By Adagbo Onoja
The news is all over the place already that Prof Jubril Aminu, ex-Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC); ex-Vice Chancellor of the University of Maiduguri; ex-minister for Education and later Petroleum in the Babangida regime; ex-ambassador of Nigeria to the United States of America and, lately, a Senator of the Federal Republic is dead. What one is doing here is to join others in paying a tribute to him from the very little interaction that existed.
It bears remarking that have already said some of the things I would be saying here on August 21st, 2023 when I did a piece calling for another era of Jubril Aminu in the NUC as a critique of that sphere within the larger crisis of the unsteady Nigerian State today. Apart from his image in the media as someone with dictatorial tendencies, I had no personal view of him before we met. Interestingly, we met for the first time in Washington where he was Nigeria’s ambassador between late 1999 and 2003. We met more on phone than physically. He was one of the few ambassadors who picked the phone call of the media aide to the Foreign Affairs Minister at the time or called back later. And whenever he did so, it was usually a long conversation.
Prof Daniel Saror, another VC who became controversial in office but turned into a campaigner for better university system at some point
Given that we had no previous encounter before then because he was no longer in active service by the time one got involved in NANS politics, my suspicion is that he was relating to me because I was the media aide of Sule Lamido, his fellow elite. That is what I can put his forthrightness with a junior and a stranger if I may describe our relationship so.
Contrary to the image of him in the media, Prof Aminu was ready to debate even on phone. He will take his time to explain his hostility to ASUU, for example. At the level of logic, he usually did it in a very memorable and infectious argument. He never stopped wondering how it made sense to ASUU that an Assistant Lecturer whose letter of employment was signed only yesterday could today, in the name of ASUU, issue an automaton to the university and, by implication, the official who signed the letter. That was not acceptable to him. You cannot convince him that the lecturer was now acting in a different capacity. If you argue to the contrary, he had the time to defend his position.
In that sense, he was different from Prof Ahmadu Jalingo, his contemporary from Taraba State or Prof Nur Alkali or Prof Kyari Tijani, all of the University of Maiduguri, all of them from the Northeast and all of them now late. While Prof Ahmadu Jalingo and Prof Kyari Tijani were of the radical hue and Prof Nur Alkali, a radical nationalist, Prof Aminu was a highly informed right wing and one with no apologies for that. It seemed he was all too aware of that as we shall see in what I call his manifesto for independent mindedness.
Prof Ahmadu Jalingo
Still, common to all of these individuals, in spite of differences in ideological orientation, is the ease in going along with them. They did not manifest fear of their own shadows. I am not sure if that was because they were all academics but something points to that. When approached, Prof Nur Alkali graciously put his intellectual skills at the service of Jigawa State Government under the Lamido regime. My age didn’t matter to him. It also seems he bothered about grooming ‘successors’. There was a Sunday evening when I found then Borno State governor, Kasim Shettima, (now Mr. Vice-President) to be so articulate in a lengthy interview in Sunday Trust. I still remember what Prof Alkali said, something regarding how the VP was sent to obtain American education. There was nothing Prof Ahmadu Jalingo did not know about Mallam Aminu Kano (because he was Mallam’s Political Secretary until he was sent to Oxford University) all of which he was ready to share, be it access to Mallam’s diaries (which for the benefit of those who see secrecy in even open space materials may need the reminder that a very restricted version of Mallam Aminu Kano’s diaries was written by this reporter as a cover story in Weekly Trust in mid-1998 or so) or Mallam’s hatred of smelling socks, which was why Mallam had too many pairs of socks because he rarely repeated using any pairs. Jalingo remained a scholar and practitioner of trade unionism throughout his life. Even when he was Secretary to State Government, it was as such. In spite of all traces of extreme self-assuredness, Jubril Aminu once said that his university days were his best days because of the culture of debate. That was before Nigeria became a society of ‘anything goes’ and which is why it is a collapsing entity without anyone knowing what to do (taking into consideration what have been going on in Benue, Plateau, Zamfara, the East, Yahoo yahoo, etc). And Aminu gave empirical push to his belief in the culture of debate and criticism by teaming up with Prof Daniel Saror (ex-VC of ABU, Zaria) and ASUU to try to save the university system as senators. It was a remarkable evidence of the fluidity of the social space that two Vice-Chancellors who were at the heart of breakdown in the system at their own time could end up teaming up with others to save the same system in a different circumstance.
For someone who went and set a record of brilliance in medical science at the University of Ibadan of those days, he was probably not conservative enough. My take away from the totality of my interaction with him is what I call his manifesto for independent mindedness and which I could recite until recently. I could because, each time you spoke with him, he was likely to make reference to it. I stand to be corrected but this is what I still remember of it:
When they cannot call you ignorant, they say you are arrogant,
When they cannot call you corrupt, they say you are rich,
When they cannot call you dishonest, they say you are eccentric,
When they cannot call you incompetent, they say you are an autocrat,
When they cannot call you liar, they say you are undiplomatic,
When they cannot call you an imbecile, they say you are controversial
What should we say to Prof Jubril Aminu? Ask him to carry a message of the ‘Garden of Eden’ (apologies to Ali Mazrui) in shambles to her founding fathers and ancestors over there?
