Needed: Another Prof Jubril Aminu @ the NUC

Nigerians are believed to have been shocked beyond shockability in their encounter with nation building. But even then the set of members of the NYSC somewhere in the country who didn’t know what their gender is must shock anyone. It has to be the ultimate alarm signal even for a nation that is beyond shockability.

Education is in trouble all over the world in this epoch but there is a uniqueness to the Nigerian dimension. The uniqueness is that those who should lose sleep over the signal are least bothered or even aware. Lack of grasp of basic concepts is not part of the problems in some other parts of the world where the never ending clashes in the philosophy of science is a bigger ‘wahala’. But that’s in the category of problems we can describe as pleasant and inviting.

A concept such as gender around which global politics revolves a lot must be something that graduates, irrespective of their discipline, are conversant with – how gender is constructed and some would say performed and what all of that has to do with empowerment and emancipation of the entire society.

A regulator in need of urgent rejigging

The problems manifesting in education may, in the last instance, lie with the social order but the argument here is that it has an agential dimension. In other words, the person on top of the agency regulating the university system in Nigeria has a role to play, a contention which raises the question of how then might such a person be decided?

For Intervention, thinking about this compels attention to Prof Jubril Aminu. Jubril Aminu is someone about whom opinion will remain divided in Nigeria. But opinion about most individuals in Nigeria is, for most time, based on hear-say, shallow, pedestrian and deserving of being ignored or treated with utter contempt. In most cases, the characters who make the loudest judgment about other people are the most distant from the situations they talk about. Instructively, Jubril Aminu understands and accepts this perspective of public opinion and has got a critical paradigm, beginning with his thesis about ‘when they cannot call you ignorant, they say you are arrogant, …’

In the context of the foregoing, there is a case for arguing at this point for a search for another Jubril Aminu for Executive Secretaryship of the National Universities Commission. The era of the senior Jubril Aminu is gone. There is no illusion that, at his age, Jubril Aminu can be brought back to serve as chief executive of NUC. In other words, reference to Jubril Aminu here is only in terms of a model chief executive for a key regulatory agency which allows the rest of us to go to sleep comfortably if it is working very well.

The point is that the very qualities that were derided in Prof Jubril Aminu during his time as Executive Secretary are the qualities needed by whoever gets there now. Aminu was very brilliant and was perhaps unable to appreciate why others were not that endowed. For whatever reasons, he came to be perceived as high handed and autocratic but unassailable as far as matters of quality and standards were concerned. Those are precisely the point about Aminu now: quality and standard. Quality of who teaches in the universities, what is taught and how are gradings done that certain students can still move from one academic year to another in spite of unsustainable outings.

The point too about Jubril Aminu is his capacity to ram it down on Vice-Chancellors who lacked capacity. His was a case of being positively autocratic as to have his way as long as he held sway. It was required by anyone who was concerned about mobilising and moving a ‘Third World’ country to a ‘First World’ status.

It is up to Nigeria, a country which is paying heavy prices already for being frivolous with serious things. Reading Bolaji Akinyemi in a Daily Trust interview, one could sense his pain in the exclusion of Nigeria from the G-20. Yet, Nigeria was originally on that list before it was dropped and replaced with the European Union. And what was the reason? Nigeria was dropped for reason of domestic incoherence – endlessly fighting over trivia and unable to ever achieve consensus practically over anything. Too chaotic at home to reflect on anything beyond the surface and bring anything new to the table. So, it was dropped.

As Akinyemi pointed out, President Tinubu will be going there in the next round but as an observer even though Nigeria is supposed to be the largest economy in Africa. The late Prof Raufu Mustapha and Prof Adebajo Adekeye warned Nigeria over a decade ago: they don’t put you on the list simply because you are over 200 million in population. That is a factor but only a quantitative factor. They will go for South Africa which is about a third of your population because, in spite of chaos and corruption in South Africa, they can see the might of the University of Cape Town, Wits and the South African Journal of International Affairs (SAJIA). These are little things to us but they matter to those who make the decisions and who are there based on works that their Harvard, Oxford, McGill, ANU, etc.

Back home, successive Nigerian presidents engage in destroying their own citadels and humiliating Nigerian academics, who are reduced to conditions in which they cannot think theoretically. The preference is for stuff handed down to them by the IMF and the World Bank based on theories and models developed in graduate schools by young chaps who cannot locate Nigeria on the world map. There is, indeed, a price to pay for every choice made.