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ASUU strike: context, Nigerian education and future

August 23, 2009

Takeoff Thoughts: Reason abandons a nation in which everyone is right on a disputed issue. Chaos rules a nation in which everyone is aggrieved. The chief enemy of a great future is a self-indulgent present. The state is a moderator and modulator of conflicting social interests, so as to optimize the security of all.


During his recent visit, United States President Barrack Obama addressed the Arab and Islamic world from Cairo University. To some people, the choice of a university campus by the world’s most powerful leader for such an important speech would not make an easy sense. If it made sense to the rulers of Nigeria strikes would not be so endemic to Nigeria’s university system. The Cairo university address is not an isolated, unique, occurrence. If one recalls the campaign that led to Obama’s presidency, the key debates took place on University campuses. For the same reason Obama also recently went to Notre Dame University when he wanted to address catholic America on issues, like abortion, they felt strongly about.

Obama chose to address the Muslim world from a university to stress the fact that he is addressing their civilization, with which he wanted a dialogue. He did that knowing the importance of the university in Islamic culture and civilization. The university system as we now know it was influenced by Islamic civilization. In West Africa, we always point to the University of Timbuktu, an Islamic university, as the oldest, but it was part of a wider network that included Al Hazer in Egypt, Fez in Morocco, etc, that created the framework for modern science by their discoveries in mathematics and optics. One recalls that the centre-storm of the Iranian revolution is the prayer ground of Tehran University.

Obama chose a university setting for his speech, therefore, for its powerful symbolic message to the Islamic world that he knew would understand and savor the gesture.

If the symbolism and import of the University is understood in North Africa, it is no less understood in South Africa, which has the best Universities in modern Africa. The fact that a young mathematics lecturer from Imo State University, from where the President of the Nigeria’s Academic Staff Union of Universities also  comes, taxes himself to pay his way towards a South African doctorate degree says it all; in comparison to Nigeria. And explains why such a young man and those like him would support the indefinite ASUU strike.  Anyone familiar with the history of apartheid South Africa would know that the mind of apartheid was Stellenbosch University. In 2006, the University of South Africa invited me to deliver lectures on my work on African Cosmology. How many Nigerian universities invite other scholars to come cross-fertilize ideas now? There is something about the siting of the University of South Africa that indicates the import of that institution to the Nation. There are four prominent hill-tops girding Pretoria. On top of one is the Union Building, the South African Parliament. On top of the next sits the telecommunications mast. On the third is the Heroes ground; burial place of national heroes. On top of the fourth sits UNISA, the University of South Africa, beautiful as a space-craft that landed from outer space. I was also at Limpopo University and Medical University of South Africa; the architecture was marvelous and uplifting. And can I help comparing this with the fact that the day I took my daughter to her hostel at the University of Port-Harcourt in January 2002, I wept? My daughter, happy she got dormitory allocation at all, compared to the many who could not, could not understand when she turned around and saw me frozen where I stood with tears in my eyes. I wept because exactly 30 years earlier, January 1972, I had checked into what Nigerians would call a presidential suite, which I shared with my room-mate Bill Stegmann, at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Yet, here I was checking my daughter into a dingy nest, by the name of hostel, one full generation later. My daughter, of course, lost one full year to academic staff strike in her first degree studies at Uniport.  Yet, Uniport is far better than many others. On the eve of an important examination in her medical studies at the same university, the present strike started. She called, tearful, that their academic calendar was going to be disrupted again. I reminded her, cheek-in-the-mouth, that ‘daddy’ was part of the ASUU strike. In self-recognition, she uttered a melancholic laughter that saddens me whenever I think of it. Yet, ‘daddy’ is still on strike, while Adiya pines away, in frustration, like most Nigerian youth. This is the dilemma of the ASUU strike to a family, and a whole comatose nation.
The University is the brain-box of a nation. To shut it down is to a nation the equivalent of a stroke to a person. There is a nervous breakdown! Again, to see the importance nations attach to Universities, some will recall the vigorous debate that followed President Obama’s appointment of a University of California, Berkeley, Professor Christina Romer, as Chair, White House Council of Economic Advisers, an important economic-oversight post. That debate, in America, will not make much sense to Nigerians. This is because we don’t quite understand the university idea; the idea of university as brain-box of nations.

