising, he advised the university’s authorities, should not be undertaken only on formal occasions “but as on-going, well-articulated, perennial activity.” They should keep it in mind that “the provision per se of supplementary funds cannot obliterate the problems of our universities, because “deft management is also a desideratum.”
He went on to remark and deplore how students’ grievances reveal “a hiatus in the communication structure,” and how “distortive” processes cannot be a reflection of positive development. He spoke of how, after the “ferments” on campus, “the prescribed quantum of knowledge become unimpartable and the degrees ultimately awarded stand a risk of being emasculated…”
He closed by reminding teachers that since they stood “in loco parentis” to their students, they were “vantagely placed to show meritorious examples and moral rectitude to those who are in statu pupilari.”
A guest in the row behind us said the whole thing reminded him of Bomber Billy in Ogali A. Ogali’s Veronica my Daughter, the flagship title in the Onitsha Market Literature Series.
No prizes for figuring out that the guest speaker was Vice President Augustus Aikhomu, since deceased.
Some two decades later and half-a-world away, I watched on live television a commencement address given by Noam Chomsky, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic and political activist, among other defining attributes.
Wasting no time on preliminaries, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor launched into an impassioned disquisition on the latest findings from research on the structure and functions of the brain, and on their implications for how we learn and think, and how we develop and use language.
There was pin-drop silence. No rustling or shuffling of papers. The only sound was from Chomsky’s delivery. It was unapologetic. It made not the slightest concession to the less intellectually endowed, nor to those who might have found some relief in eye contact. “Total immersion” is what best describes the performance, for performance it was.
After some 20 minutes, he finally looked up, gathered his notes, thanked the audience curtly, and retreated to his seat on the platform. A huge sigh washed over the audience, followed by thunderous clapping. Finally, it was over. The school’s authorities, the students and the guests could finally face the real business of the day.
Until last week, there was one convocation address that I felt sure Nigerians of my generation would never forget, namely, Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s speech on the provisional results of the 1973 National Population Census, delivered at the University of Ife (as it then was), on July 6, 1974.
Of that census, supervised by former chief justice Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, the Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon had stated, at once defensively and affirmatively: “The figures are very provisional but I can say that the 1973 count was probably the most thorough headcount in the history of the world.”
Not so, Awolowo rejoined.
“I have examined this result from several standpoints which time does not permit me to elaborate upon here, and as a result, I have been irresistibly impelled to the conclusion that the so-called provisional figures are absolutely unreliable and should be totally rejected by the Supreme Military Council,” he said.
So absolutely unreliable, so incurably flawed, that no post-enumeration survey could save it. With his trademark forensic brilliance and expository rigour, he showed that the 1973 Census reversed previous population growth rates in the 12 states of the Federation, crediting the Western State with an inter-censal growth rate of negative 0.62, and the North Eastern State with a growth rate of 7.04.
“This just cannot be true,” the great man said.
One of the first acts of the Murtala Muhammad regime on overthrowing Yakubu Gowon was to cancel that census.
To this convocation address, this unforgettable instance of speaking truth to power, we must now add General TY Danjuma’s speech last week, at the Taraba State University, in Jalingo.
During the past year, lethal clashes between nomadic cattle herders and farming communities have become the grisly subject of conversation where two or three Nigerians are gathered. The orgy of bloodletting reached a high point of sorts when, over the New Year weekend, more than 70 helpless residents of Benue State were killed, reportedly by herdsman armed with sophisticated assault rifles, who also made it a point to leave entire communities pillaged.
Similar killings have occurred repeatedly in Plateau, Nassarawa, Kaduna and Zamfara, Taraba, and Adamawa, among other states.
How could this go on when Nigeria was not engulfed in a civil war? How could the perpetrators operate with such brazen contempt for the lives of Nigerians and the laws of the land? Why is it that none of them had been apprehended, much less prosecuted?
With characteristic forthrightness, Danjuma, the nation’s former Chief of Army Staff and one-time Minister of Defence, furnished some answers to these questions in his convocation address at Taraba State University. His speech was unscripted, and the delivery had about it the subtlety of a whiplash.
Excerpts, transcribed from the cable service provider TV Continental:
‘Taraba is a mini-state. Taraba is a mini-Nigeria, composed of various ethnic groups living together reasonably peacefully. But the peace of that state is under assault. There is an attempt at ethnic cleansing in the state, and of course in all the riverine states of Nigeria.
“We must resist.
“We must stop it.
“Every one of us must rise up.
“The armed forces are not neutral. They collude. They collude. They collude with the armed bandits that kill people, kill Nigerians. They have assisted their movements. They cover them.
“If you are depending on the armed forces to stop the killing, you will all die one by one.
“The ethnic cleansing must stop in Taraba State, must stop in all the states of Nigeria. Otherwise, Somalia will be a child’s play.
“I ask every one of you to defend your country, your territory, your state.
“You have nowhere else to go. You have nowhere else to go.
“God save our country.”
A great many people have interpreted the address as a call to arms, a piece of incitement. A great many also see it with greater truth as a call to self-defence in the face of the government’s inability to protect innocent, law-abiding citizens.
Wherever one stands in this divide, there is no denying that General Danjuma has re-framed the national conversation.
