Dear Mister President,
Permit me, Mister President, to cut off the congratulations from this epistle. Apart from Cardinal Onaiyekan’s moratorium on that, (about which Senator George Akume has approached him to reverse himself, a smart move because, more than being a Catholic leader, Onaiyekan also has moral authority), you are already weeks in office and, as some would, say, have somehow, hit the ground running.
Let me say too that I am neither ignorant of the age gap between you and I nor of the huge authority gap between the two of us. All two are in your favour but citizenship still gives me the right and the obligation to get on with this open letter.
There is very little chance that you will get to read it personally but there is high possibility that the First Lady, Oluremi Tinubu, might. Mister President, I have certainly become very fascinated by the First Lady’s populist dash, typified by her May 28th, 2023 performance in the Church. There is no student of critical discourse analysis who will not be fascinated with that performance even as language use and meaning can be complicated. But even then, her awareness or sensitivity to the public feelings that she effectively captured and deftly responded to in that outing suggests that she can be an independent, functional elite unlike the many dead weights in the name of wife that many political leaders in Nigeria burden the people with. If her sensitivity to public feelings get her to read this mail, the point would have been made as well.
First Lady Oluremi Tinubu
Her job in this matter does not contradict that of your media pointsmen, led by our senior colleague, Dele Alake and his media squad. But while Alake and his team are on the media plane, the First Lady operates on a completely different wavelength: populism, the currency of 21st century politic, notwithstanding that it has its positive and negative tinges. So, the fondness for the First Lady is purely academic, not quite media.
Mister President, something tells me that we are heading for the situation whereby Asiwaju Tinubu is going to end up as his own Minister for Education. And I am asking myself whether it would it be out of sync if the president picks out the Ministry of Education as where he would like to put a presidential eye? My answer is that it won’t and the rest of this open letter is about why it won’t.
It would not be because, as much as everyone would want a country that has a brilliant, lethal military; a top ten health care delivery system; an infrastructural envy of OECD standards and a first rate bureaucracy, education remains the ONLY means by which any of these is achievable. There would thus be nothing out of sync if a president decides to put education directly under his gaze, particularly in a situation in which but for the restraint of plastic patriotism, the truth is that, right now, there is basically nothing called education in Nigeria. The universities are so totally run down into antediluvian level. Allowing things to get to that level of hopelessness is the most solid evidence that Nigeria of today simply has no ambition to be anything in the world.
It cannot be otherwise if two out of four presidents of Nigeria have had to cry upon coming in contact with the degree of decay in the university system. The late President Umaru Yar’Adua cried when the also late M D Yusuf dragged him to attend a function at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He could not believe what he saw of the ABU, Zaria, a place he knew very well because that’s where he obtained his degrees and whose crevices he hid here and there to steal a stick of cigarette. It is said he felt so sad that he cut short his stay. Upon arrival in Abuja, he initiated a behind the scene meeting with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). What he would have done if that process went up to the end of it now rests in speculation since he did not last in office.
Dr Goodluck Jonathan also cried. In his own case, it was the entire cabinet that cried because what it heard on the day Prof Yakubu Mahmood (now of INEC) presented the report of a Federal Government investigation into the state of the universities sent it into a loud ‘silence. The minister who told me the story said nobody could comprehend the degree of physical and the associated mental, intellectual and other components of the degeneration. I have no idea what then President Jonathan did afterwards.
It is interesting that the other two presidents who never cried over the state of the education industry are the two soldier-statesmen, Obasanjo and Buhari. Instead, the most unproductive wars with ASUU took place under them. It is the most serious evidence of hopelessness for any government to fight ASUU. ASUU is not an issue in any fundamental sense except for leaders who most likely thought Nigeria is a battalion and they were battalion commanders. Under that condition, everyone is either a friend or an enemy and reconciliation of claims in conversation sessions is not part of their moulding.
Mister president, are you with Obasanjo and Buhari or with Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan on the crisis of managing the educational collapse in Nigeria?
So, Asiwaju Tinubu has a choice where to belong among the two different sets. In deciding which camp to choose – Obasanjo/Buhari or Yar’Adua/Jonathan – he might wish to consider the point that we are talking of a university system that attained a stature even above world class. The Nigerian universities were something else before the rot set in and I will prove that right now, using an accepted sourcing approach in social analysis: personal experiences.
