It must be good news for all those who care for the possibility of the remaking of Nigeria that Sola Olorunyomi is now a Professor. He has always been a professor but it is still welcome for the Nigerian system to officially confirm him as such by its own criteria of eligibility. There should not be much time for celebration of that in the context of the arrears that have accumulated.
The Olorunyomis of the Nigerian university system have accumulated arrears and it is time for them to pay. Of course, the system is operated or operates in a very dispiriting manner, simply destructive of any spirit of innovation. Still, an Olorunyomi must enact an internal japa’.
Intervention would want to see him get out of Ibadan for one or two years to some campus somewhere in Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Kano or Sokoto State. The empirics that can contribute to the frame game from which emancipation will come cannot come from standing permanently on one spot.
But Intervention will not support Prof Olorunyomi going to Bayero University, Kano. BUK is certainly not built to accommodate two of his types at the same time. Already, there is another Olorunyomi in BUK’s Dept of English and European Languages by name IBK (Ibrahim Bello-Kano).
What about ABU, Zaria? Zaria may no longer be its old FASS self but it is not that bad there. Why not a more virgin land somewhere in Taraba, Plateau or Sokoto?
Some of the challenges facing the Olorunyomis, IBKs, Uwasombas and so on in the Nigeria university system would have been easier to face a decade or so back. But while it has to be noted that age is not entirely on their side, age is not an issue against rising to the challenges and overcoming them by the signifiers of the values of that generation signified by the Olorunyomis in the system. That must be the lesson handed down by the Mahathir Mohammeds, Robert Mugabes, Joe Biden, Atiku Abubakars and Bola Tinubus. If these people can swim in defence of whatever values they subscribe to at their late 70s and early 90s, why not the warriors of the ‘Great Nigeria’ generation who shook Nigeria from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s?
It is no point stressing that academics must circulate when Nigeria is constituted in opposition to that time – honoured practice. Notwithstanding some encouraging voices from the House of Representatives, the inclusion of academia in Nigeria’s deadening bureaucracy continues. It is doubtful if anyone thought the Tinubu administration will tolerate that arrangement a day longer than his swearing – in. Why? Because it serves nobody’s interests.
Two, several decades into the age of the ‘textual turn’, one would have thought that the Olorunyomis on our campuses would be awash with consultancy jobs from advertisers, think tanks, global civil society, Federal establishments, politicians and even the military arising from the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and the associated shift in the conceptual framework of strategy. It must be a major indicator that something is wrong somewhere if that is not happening or if the system feels, for whatever reasons, that the Olorunyomis are not, as the trained philosophers of the frame game, the indispensable actors. These things are not casually bought from the market.
Anyway, congratulations, Prof Sola Olorunyomi of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan!
