My title plays on the title of Professor Femi Osofisan’s inaugural lecture at the University of Ibadan, “Playing Dangerously”, and my reasons shall become apparent presently. First, an anecdote. Back in secondary school, one of my close cousins, Bola Akanbi, fell in love with Professors. Bola and I were then sharing the same bedroom in my mother’s staff quarters bungalow in the sprawling compound of Titcombe College, Egbe. Bola’s Dad, one of those colonial, missionary-trained, no-nonsense, secondary school principals like my own Dad, was doing his doctorate at the University of Ibadan. Dr Samuel Akanbi and my father belonged in a generation of Spartan educationists who spiced their impeccable Queen’s grammar with Latin and spotted a District Officer “parting” (a straight line carved through the hair with a comb) on the right of left side of their heads. They could drive you home at the end of a school day to “cane you” in front of your parents and be thanked generously for it by your parents before your Dad proceeded to give you “jara” (supplementary) caning for the disgrace. Infrequently, Bola earned a hop-along trip whenever his Dad was going for consultation with his doctoral supervisor at Ibadan. Those were the days.
That was before the academic hemorrhage to Euro-America that Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has analyzed so brilliantly in a number of works. Many of the big names in the Faculties of Arts, Education, and the Social Sciences were still around in Ibadan. That’s where and how Bola’s love of Professors began. Bumping into some of those names must have done things to the impressionable mind of a secondary school kid. Bola would return to Titcombe from Ibadan to regale us with stories of Professor this and Professor that, laced with routine school kid’s exaggerations and a considerable swagger of superiority. Soon, things extended beyond the University of Ibadan and Bola came to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of the names of Professors in most Nigerian Universities. His hobby was to reel out names of professors, stressing every syllable of that word, looking at us like primitive baboons when we professed ignorance of those names. “You mean you don’t know Pro-ffe-ssssor Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi?” “What about Pro-ffe-sssor Obaro Ikime?” “Pro-ffe-ssssor Eskor Toyo?” “You don’t know them too? Suegbe l’eyin boys wonyi o”. And Bola would strut away like a royal peacock, hissing and bemoaning the fate that placed him in the company of such ignorant peers as us. In essence, if you were a professor in Ade Ajayi’s generation in any Nigerian university and you were worth knowing, Bola knew you in his little corner of the world in Titcombe college.
Then the radio announcements came in dizzying succession in the 1980s: “I Colonel Joshua Dogonyaro of the Nigerian Armed Forces” (1983); “I Colonel Joshua Dogonyaro of the Nigerian Armed Forces” (1985). “I Brigadier this, I General that”. Coups and counter-coups. We gradually became a generation that new more about martial music coming early morning on national radio than we knew about fuji or juju music. National ethos was changing. All the values we knew were being bastardized by the military before our very before. Principals like my Dad or Bola’s Dad had better watch out. You had better be able to recite the national anthem or pledge “with immediate effect” or a considerably younger Group Captain Salaudeen Adebola Latinwo, Military Governor of Kwara state, could barge into your office – through the window, always through the window – and ‘frog jump’ you. On national TV, we saw those despised soldiers publicly frog jump Nigerians in our fathers’ generation. We saw them slapped and horse-whipped in the street. In graver situations, the soldiers could deny you your share of “essential commodity” (essenco).
These changing scenarios were playing out as we approached 100 Level. During our transition from secondary school to University, Bola’s diction had changed. Now, that’s a paradox. Here was a school kid who spent his time in secondary school memorizing the names of a mind-boggling number of Nigerian Professors. This same kid got to the University and Army Generals became his new fascination. His encyclopedic mind dropped the database of Professors and replaced it seamlessly with a brand new database of Generals. He was also now less enthusiastic about University education. He was only just there at the University – going through the motion. His mind was really at the Nigerian Defense Academy in Kaduna and he spent a couple of years trying to get in. Like most Nigerians in my generation, Bola was seeing possibilities of himself as a newly commissioned military officer first serving as ADC to a military governor before participating in a coup to become a governor himself. In my own moments of messy privacy in the toilet, I would practice on top of my voice: “Fellow Nigerians, I, Major General Pius Adesanmi, of the Nigerian Armed Forces”… That sounded kinda cool.
There is however a lot more to why Professors crashed from their Olympian pedestal and eventually disappeared from the mind of Bola Akanbi. If we admit that there is a story here that we may now tentatively entitle “the rise and fall of Nigerian Professoriate in the mind of one Nigerian school kid”; if we also agree that Professors Ayodele Awojobi and Charles Soludo are at antipodal ends of this story, we need to begin to critically map and understand the trajectory that took us from Awojobi’s brightness to Soludo’s penumbra. We need to know when, where, and how the rain began to beat Nigeria’s professoriate, especially in view of an uncomfortable history of dangerous and unethical demissions that Charles Soludo has inadvertently but tragically come to symbolize.
