Prof Etannibi Alemika is easily one of the most sophisticated of their generation of Nigerian academics. He obtained his first and second degrees at the University of Ibadan under intellectual beacons such as Omafume Onoge, Bade Onimode, Yemi Kayode, Lai Erinosho, Francis Okediji, Peter Ekeh and the likes. Then a PhD with bias to Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. At the University of Jos, where he taught for over four decades, there were outstanding social sciences scholars like Onoge again, Jonah Elaigwus, Ali Mazruis, Aaron Ganas and others as well as a revered university administrator, Ochapa Onazi. So, he is a product of a multiple of the best available in his time.
A few months into retirement, Intervention asked him in this occasional interview series how the consensus about the university system in Nigeria being down and down came about. Prof Alemika doesn’t contest the fact of such a consensus, given the endless protests by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), admission by even the Federal Government through its documentation of decay of infrastructure in the universities and the culture of parents sending their children to other countries, indicating loss of confidence in the Nigerian system. So, there is a consensus which he traces to what he calls the jettisoning of the tradition of looking for the best when recruiting both staff and students into the university. Taking them one by one, he sees the death of the tradition of retaining the best produced by the department. When this was the tradition, those who had a First Class were automatically asked to stay back while the department is likely to invite those who got a Second Class Upper score. Today, it is those with a marginal second class lower division degree that are hired because of patronage. So, in most cases, it is those without the capacity and the interest that are hired. One outcome he identifies with that is that now, there are almost none of the activities which allow senior colleagues of the new academic debate issues as part of coaching and mentoring. The universities are not that environment where one cannot evade learning anymore. “The culture of engaging one another as academics is gone”, he says and this right down to publications. Staff do not circulate their drafts for peer comments again because competition to publish rather than quality works has taken over, “meaning the whole culture of sharing knowledge eroded”.
Prof Alemika’s base until recently
He puts this to the culture of recruitment by patronage, saying the same thing is applicable to recruitment of students. Less than 40% of our students are, in his view, university materials. His evidence is the carry – over rate at the end of every semester. His greater worry with this is that majority of the students go through the whole university degree programme without maturing. It is to the extent that they do not even have the vocabulary of the respective academic disciplines they studied. So, he asks: how did we get to this level?
In answering his own question, Prof Alemika identifies the following factors. One, the destruction of primary schools through government’s abdication of that key responsibility which he equates to a crime against humanity. Second, the cancellation of the HSC (Higher School Certificate) which would have equipped students with the attributes needed to cope with undergraduate studies. Three, the process of JAMB but for which he doesn’t blame the students who keep writing the examination until they passed. In his own time, many students didn’t go to the university until they were more mature. Now, they have to continue straight to the university because there is no plan for secondary school products to engage themselves. Before, there were such plans. And the question he asks is why hasn’t anyone thought about this massive pressure on students to go to the university. “Why can’t we have a 3 – 6 and even 12 months vocational training opportunity for secondary school graduates in, say, automobiles repair and maintenance, where a student can learn either the electrical part or mechanical or painting or vulcanizing?”. It is not too much to assist them with the finance or to do this by organising it in the form of a cooperative. That way, people do not have to be taking their vehicles from one mechanic workshop to another because they will be concentrated in one place where anyone can get whatever type of services needed. “This is the thinking lacking in government”, Alemika argues, tracing it to it the pressure on every product of the secondary schools to get into the university, with the result that millions keep writing JAMB year in, year out.
His fourth feature is the decline in quality of university governance to the extent that he doesn’t think that many Vice-Chancellors today have the carriage of Heads of Department in the 1970s. He sees accountability of lecturers to students and to the university gone, traceable, in his view, to the tendency of those who are close to VCs or powers that be to misbehave. He cites an example of the crisis of quality of internal governance. “You have a department where you can only take 120 students but you took 300 students. In doing that, you violate the guideline on carrying capacity, resulting on pressure on lecturers, facility and students. That is not the fault of government but due to poor governance by university leadership and academics”. Although Alemika credits JAMB with a record of excellence under Prof Oloyode, he wonders why JAMB does not use its power to abort admission beyond carrying capacity of existing facilities.
Fifth is the government against which the Professor of Criminology holds the charge of crime against humanity for abdicating responsibility for functional primary schools in Nigeria. His argument is that the best education anyone gets is in the primary school. “Once you mess up somebody at the primary school level, you have messed him or her or them for life”, he says, insisting on Nigeria restoring quality public primary school as a must.
He uses himself as an example, revealing how the best education he got was in Primary 3. In that class, he was already taught how the slave trade occurred, the map of Africa and the logic of the song ‘Oh My Home’. And his teacher was who? It was a Standard 7 Mistress unlike today when the minimum qualification for teaching in the primary school is the National Certificate in Education (NCE), not minding that, as Alemika puts it, the NCE of today is not equal to Standard 7 in those days.
Still against the (Federal) Government is the crisis of performance measurement. Alemika is not sure if the ubiquitous operatives from the Inspectorate in those days are still at work. But they were the ones who made the system thick. His memory of it is that an Inspector could arrive anytime at a particular school on his bicycle. The fear of the Inspector was the beginning of wisdom because Headmasters inspected Lesson Notes in the morning in case an Inspector arrived.
