By Adagbo Onoja
The dirges and mourning rites must be going on in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria where he rose to the position of Professor of Political Science, within the Nigerian Political Science Association where he was active till death and Offa, the likely place of his burial. That is Prof Ayo Dunmoye who died August 19th, 2024. He was 74, having been born in 1950.
The details of his last hours are not yet available but if it is sickness, it must be a very brief illness. He has been active even in retirement. 74 is not an advanced age for a well-educated and highly exposed. Might the self-help formatted, tension-ridden and stressful Nigerian environment be complicit?
As early at 1997, Prof Dunmoye had started saying he had stopped reading. As it is very difficult for any educated person (he attended the University of Toronto, one of the 25 front rank global universities today) to actually stop reading, such statements can only be understood as measure of his frustration with the system, whatever they might have been.
If that’s right, it was an understandable self-reporting. He mirrors the life of the typical academic in his generation in that they either went to some of the most reputable universities at home or in the world in preparation for service to the nation through academia but only to return home and get lost in a very anti-intellectual atmosphere, spending so much time fighting for facilities or for the required quietism for academic breakthrough. So, while they may have been taught by the leading authorities in their fields, they were, for most of the time, unable to make a global statement in research because the atmosphere is not facilitative of anything called a breakthrough.
One of the debates that defined academia then
It is unimaginable for a lecturer teaching up to three or more undergraduate classes, each of which has probably no less than 300 students to do anything on the scale of a breakthrough. And this is just an example of the creases. The same lecturer, if he already possesses a PhD, must have masters and PhD students to take care of. This is a system from which an academic cannot take a research holidays.
Oh yes, individuals could, by virtue of personal makeup, be a problem to themselves in terms of professional and material progress but how is it that this is hardly the fate of those that society call mavericks in the West in particular?
Or, why is it the case that, apart from Nigerian academics in the Diaspora, there are few or no hair raising scholarly outing with substantial conclusions since the 1999s? If one is right, that certainly goes against the trajectory in 1970s down to the mid-1980s, if we just take Segun Osoba’s The Deepening Crisis of the Nigerian National Bourgeoisie, Peter Eke’s postcolonial take on corruption in his Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement, Bala Usman’s Middlemen, Consultants, Contractors and the Solutions to the Current Economic Crisis and Jibrin Ibrahim’s “History As Iconoclast: Left Stardom and the Debate on Democracy” (which I couldn’t find the CODESRIA link in a hurry).
Why does it matter that there are no hair raising essays coming out of academia in a society permanently in crisis? It matters because it can only happen when and where academia has been successfully desensitised to collective stupor. In an age where Nigeria’s competitors are funding institutions with the sole task of producing critique (normative and otherwise), the death of academia suggested by the dearth of research reports that interrogates the social is the most frightening indicator of the future.
A devastated national university system is a national security issue unless we still have a law and order sense of security in Nigeria
Yet, the university system has been so dazed that there are professors involved in the punditry blaming Nigerian universities for not being innovative enough in self-funding. No universities in Nigeria can do that because the university system in Nigeria lacks everything that can make that possible. And is it not another danger sign that a nation state such as Nigeria with global ambition imposed on it by history and geopolitical identity will not take adequate funding of her universities number one national security priority if not for the deepening crisis of the Nigerian national bourgeoisie?
Of course, funding alone does not a university system make. Curricular and traditions of scholarship can be even more definitive here.
Today, in the event of the loss of all of these and the associated loss of the swagger (not same as arrogance) that necessarily define academics, the academic field of play is full of nothing but scandalous, predatory practices, from clumsy teaching to shabby conference titles to lecturer-(female) students relationship to cheap Festschrift published in backwater publishing houses for the sole purpose of promotion rather than filling any gap. Interestingly, there is a hefty Festschrift on Prof Dunmoye. Without suggesting that it isn’t a good outing, it does not contain Dunmoye’s paper at the Marx and Africa Conference in Zaria in 1983. Yet, that paper embody elements of the predictive brilliance that accounts for the few essays mentioned above. One cannot recollect the title of the paper immediately but it is something like “The replicability of the Chinese model” or something in that direction. The argument for that paper is simply that, from hindsight, he was already anticipating the historical transformation China has accomplished and what Nigeria could learn from it. (That’s if I am correct regarding the reference to China). It was thus the sort of paper that could have been developed further by him or by one of his graduate students. Nothing of that happened. How could it happen if by 1997, 14 years after, the system has dazed him to stupor as evidenced in the self -reporting already referred to?. It wasn’t something hidden. It was what he said repeatedly in class and to which any MSc student of Political Science in the 1996/97 session can confirm.
The NUC which has neutralized the Senate as the soul of the university system has itself been taken over by a hijacker for whom filthy lucre is it. Who can challenge a titan who has many ways of hitting back, remote and otherwise,? That is what is said. But nobody said he is God.
The death of any prominent academic reminds us or should remind Nigeria of all these because the university instrument is still beyond BA, BSc or meal ticket or being brilliant. It is at the heart of national security because it speaks to the possibility of subjectivity, of citizenship and of agency. Without those variables, nation building as a daily referendum is impossible
Gratitude to Prof Ayo Dunmoye that, in death, he makes it possible for us to return to some of these issues, even if hurriedly and on the eve of another industrial strike notice from the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). As usual with some of us, ASUU is, at the level of principle, deserving of solidarity in all cases but, this time, it must hone its grasp of articulatory practice or risk having a good case but still end up with a negative image.