Daniel Elombah, the prolific publisher of elombah.com has recently offered an excellent dissection of Professor Soludo’s ethical about-turns and moral summersaults. What needs to be added to Elombah’s treatise is the fact that there are broader national contexts and histories that have led us to Charles Soludo. It is a national malaise, not a regional or Anambra problem. Those contexts and histories are, in turn, linked to what Obi Nwakanma, a prominent Nigerian poet and public intellectual, likes to discourse as the collapse of “the University idea” in Nigeria. Whereas most analysis always reduce the crisis in our Universities to empirical and material details – collapse of infrastructure, outdated libraries and laboratories, etc – Nwakanma has always contended that we have in fact lost the idea behind the derelict structures. The fortunes or misfortunes of the professoriate in our recent history is a good place to start engaging the loss of the University idea.
For what, in fact, Bola Akanbi had plugged into back in secondary school wasn’t just the title of Professor or the considerable body of knowledge that the wearer of that title is normally deemed to have acquired. That school kid plugged into an over-arching halo, aura, and awe that devolved from the considerable socio-political, moral, and ethical capital that the Nigerian professoriate had come to acquire in the public space largely due to the critical interventionism and public activism of a long line of engagé Professors symbolized by the likes of Ayodele Awojobi, Wole Soyinka, Pius Okigbo, Eskor Toyo, Omafume Onoge, Bala Usman, Adebayo Williams, and Attahiru Jega, just to mention those few randomly. Add to this the collective public profile of the hot literary lefties of a certain era – Professors Biodun Jeyifo, Niyi Osundare, Femi Osofisan and others. Such critical and activist modes of inhabiting the public sphere was what created a certain national idea of the Professor-as-demiurge or the Professor-as-vates – the image and idea that mesmerized a secondary school kid.
By moving beyond the cocoon of academia and making knowledge production an expression of the people’s will and desire, in the people’s language, and always in opposition to the organized banditry otherwise known as the Nigerian state, these engagé Professors carved a Gramscian trajectory that came to define the public face of Nigerian professoriate. You will recall that the Italian, Antonio Gramsci, by far one of the most famous thinkers of the 20th century, gave us the idea of the “organic intellectual”. In addition to analyzing social life according to systemic and scientific protocols, the organic intellectual harmonizes and expresses the consciousness and feelings of the people. In this academic professor, town and gown meet and a social vision/mission is born and pursued often at great personal costs.
It is often wrongly assumed that Ibrahim Babangida, the military despot who ruled Nigeria from 1985 to 1993, destroyed education by deliberately underfunding the Universities, wrecking academic and non-academic unions, and triggering a mass exodus of the Professoriate by making the words ‘Professor’ and ‘poverty’ much more than a matter of poetic alliteration. Those are mere empirical consequences of a much more symbolic and graver assault on meaning. Babangida was far too sophisticated a buffoon to be content with merely undoing the Professor materially. He targeted the aura and the halo, demoted the demiurge, and vanquished the vates. What Babangida undermined and put on life on support were the idea and the ideal that society had vested in the professoriate. General Sani Abacha only needed to remove the oxygen later.
Babangida’s strategy was brilliant. Part of the professoriate’s capital with the Nigerian public was the idea that an indissoluble union of character and learning inhered in it. Babangida would have none of that Siamese twin. He performed a surgical operation, severed character from learning, and threw the former into a septic tank. To demystify the professoriate, Babangida manufactured two Professor types and unleashed them on the Nigerian public: Professor Errand Boy and Professor House Nigga.
Professor Errand Boy was the man Babangida somehow convinced to leave campus and come on board “on national assignment”. He gave this Professor sufficient perks and resources to discourage any idea of a return to campuses he was simultaneously starving of funds. But the real intention was to make his public image pedestrian. That was achieved by bouncing him from post to post and office to office like ping pong. Chairman of some special agency or parastatal today, Minister of some Ministry outside of his zone of competence tomorrow, Ambassador to some backyard country next tomorrow, back to Chairman next week. Professor Errand Boy would, of course, be inherited by subsequent regimes and administrations and bounced around just like his inventor, Babangida, did.
