Intervention introduced Prof Etanibi Alemika in part one of this interview as easily one of the most sophisticated of their generation of Nigerian academics, obtaining 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 before PhD with bias to Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. And that Alemika mixed at the University of Jos, where he taught for over four decades, with the likes of outstanding social sciences scholars like Onoge again, Jonah Elaigwus, Ali Mazruis, Aaron Ganas and others as well as a revered university administrator, Ochapa Onazi. He was then dubbed a product of a multiple of the best available in his time.
Prof Alemika
In this second and concluding part of the interview, Intervention asked Prof Alemika for his views on how Nigeria might get out of the problem of an elite that seems to have a crisis of mission. He answers by referencing a cliché popular with a friend of his which goes like this: bad behaviour has corresponding bad consequences”. What it means is that the way out of Nigeria’s crisis is to change the value system but changing the value system is, in his analysis, where the trouble is because it can be such a difficult thing to accomplish.
He compares value frameworks to the soft wares of the computer which, unlike the hard wares, are the values, the ethics, the philosophies underpinning the configuration of the computer. As he put it, it is more difficult to correct a problem with software than problems with the soft wares. So, Nigeria needs value orientation but changing values in any society can be complicated. In most societies, it is only through a revolution that changes values. He, therefore, regards the question of how Nigeria may get out as a tough one although he says Nigeria cannot get it right with what he calls kalo-kalo civil rule.
Intervention reminded Alemika about the coalition of the parties said to be on its way. He is not expecting anything from “any coalition of rotten eggs”. He goes on to itemize what we need to see before we can say we are moving towards some level of sanity. One, a judiciary that bothers about its credibility. Two, the need for a family system where father, mother and senior siblings are not running from pillar to post in pursuit of survival. Three, the return of operatives that are not security agents but function somehow as such. These are the teacher; the agric extension worker; the organisers of adult education and the sanitation operatives. He asks: do you see these people in the rural areas again nowadays?” It was a rhetorical question.
Prof Alemika cannot understand why any governor in Northern Nigeria cannot be a performer. He cannot see any reasons for that because “the template for performance is there”. he elaborates on the template in question as follows: the Premier (Sir Ahmadu Bello) established the Northern Nigeria Development Company (NNDC) which came up with its 10-storey building on Ahmadu Bello Way in Kaduna which he is sure must still be the tallest building in the town just like Cocoa House could be in Ibadan. To support the NNDC, he established the Northern Nigeria Investment Limited and the Bank of the North. How would he communicate the operations and effects of these structures? He responded to that by establishing the New Nigerian Newspapers. Agriculture was considered primary, much of it livestock. So, he established the Northern Nigeria Livestock Production Company which established ranches. Prof Alemika spent three months in one of the ranches in Manchok in what is called Southern Kaduna today. He spent the three months with two other students in their student days as interns. His anger boils over at this point because “now, people think a ranch or ranching is something new or something that never happened before. Instead of ranching, members of the elite are using cattle movement and conflicts to divide people but it was the Northern Nigeria Livestock company that was running these ranches. Today, these things are not there”. He wonders why Nasarawa, Kogi and other states could not establish a light rail to Abuja, for example.
Alemika remembers the more regular question his students used to ask him when he was a lecturer. It is the question of what exactly happened to quality of leadership between the First and the later republic in Nigeria. He recalls his answer to them. Whenever the leaders in the First Republic travelled, they send their staff to study whatever they found fascinating during their trip. It is the report of such studies that turned into programmes and projects. But when the current leaders travel, and sees a wonderful place or project, what they arrange is they and members of their family would return to go and enjoy the place. That is why I said it is a question of values.
Nigeria had universities that competed very well with any of these until the locusts descended
He has not given up. He thinks there could be change if critical thinking begins to take place in labour, in academia and in the professions. He is not ignorant of the share of the crisis of clarity in these centers but he thinks critical sectors within them could still provide the sort of ideas that can provoke rethinking of praxis.
