In the days when it made sense to talk about the core of any reality, it would have been said that the core of the Kano-based Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) is the interface between IT and development. In the age of borderlessness as a result of diffuse spaces of flow, talking about the core of anything now makes little or no sense. CITAD is a good fit proof of that claim. It has become a study in diffuseness.
Mallam Y Z Yáu of CITAD
It is involved in philosophical iteration just as it is in IT ecumenism across Africa. And it is not missing in broadcasting either. There will be nothing surprising if its academy grows into an all-purpose university tomorrow. Should that happen, that’s likely to give Nigeria a model campus and a critique of the joke called the university system in Nigeria today.
Scathing but warranted about the university system in any country paying university teachers what Nigeria pays them. University teachers on the wages Nigeria pays cannot be expected to attain the level of abstraction that anyone anywhere else would be inclined to reference. It is as simple as that. What is shocking in this regard is the absence of the sense of urgency that should greet a national calamity of that magnitude but, except ASUU, warts and all, that sense of alarm at an unfolding tragedy is not manifest. Every now and then, the rituals are staged with fanfare as if everything is fine. Unfortunately, Nigeria will remain a chaotic society as long as it lacks the critical mass capable of framing the defining categories of the state, nation, citizenship, governance and security.
But let’s return to CITAD which is our subject matter at this point. Of late, CITAD has also come of age in soccer. Its Dukawuya United FC is getting used to winning and casting its gaze up, up in the sky and may get the reward those who dream big get most of the time. Earlier in the year, it won the Sallah Football Competition organized by the Kano State Commissioner for Power and Renewable Energy, Engr. Dr. Gaddafi Sani Shehu.
At stake here is not so much the victory in and of itself but the ability to keep many systems up and running simultaneously. There is a message there which speaks to the possibility of a conglomerate in incubation. How many more years do we give it in incubation?