The bouncing back and forth had consequences: in the public’s mind, the boundaries between Professor and office messenger got dangerously blurry. One would almost need a calculator to tabulate the posts held under the military by Professor Jerry Gana alone. The more aura, halo, and social capital they brought to the table, the better for Babangida. Hence he also got Professors Tunji Olagunju, Adele Jinadu, Sam Oyobvaire and a host of other distinguished academics to constitute an unimpeachable pool of knowledge producers in Aso Rock. And they ran errands with unalloyed love for the military puppeteers. Those who today make grandiose claims about the “legacies” of the professor-servicers of Babangida forget too easily that whatever the said professors did in terms of bringing so much intellectual fire power and ideas to the governance of Nigeria at the time was subsumed within the symbolic economy of Babangida’s subterranean politics: demystify the professoriate. With Professor Errand Boy, the awe was gone. The rash of quota Professors being manufactured in the northern part of the country did not help matters in terms of public respect for the professoriate.
From the standpoint of the soldiers, Professor House Nigga was an improvement on Professor Errand Boy. Here, we cross the threshold of errand running into the territory of faith. Professor House Nigga’s work for Babangida was not just an assignment he mistook for service to the nation. He saw his job as a sacerdotal mission because he was a true believer who was genuinely in love with his master. Like the house nigga in American lore, if Babangida was sick, Professor House Nigga declared to the nation: “we are sick”. If Massa Babangida went to France to treat radiculopathy, Professor House Nigga wore sackcloth, poured ash on his own head, prayed, and fasted till Massa returned. This pathological love of Massa has been known to subsist long after Massa has left office.
Consider this scenario: more than a decade after Babangida left office, you are ill to the point of death in a Boston Hospital. This man, whom you served so faithfully at the risk of your own professoral reputation, does not lift a finger to help. Yet, you remain a believer, constantly trying to smuggle the tyrant into a nice corner of Nigerian history in broad daylight. Then Babangida’s wife lands in a California clinic and you are the first to release an online statement urging prayers for her. What greater love hath a man for his Massa? We are effectively in the province of what Wole Soyinka calls “inhuman” love when discussing Senghor’s infinite capacity to forgive the colonial atrocities of France and still find a wuruwuru way to place France on the right hand of the Father “among the white nations”. This love for Babangida by a Professor he somehow convinced to believe that a research centre could forge democratic ethos under jackboots and a pile of decrees is inhuman – inhuman because “superhuman” according to Soyinka. Are we surprised that our subject is still online today celebrating his role as one of the “founding fathers” of Nigeria’s current constitution – a flawed, illegitimate document imposed on the nation by a bunch of arrogant Generals who dared to utter the solemn words, “we the people”?
In Professors Errand Boy and House Nigga, Ibrahim Babangida demystified and pedestrianized the Nigerian professoriate. This was a sophisticated way of preparing the ground for the gaggle of Professor-servicers that Sani Abacha would instrumentalize later in his own much cruder fashion. What Abacha added to Babangida’s template was his ability to convince so many credible and impeccable Professors that it was possible to work for and with a killer like him and somehow come out of it all with the squeaky-clean reputation with which most of them went in.The combined effect of Babangida’s and Abacha’s assault on the professoriate was to erase the halo, aura, and ideal that society had invested in those persons.
Ironically, lowered ratings and expectation by society meant freedom to descend even lower in the logic of he that is down needs fear no fall. This explains a new phenomenon that emerged with the advent of ‘democracy’ in 1999. I was still in graduate school at the University of British Columbia. I would phone Nigeria and ask casually after Professor X or Professor Y. You got an answer that became increasingly frequent and worrisome: “ah Prof has left o. He has gone back to his Local Government to contest for Chairmanship o. Prof is now a PDP Chieftain in his Local Government Area”.
The problem wasn’t that Profs were leaving in droves to join politics. I believe that our tragedy as a nation devolves from the fact that the best among us have abandoned leadership and governance to the Orangutans among us. The problem was the kind of politics the Professors joined and the terms of engagement – electoral politics as defined and determined by the PDP, by far one of the most corrupt and oppressive institutions ever to bestride the African continent. This is no place to rehash the sorry, disgraceful, and embarrassing profile of that bastardy of a political party. Suffice it to say that unrivalled ability to lie and loot and a one hundred per cent deficit in integrity are the two most important membership requirements of the party. When Wole Soyinka described Abacha’s regime as “the open sore of a continent”, he was describing a counterfeit or “bend down” open sore. The Peoples Democratic Party in Nigeria is the genuine or original open sore of the African continent.