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The American elite know that even though Obama comes from Chicago, he is a Harvard mind, a Keynesian in economic thinking; though, more evidently, all-American pragmatist. He is not a monetarist, like the core capitalist apologists from the University of Chicago. That is why Senator McCain, during the presidential campaign, kept accusing him of ‘socialist’ aspirations. It was, therefore, not expected that he would appoint a Berkeley mind, a Marxist; it would be supposed, to such a sensitive Economics position. In other words, Universities are unique thought institutions; different schools of thought. In today’s Nigeria, the idea of the school, as a grouping of people that share thought is an alien idea. But the first generation universities in Nigeria were set up as ideas machines, as proper universities are by definition.


Ibadan was set up to propagate ‘classic’ western civilization and education; to ‘civilize’ Africans. People like Chinua Achebe emerged from there as rebels against such propagation; at the expense of African civilization, which Europe claimed did not exist, and he knew existed. Nsukka was founded as the brain-box of renascent Africa; and Nnamdi Azikiwe, personally, headed the governing board, even when he was Nigerian leader. The post was too important to hand to any other; it needed close husbandry by one who knew its mission. Today, such positions are handed out as political patronage; because the Universities have been reduced to sign-boards, where ‘school’ lacks meaning. This is the end-products of anti-intellectual military regimes in Nigeria. Like the Babangida regime deported the Pan-Africanist intellectual, Patrick Wilmot, of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, for ‘undue radicalism’. Yet, thinking-to-root of issues, radical thought, is why universities exist. It is important to know that the culture of cultivating deep thinkers is not a novel idea that Europe introduced to Nigerian culture. The Igbo hold that instead a thinker will die in war, let the general die; so the thinker will think out what to do next. You can from this imagine the premium put on the intellect. The reversal of this value is at the root of the decay of the Nigerian educational system, and society.


. One issue ASUU is drawing attention, popularly called brain-drain inheres in this decay. Brain-drain means the manifest exile of the best the University College, Ibadan, produced, even as a colonial institution; the Achebes, Soyinkas, Echeruos, etc.  It means Nigeria’s Nobel laureate lecturing young students around the world, while being a semi-mythical figure to Nigerian students the same age; because the framework does not exist for him to go round and talk to them.  Thirty years ago, I was a teaching fellow in the Chemistry Department of the University of Houston, Texas. On the Chemistry faculty was a British man who was a noble laureate. To my knowledge, he just appeared occasionally to give lectures and workshops on Chromatography, his area of specialty. He was paid consolidated one million dollars per annum; as the students informed each other. I at first wondered why he would be paid so much for spending so little time around. Then I learnt why; the guy was a mascot. His presence brought prestige to the faculty and inspired students. Brain-drain means that instead of importing geniuses like America does, Nigeria exports the little she has, by mis-governance. Brain drain means that Chinua Achebe is in America, teaching American children; the best that Achebe taught are in Europe teaching European children; while those who knew those who Achebe taught are in Nigeria doing what they can with our children. Brain-drain means that there is a Nigerian on the board of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, in America and Nigeria cannot locate the errant satellite built for her by China in space. Brain drain means that an Igbo, Christine Ohuruogu, won Olympic gold, in the Beijing 2008; a Yoruba, Idowu Phillips, won Olympic gold at the same time; both for Britain. And Nigeria won none! That is what ASUU is against.
The ASUU strike would, therefore, be misunderstood if seen, only, as the demand for salary increase, by university lecturers. Although many in the university system, who should not be there if they had more efficient sources of livelihood, would in fact think it is all about money. The understanding of those lecturers, who know what the university is about, is the restoration of proper universities in Nigeria. Any negotiation between the government and ASUU should be guided by this consideration. Government should undertake to provide effective and efficient governance; that in African tradition is measurable in the improvement in the quality of life of the people; increased life expectation. ASUU should undertake to run proper Universities; create enforceable code of conducts for university teachers, a few of who exploit and persecute some of the students that they are supposed to nurture and protect. The recent boko haram uprising in northern Nigeria, like the uprising in the Niger-delta was, to my mind, a protest by frustrated youth against unintelligent and amoral people who now rule Nigeria for their personal aggrandizement, and western-based education system, anchored by the universities, that produces such people, as well as rationalize their misanthropic rule. The welfare of the generality of Nigerian should be considered in the negotiations, between ASUU and Government, this time around.
Great nations are founded on reason! Irrational salary structure cooked up by politicians, who know nothing about economics should be negotiated out. A national incomes regime that allows some to spend millions to celebrate birthday parties or marriage anniversaries when some of their age-mates cannot afford the dowry to marry, inspite of effort to find work and earn such, should be condemned and negotiated out. In a poverty-stricken nation ostentatious life-style irritates the poor and aggravates social tension. Reason comes from the root RATIO; to put things in relation. We are familiar with ratio in mathematics, but don’t easily link it to reason. When we say someone is rational, we mean he thinks in ratios. Europe becomes great during its age of reason; when people looked at things in relations; in ratios. Newton’s great laws are forces in ratio, for instance. Nigeria is today threatened with state-failure status because things are not done in proper ratios. When a national assembly member takes home millions and the cleaner in his office takes home thousands; what is the ratio; what reason? When a council chairman who’s only known job is sharing out federal allocation, monthly, earns half a million naira, and a university professor earns two hundred thousand naira, what is the ratio; what reason? When a master’s degree holder in primary school earns fifty thousands naira, when his exact colleague in the university earns one hundred thousand, what is the ratio; what reason? Why is the income gap between segments of society, wider in poor Nigeria than rich United States; what ratios; what reason? It is best if all these are put on the table, to avoid the current culture of vicious cycle. Very soon other unions will go on strike, through the endless game of one-up-manship. The reason for this suggestion is that these irrational relationships, within the larger society, end up disturbing the university system, by perturbing the minds of academics that are cultivated to think in ratios; be rational.