It had been a drawn out interview session but one more question remained to be posed. It was to ask Alemika what his model educational system in the world today could be. He starts by arguing that Nigeria went and bought the American model from the shelf, leaving the British model but only for it to turn into ‘a once chance’ experience that has left the country stranded. It is to being stranded that he traces the current confusion because “we didn’t get to evaluate the American model well enough before leaving “the philosophically deep British education” for the general knowledge we envied in the American model. Every system, he says, evolved to where it is and going to buy into any such model from the shelf is never the way to go. But buying things from the shelf is what Nigeria does. “We buy Tokunbo stuff, including used clothes just as we echo slogans we do not even understand. Ministers are shouting private – public partnership (PPP) all over Nigeria. We buy outdated slogans which the owners have either modified or stopped using”.
To get out, he recommends taking another look at our educational system and evolve something ours. One, no child should be out of school because he cannot imagine our leaders being able to sleep when they hear that there are up to 22 million out of school children. Nobody can speculate what they will become tomorrow without quality education. Two, the quality and relevance of the content of education must be so high and relevant as to speak to our security now and in future. Three, the country must have programmes for (potential) utilisation of the products.
Taking all these into consideration, he arrives at the kind of assurance that the Nordic countries have been able to give to their own people as the model he would vote for. They live longer in the Nordic countries, something that the Human Development Index (HDI) confirms every year. Prof Alemika wants to see a Nigeria where citizens live their life as human beings.
On the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Alemika submits that the union needs to rethink. He is absolutely sure about that, insisting that retreating in a struggle is not anything negative or an acceptance of defeat. “The heavy burden is on academics to think through and change the society. It has a role to play but it has to be within a wider or coalition context, in coalition with critical other players such as the media, labour, religion, all of them going to a retreat to produce a vision of society”.
A generation of academics is on their way out of the university system, some due to retirement age, others because they can no longer make sense of the system even though they still have years before retirement. The fear is that the system may not collapse totally with their exit but it will be much worse than what exists, particularly in the social science. Alemika was asked what he thinks about the fear. He answers by saying that the category of academics in question have since become a minority in the past 10 years. That is why one goes to the university senate only to hear someone talking about the university management. But there is nothing like university management in the university system. In the university, there are principal officers with specific powers. A Vice-Chancellor who comes to the Senate to talk about university management has directed this or that has missed his way. A VC is not a Chief Executive Officer. There is no committee of the university where a VC can veto its decision. If the Senate is inclined or constrained to the point of voting on an issue, that is it for whichever side wins or loses the voting outcome. The university is run by committees, not by the VC, we do not have a Sole Administrator in the university system. Over the last 15 years, many have withdrawn from the Senate because it can be a problem to insist. They can call you a trouble maker. Then it becomes a university where anything goes. For instance, you get to hear a lecturer saying a student cannot graduate. But how can such be possible. It is the department that determines whether a student can graduate or not. Yes, a lecturer taught a course but the course is a department’s course, not the lecturer’s course. If there is a problem where a particular student can or cannot graduate, the department has established ways of determining that. It cannot be determined by a lecturer and certainly not by the lecturer who taught the course.
Alemika tells the story of a proposal he made to a minister for Education in the early 2000s, drawing attention to how some of the academics who went to some of the best universities were retiring while some others were leaving, a lot of them for frustration with the new trends they were witnessing. He asked the minister if it is not possible to find a way of calling them back and give them, say, a 5 year contract and restrict them to handling the supervision of PhD students and/or presence in graduate seminars. Assuming that you got 200 of them and each had five PhD students, then we are talking of about 1000 PhD. If 600 of them were able to finish, you would have injected that much into the system, trained by some of the best brains. The proposal didn’t see the light of the day. Today, that generation are mostly in their eighties or so and can not do what Alemika was suggesting some two decades ago. The few of such academics available now are too disenchanted with the system to agree to any such arrangement because, as Alemika puts it, before their own eyes, the most popular lecturers became those who do not go to lectures. They go to the class just two weeks to examinations, teach without giving any reading list. Paradoxically, they are the ones the students like. The students have a language for the serious academics. They would say that such lecturers are stressing them. Alemika thinks it is either the government doesn’t know or is not bothered. It is also either the parents do not know or are not bothered. But he believes there is a way if the government is serious. In such case, that arrangement can still make the difference in some of the disciplines.
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