This purulent political institution benefited immensely from the demystification of the professoriate by the military. With the road to demystification smoothly paved by the soldiers, all the PDP needed to do was to create a worse personage than Professors Errand Boy and House Nigga. Enter the PDP’s Professor Nutin Spoil. Where Professor Nutin Spoil is not a regular jobber like Professors Errand Boy and House Nigga before him, he is neck deep into everything that makes the ordinary people of Nigeria sick and tired of the accursed democracy that has held them hostage since 1999. As electoral umpire, Professor Nutin Spoil is otherwise known as Maurice Iwu; as participant in and beneficiary of the PDP’s culture of electoral violence, massive rigging, and and daylight political robbery, his name is Oserheimen Osunbor.
This, in essence, has been our compulsory rite of passage to the unfolding tragedy that is Professor Charles Soludo, Nigeria’s latest and, according to Daniel Elombah, palpably most disappointing Professor Nutin Spoil. Suddenly we are dealing with the familiar and the strange united for better for worse in the same body. There is the Charles Soludo that we know: one of Africa’s most brilliant economists. A stellar academic trajectory saw him become one of the youngest full Professors of Economics ever to emerge from Nigeria. Then there is the Charles Soludo that we don’t know: he becomes Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank; becomes an overnight billionaire; buys up choice properties in London; sends his kids to private schools in London that only the kids of Middle East oil Sheikhs should be able to afford; joins PDP politics; gets himself an offshore godfather in a dubious character like Chief Tony Anenih; participates in the subversion of democratic ethos within the PDP to emerge as the party’s governorship candidate in the forthcoming Anambra elections; roams the land now in a convoy of thugs and loads of money that he is distributing to buy the election.
Where is the Professor of Economics? Where is the Economics he taught as a Professor at the University of Nigeria? Even in secondary school Economics when we read those famous textbooks authored by O. Teriba and O.A. Lawal, one sort of got the impression that Economics is all about the prudent management of scarce resources. Would the students Professor Soludo trained – especially the doctoral students he supervised – be able to square up his gargantuan profligacy with the theories he taught them? What did he teach those students about looting and plundering the resources of the state in Africa? Did he attend graduation ceremonies in his years on campus? Did he wear an academic gown? Did he mouth the usual platitudes about “character and learning” as the graduands filed past the academic staff? What does he think of all these things now as he spends looted in the attempt to buy the office of Governor of Anambra state? How does he plan to recoup that investment? What’s in it for Chief Tony Anenih, his offshore godfather from Edo state? How does the Professor feel about bringing himself so low that a charlatan and a buffoon like Chris Uba now feels sufficiently enamoured to ask Nigerians to determine who the criminal is between himself and Charles Soludo? The horror! The horror!
Questions. Questions. Questions. Yet, Professor Soludo just happens to be the most famous Professor Nuting Spoil around. Others abound in the system, contributing a restless run of nails to the coffin of what they once professed. Sometime last month, some Professors in the Senate of the University of Benin, led by Professor E.P. Kubeyinje, acting Vice Chancellor of the University at the time, put their heads together and somehow concluded that it was a great idea to invite Elder Chief Stakeholder James Ibori to deliver the University’s 2009 Founder’s Day Lecture! A thoroughly embarrassed Nigerian cyber community has sufficiently addressed this unbelievable violence inflicted on the very idea of the University by the Professors in Benin.
Here are some facts that the specific Professors Nutin Spoil responsible for the invitation knew about James Ibori: (1) he was convicted twice in London in the 1990s for theft and shoplifting; (2) he is wanted in London for money laundering and other related charges; (3) he is still standing trial in Nigeria for corruption. None of these facts discouraged these Professors in Benin from giving this convicted felon a university pedestal to address graduating students. Apart from Professor Kubeyinje, the Nigerian people need to know which Professors actually sat down in a lecture hall to listen to James Ibori. Hopefully, they had the decency to at least forget their academic gowns at home?
When next our folks in Benin want to invite a guest lecturer, let them borrow a leaf from Obafemi Awolowo University. OAU has just reduced the shame brought on us all - us is the Nigerian academic community - by the University of Benin when it recently invited the globally acclaimed human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, to deliver its Distinguished Alumni Lecture. Let the Professors in Benin not tell us that they can find no better alumnus of Uniben than a third class graduate of that institution convicted twice for theft by the Queen of England. If James Ibori wants to invest part of his huge loot in education as part of a broader process of restitution, there are ways to do it.
Yet, Nigerian Professors abound, at home and abroad, who are doing this thing the way it ought to be done: quietly, diligently, and steadfastly. From Toyin Falola to Eghosa Osaghae, from Jimi Adesina to Aduke Adebayo, from Demola Dasylva to Obioma Nnaemeka, from Dele Layiwola to Onookome Okome and thousands like them, Nigerian academe remains the root and home of so many bright stars in the firmament of global academe. But, in the nature of things, the good apples don’t get to define the public face of the professoriate. The political jobbers do. Sadly.
