BUKites (graduates of Bayero University, Kano) are insistent that the exceptional (food) insecurity being experienced in Nigeria is not a good enough reason not to celebrate one of theirs who has struck on a global scale. They have Stanley Nwabali – skipper of the national team – in mind.
According to a graphic made available to Intervention by a senior graduate (if there is anything like that), Nwabali is a 2019 graduate of the institution. While in the university, he was a Director of Sports at the Departmental level, meaning that he didn’t just start at the national/global level. Rather, he is coming from somewhere.
For those who put their ears to the ground, what BUKites are ‘silently’ saying is that, without being chauvinistic, the skipper builds on a legacy of exceptionalism associated with BUK. Where might this claim of a legacy of exceptionalism be coming from?
A lot depends on who is talking to who. Many would start with Dr Tajudeen Abdulraheem whose exceptionalism is not just how he got admission to that university (He went to HoD and said he wanted to study Political Science in the university, rejecting the advice to go and write the required exams, persisting until he got the admission and made a First Class in those days when Nigerian universities rarely awarded that class, rarely in the social sciences) or obtaining a PhD from Oxford. What is talked more about him long after his death is an Ogbomosho man who died and was buried in Katsina State. He obliterated the rigid ethno-religious walls celebrated in the newspapers today by ethno-religious champions. Of course, Taju as he was fondly called was named the African president. There is no such position in an objective sense but he was enacting it in everything he said and did, squaring up to African presidents at the same protocol level but without converting it to personal or mercenary ends. He left the world with the memorable call to action: ‘Don’t agonize, organize!
Others bring in Prof Attahiru Jega who has two exceptions to his credit. One is president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) at the time ASUU moved the level of struggle to squaring up to military rulers. But the nation hadn’t had the last from him. He was to emerge later as Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and, working with a team of hard headed social scientists, applied a form of technological determinism that caught the politicians completely unaware. That outcome made contrary plans difficult to implement and Nigeria was saved the calamity prophets of doom were serving.
About the same time or shortly before Jega struct at INEC, a Literature lecturer from BUK arrived at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria to undertake a PhD. His problematic became a subject of a debate between him and established figures in the social sciences arena in Zaria. The point about such debates is not winners and losers but the debate in question, specifically between then Mallam Ibrahim Bello-Kano (now Prof IBK) and the late Bala Usman compelled some notable Zaria academics to go and re-read their epistemology. In academia, it is never about anyone being brilliant because the knowledge production process makes investing an individual with brilliance a cheap claim. But it doesn’t mean this is not a tribute to a legacy of excellence. After all, IBK is A – Z a made in BUK product.
Interestingly, Prof Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 2020 was either IBK’s lecturer or colleagues. Gurnah left BUK to the University of Kent in the UK where he received the Nobel Prize. As Chinweizu argues, the Nobel Prize is not awarded using the criteria of soccer, for example. That is, however, not to say that Gurnah winning the prize is not a tribute to BUK where his intellectual formation must have inhaled a lot from.
Protagonists of BUK exceptionalism also go as far as reminding whoever cares to listen that BUKites are some of the most read Diasporic voices in Nigeria today, particularly Moses Ochonu and Farooq Kperogi, two US-based BUKites. Hajia Zainab Okinno is one of the notable female success stories in contemporary Nigerian journalism. She is a BUKite. This list can grow taller and taller, depending on whom one talks to. This is thus perhaps one instance where chauvinism is allowed because it is all about exceptionalism, not Liliputianism and organised racketeering typical across the country today.
What it makes clear is that nearly all Nigerian universities up to the mid-1980s were world class. That was before the locusts came to town and before anyone knew, the universities were down.
In other climes, even the maddest policies, practices, models or regimes ensure that universities are shielded. In war, universities are shielded and listed along with hospitals as out – of – target list. It is not because the people in universities are special. It is because the stock of knowledge held in libraries are the too precious to be bombed. The unwritten law against bombing universities during wars is not always observed but even the thought of such speaks to how far national elite elsewhere go in shielding universities during terrible times. So, is the power elite in Nigeria nationals of some other countries? What happened they, on their own, set out to devastate the universities?