I have just made a presentation to an academic circle outside the country in which I made reference to a debate that took place in a Nigerian university in the 1960s but my reference was tucked in the middle of my presentation. In the feedback process, I was almost ‘ordered’ to make that reference the opening angle to my presentation. In other words, the overarching reaction was: do you mean it happened in Nigeria at the time it happened?
But that is not the first time. I once submitted an essay at another university outside Nigeria in which I made what was to me a casual reference. I mentioned something about how unacceptable a particular idea would be to most Nigerian political scientists brought up on the staple of Ake’s Social Science as Imperialism. That sentence was picked out of a 5000 word essay and I was asked if one or two of those political scientists could go and interact at a certain institute in the university. When I mentioned it to the late Prof Ayo Olukotun, he gave me the impression that I was making it up. So, I sent an email to the Director of the institute in the university concerned and he replied, explaining the funding constraint at the Institute which had made it impossible to bring in scholars from outside. I then forwarded the emails to Prof Olukotun which, paradoxically, ended our friendship. Prof Olukotun died recently but the emails are available.
The point about these stories is to demonstrate how high a national university system in Africa had climbed as to impress some of the very best in Western academia on purely academic terms. This is the system that Obasanjo, Shagari, Buhari, Babangida, Abacha and Obasanjo again, Goodluck Jonathan and Buhari again brought down from Olympian heights. The question is: Can Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu raise the system back to what it was, back to the level that Zik, Sardauna and Awo aimed at?
The point is that any president of Nigeria now must find the education sector the space to bring under strict presidential gaze. In so far as a president is the chief visioner, the apex shaman and head seer of a nation, he has to, particularly in a country as Nigeria. This must be that country where protocol supersedes substance. As such, few ministers are of any use to any visioner in power. Most ministers cannot brief a president in a way that can trigger the president into action. Some are culturally handicapped in conducting such briefing. Others have not mastered handling the authority gap between presidents and most of their ministers, especially when the president is a politician’s politician and much older in age. If those are not the shockers, then the Office of the president which is built to intimidate almost anyone else. Others are busy celebrating ministerial appointment as a life time achievement that they don’t ever come to grips with the substantive issues. Finally, there are those who are well heeled – brought up well, went to some of the best universities, have been achievers and so on but are only skilled in problem solving theory. These are the most dangerous specie in that they have the technical skills but they lack a situated reading of anything. As far as they know, they met a problem and they want to solve it, much like what mechanics do to the vehicles taken to them for repair. They can put back your car on the road but sometimes against the very principles upon which the car is built. Anyone can imagine the damage if we put the country in the place of the car. In other words, beyond looting of ministerial budgets, ministers constitute threats to a sitting government in several ways in the Nigerian context.
The only exceptions are usually people brought along by a president, people who can second guess the president and be right because they have been together for long and they share commitment to whatever binds them. Otherwise, gatekeepers in Nigeria generally believe that the right conduct is to hide things from the boss. Instead of being the eyes and ears of the boss so that things are corrected before they transform into a crisis, they compound spaces of arbitrariness, misjudgement and travesties.
Absolutely misdirected aggression
The president as his own Briefing Officer is one way of undercutting the problems listed so far respecting the education sector and its restoration. By restoration, I do not mean repainting cracked buildings or putting up gigantic edifices on campuses. I mean restoration in terms of the standard of research and teaching attained before the rot set in. That is the aspect that is more threatening to national security when we consider that those being so poorly pushed out of the universities now are those who will be the top military commanders, top bureaucrats, media managers, civil society leaders, diplomats and politicians, amongst others, in another decade or so. How would Nigeria look like under them then?
It can be difficult to appreciate the connection for those who might have had nothing to do with the university system’s core for quite sometime now. I put the core at the curriculum. It is the starting point of the massive reform needed to bring back the universities. Our course structures today are substantially outdated, incomplete and lacking in domestication. Our methodology is indigestible and disconnected, actually meaningless to the students. To escape that meaninglessness, they copy or concoct statistics or get someone to write thesis for them. Let’s take political science, for instance. There is basically no normative political theory in Nigeria. International Relations in Nigeria is still scraps of Realism. This is what anyone who takes a look at the NUC Bench marks will see. Yet, this is at a time when there are about thirteen different approaches commonly taught across the world.