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One key ASUU demand is for 26% of Nigeria’s national budget to be spent on education, as recommended by UNESCO, for developing nations. This recommendation comes from research finding by that United Nations’ agency that showed this as the needed expenditure rate on education to develop the mind of a nation to full potential. That is 26 education to 74 percent others (26:74 or 13:37). This is a ratio; reason. The human brain is the most potent machine on planet Earth; the educated mind is the most efficient machine. China and the other Asian nations that embarked on mass scientific education with less material resource-base than Africa are now struggling with Europe as to who would make the better masters for Africans. These people are arguing about which nation can better process Nigeria’s petroleum and offer Nigeria cheaper petrol, while Nigerian universities stay closed. One believes that if the youth in boko haram were educated enough to know the role that Islam played in the development of modern astronomy, and that Muslim astronomers had calculated the circumference of the Earth when Europeans were arguing, like they themselves are now doing, that the Earth is flat, some of their misguided thoughts would not arise. 26% of national budget for education, thinks UNESCO, creates a more clear-thinking, rational, citizenry. Ratio, reason, is at the heart of it all!

University autonomy is, essentially, Autonomy of Thought not, necessarily, that of purse! It’s a culture evolved to promote freedom of thought which generates more creativity of the mind; main working tool of university people. To avoid the danger of ‘he who pays the piper calls the tunes’, and ensure the efficient autonomy of Universities, the earliest Universities in the United States, called Land Grant Institutions, for instance, were granted their own land; so that no land-use decree can dispossess them of their location, for political reason of not liking their thought. They followed this with very large financial endowments; such that when the universities, like Harvard, decided to divest their investments in companies doing business with apartheid South Africa, there was panic there. Let us, therefore, not understand university autonomy out of context; so that those who have stolen public funds can afford to send their wards to universities, because the ‘autonomous’ Nigerian public universities are too costly for normal Nigerians.

In conclusion, we note that: Reason abandons a nation in which everyone is right on a disputed issue. Chaos rules a nation in which everyone is aggrieved. The chief enemy of a great future is a self-indulgent present. The state is a moderator and modulator of conflicting social interests, so as to optimize the security of all. These thoughts should inform Government and ASUU in the renegotiation of the agreement between them on the fate and future of education in Nigeria; and therefore of Nigeria. Only a world-class university system, as brain-box, can help Nigeria think her way out of her present man-made potential of failed-state, to realize her natural potential of great nation.
 
 

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