Writing JAMB becomes a career for some admission seekers
Asked to break down his distribution of the share of blame for the calamity under discussion, all other things considered, Alemika answers as follows: 40% to the academics; 40% to the governments at both federal and state level; 15% to the NUC and the university councils and 5% to JAMB. Wouldn’t he increase the government’s share of the blame by transferring the 15% against NUC and university councils since the governments constitute the councils, most times made up of people who have simply no business of being there at all? Alemika agrees, drawing attention to the presence of appointees as old as 85 years on some councils in the last list released by the Tinubu administration. So, he concludes that, in most cases, the councils add no value whatsoever to the running of the universities other than council members asking the Vice-Chancellor to take their candidates for admission and recruitment and to collect allowances.
Prof Alemika does not accept the thesis that what is happening to the university system in Nigeria is not a chance phenomenon but the outcome of a deliberate elite consensus to kill the universities because they don’t want a middle class that can question them. He thinks that is crediting the elite with the level of intelligence that they do not have. He compares the elite in Nigeria to the behaviour of the monkey when it enters a corn farm. The monkey in a corn farm eats the cobs recklessly without thinking there is tomorrow. “Monkeys in a corn farm eat for today and how it benefits them, with no regard for tomorrow. They rarely finish a corn before moving to another. So, you see half eaten cobs all over a farm attacked by monkeys”. Nigeria does not have an elite if by elite you mean a well groomed social class that can think and organise society.
He goes further to psychoanalyse the typical elite in power, saying one of their attributes is the development of amnesia once in political office. As such, they forget every deficiency of society they talked about previously. Such deficiencies disappear completely through organised forgetting. The second is how they develop cataract and glaucoma so that what they were seeing and lamenting about before securing a political office are no longer visible to them and, lastly, how they become critics again as soon as they leave power. For these reasons, he would not call these people elite. Rather, he would call them those people who get into government. For him, they all have a hearing impairment once in government which is not what an elite does.
Whatever little nationalism the elite had was wiped out by Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). Thereafter, the industrial policy of import substitution industrialization at independence was lost. Companies that were viable in the 1960s to early 1980s disappeared and the economy progressively destroyed. There were viable textile companies in Kaduna, employing tens of thousands of workers. None of them is functioning today. And that is the same story in Kano, Aba and Ikeja in Lagos.
Prof Tahir Mamman, Nigeria’s education minister
Alemika’s analysis is that, in education, they started chanting the song that it is not the business of government to participate in education. So, governments stopped funding education. The first outcome has been non-payment of salaries, especially in primary and secondary schools. So, teachers from whom pupils derive their selfhood began to improvise by selling chin-chin, puff-puff and sundry stuff to make ends meet. That is how they subverted the system they met because we no longer have the kind of leaders we had in the First Republic. The set we have now are more interested in being popular with outsiders and foreign entities. In the end, every government since 1999 has violated Chapter Two of the Nigerian Constitution which talks about Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy where the control of the economy by a group of people was prohibited. Today, less than a dozen Nigerians control the economy. This is contrary to the ideology of a planned, mixed economy envisaged in chapter two of the Constitution.
He goes further to say that the whole tragedy is worsened by the peculiar presence of the IMF in Nigeria and how it led to his narrative of external subversion and internal subordination. The peculiarity he sees is the methodical manner the elite in Nigeria accepts and follows the IMF instructions. He says that Nigeria relies on experts and institutions that are foreign, that do not understand the local context but whose activities combine to undermine the accountability of the people in government to the Nigerian people. Following from the external subversion and the delinking from the people which rubs the power elite of any social base at home, the power elite now resort to seeking validation from external experts and institutions but on terms detrimental to the nation. This, he says, is why people who served in government become radical critics again. It happens as soon as they suffer the consequences of the sort of policies they pursued while in office but which consequences they can now no longer escape.
Professor Alemika was asked if this scenario is a confirmation of Fanon’s prediction that the postcolonial elite will betray the people the day after independence or a case of racial inferiority complex among African elite. He says it is both, calling the power elite an organised criminal network of freelance racketeers. That, he says, is why they submit themselves to external validation without any sense of embarrassment and shame. He cites the case of the recent return to an old National Anthem in Nigeria. “Yes, we can return to any anthem we feel serves the purpose better but why couldn’t we edit the portions that talks about tribe. The category of ‘tribe’ is, for him, a category with racial connotation of primitivity”. Alemika is wondering about a Senate that couldn’t be bothered about such things. He asks, “who is so desperate to have a National Anthem renewed within a week that we cannot even have a debate on it?”
He raises the question in relation to floating the exchange rate, wondering if it would not have been better policy if there was a debate. A debate, he maintains, could have opened up the possibility or the option of identifying some sectors or segments of the economy that need specific exchange rate such as health, housing, education. He dismisses the argument that corruption makes such an option difficult to contemplate. “What is a government there for if corruption can trump the implementation of a particular policy decision of its?”
For Prof Alemika, it is not lack of formal education that explains crisis of clarity of the power elite. He says that the leaders of the First Republic did not have much formal education but had basic ethics, nationalism and values. And that nothing will change without this. In other words, people clamouring for return of regionalism are engaged in what is nothing more than a wild goose chase as far as Alemika is concerned. “Going back to the old regional structure is nonsense because what gave substance to regionalism in the First Republic is not the regions but the value frame of reference of the key drivers and the key drivers were the premiers at the time, their values, their nationalism and their commitment”. He is not saying that Awo, Sardauna and Okpara were angels. He is situating them in a context and concluding that they served the country better than the present cohort of rulers.
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