Barely 24 hours after a former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Prof A.D Yahaya died in Abuja, Nigeria is also receiving the news of the death of Historian and culture administrator, Prof Sule Bello of the Dept of History at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. In his own case, he died today, (Sunday, October 3rd, 2021) in Zaria. It is not known at this point what killed him.
Prof Sule Bello was once the chief Executive of the Bureau of Arts and Culture, a position that is said to have given him the other or the empirical side of the national question in the ensuing sojourn in Lagos beyond what he ever read in the books. He has remained a member of the People’s Redemption Party, (PRP) but from a rebellious angle most of the time.
The climax of that tradition must be the clash between his group and the group led by the also late Yusuf Bala Usman during the ‘Marx and Africa’ Conference in the university in 1983. Subsequently at a Faculty seminar, he presented the paper titled “The Inherent Limitations of Petiti-Bourgeois Political Analysis”. It was a finishing job of the group generally known as the Bala Brought Ups, (BBU) around the Kano-Zaria-Jos academic and media axis, with protagonists and antagonists on both sides among students produced especially from the old FASS in Zaria.
The tragedy of these death and that of other senior academics of late is that Nigeria is not reproducing their types. No more admissible evidence can be there beyond a recent confession by the industry regulator – the National Universities Commissions, (NUC) which declared that
Nigeria produces poor Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) holders because the quality of supervision is nothing to write about in terms of the inadequate grounding of many supervisors and the very low pay. Although Prof Abdulrasheed Abubakar, the NUC Executive Secretary who disclosed this himself also added the body is taking steps to address issues and challenges of post-doctoral education in Nigeria in terms of the timeliness, quality, and relevance of research projects”, he got an immediate reply. It came in the quote below:
“NUC has all the blame. It started with its avowed decision that the entry degree for academics on universities would be the Ph.D degree. Many academics at the time foresaw what is now happening that with that prescription, all sorts of doctorate degrees will start rearing their heads, more so with the proliferation of universities, without any structured plan for those to man them. That has now come to pass and all sorts of ill baked rookies are trotting about as Ph.D degree holders. There is nowhere else in the world that new universities had been created astronomically, without any discernible plan and followed by a “decree” that every academic must possess a doctorate degree that could emanate from fledging and poorly resourced universities. Poor thinking, poor outcome!”
The point is that the generation that got quality grooming from the university system before the SAP era are dying off, retiring or leaving the system due to dissatisfaction with the mess that confronts them.
Meanwhile, the decline is unspeakable, aggravated by a recruitment regime in academia that requires approval of Abuja to hire even an Office Cleaner, not to talk of a lecturer. And how many quality PhD holders are coming out of the system every year to fill the gap at a time the PhD has no duration in Nigeria. Many PhD candidates die before the time comes. Neither the parents understand what is going on in terms of plausible popular actions to compel the government to appreciate the issue nor are the students anymore political as before, what with majority of those teaching them.
In the circumstance, it is almost natural that the death of the leading names behind the era when academia was a force for disciplining a rascally state and elite would evoke memories of the system they created and operationalised! May we see less death of good academics in Nigeria and all over the world!