In some universities, there is an unwritten law against teaching of theories. In one of the departments of political science, the HoD said ‘don’t teach these children theories because they will not understand it’. So, how might they function as husbands, wives/mothers, employees generally if they have no theoretical perspectives? How do they compete in a globally entangled world if they are not theoretically armed? Why does anybody go to the university if not for theoretical grounding? You do not want your own citizens to come to grips with the theories but a 27 -30 year old student from other countries, many of them with no idea of Nigeria on the world map goes to Harvard or Oxford, comes up with a theory which is subsequently deployed by the IMF and World Bank to rule you through coinages such as SAP. And you are still not interested in theories. That is the danger in the cult against theories on the basis of their false distinction between theory and practice. Such people are dangerous because there is absolutely no practice that is not informed by a theory. Even the hatred of theories is a theory. Theory is inescapable. Theory is power.
Still in political science, I am sure there is nowhere in Nigeria where students are made aware of the so-called great debates in International Relations. This is an elementary, dated point but it illustrates the crisis, the left behind-ness of our curriculum. The only exception is the typical Department of English in the typical Nigerian university. They are basically up to date because Literature is not an American discipline in the sense in which Stanley Hoffman conceptualises International Relations as an American discipline and which makes it to suffer from the drawbacks of neopositivism.
Some former academic colleagues of mine would say there is nothing missing from the curriculum in Nigeria. Their evidence is that Nigerian students who go out of the country perform wonderfully. It is the kind of convenient analysis that keeps us backward. They perform wonderfully but on the terms of their new university, not on the terms of our own university which teaches them Plato, Machiavelli, Marx and so on as privileged texts, unproblematised. Why should a 17 year-old ‘mummy and daddy’ undergraduate in a Nigerian university be made to study what Plato or Machiavelli said or didn’t say without a problematisation of it in favour of an angle that the student can relate to? Even in Europe, they don’t study any philosophers as privileged texts. Never.
Memories of the seeds of today
So, is it that our lecturers are good for nothing? The best answer to this question remains the one Prof Asisis Asobie, a one-time president of ASUU, once gave. It is a long time now but one remembers Asobie saying that most lecturers were hired on the basis that they got a First Class or a 2:1. That is they are brilliant or potentially so. But there is nothing to stop them from stagnating and degenerating into sycophants, traders and speculators of all variants if the university system is such that does not enable them to attend conferences, within and outside the country so as to update their skills, publish in reputable journals and generally keep up with the debates. As soon as no lecturers could/can afford any of these, they cease to be academics, completely subverted or turned into something else by the very system that is supposed to elevate and enhance their capabilities. This is exactly where Nigeria is today. It is safe to say that no Minister for Education or Executive Secretary of the NUC has told any presidents some of these in the required dosage of hoha. They all want to preserve their jobs by going to tell a sitting president that everything is okay except the stubbornness of ASUU. So, we need to cut ministers and Executive Secretary of the NUC out of the chain this time. If after President Tinubu has been his own Minister for Education for a year or two and the problems persist, then we say bye-bye to Nigeria.
Why? Well, former President Obasanjo is saying in a Punch story that Boko Haram leaders told him they took the option of terrorism because they were excluded from opportunities for self-realisation. Boko Haram ideologues and fighters are less than 500, 000 at any one time. Now, consider the millions that the universities are turning out, many of them barely able to conceptualise their station in life. It ought to dawn on anyone who is thinking that, very soon, there will be another bunch of ‘Boko Haram’ commanders everywhere. This time, they will carry no arms but their ignorance and myopia will be more lethal than the guns Boko Haram commanders carried and used.
It is already unfolding. Isn’t Nigeria merely a limping, battered shadow of itself now? Things have never been this bad, not even during the Nigerian Civil War. The evidence are there, from the level of misery, the degree of alienation, the limping stateness of the Nigerian State, the high level of negative accumulation (human butchering centres, baby factories, trafficking in human beings, mostly girls and women, banditry, kidnapping for ransom), recklessness of individuals in power, brazenness of alienating policies, exclusionary bravado, showy sense of democracy, extreme poverty of leadership, technical incompetence of impostors called leaders at various levels and what have you. And so, taking the task of putting Nigeria back to work as an emergency is the assignment for whoever is president now. And the core of that task is the education sector, not NNPC, the running of which Obasanjo and Buhari chose as the additional duties.
There are still a number of issues but the letter is getting too long. There might be another opportunity to clarify the few more issues left, particularly whether only Mister president taking up the ministry is the answer, why this letter focuses more on the universities than other sub-sets of the educational system and if the recently introduced students’ loan policy of the government is an answer or a crisis itself.
Thank you, Mister President, for your patience and have a great week!
Yours Adagbo Onoja
