By Ikem Okuhu
His Excellency, the Rt Hon. Dr Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe, one of the most illustrious sons of Nigeria, was indeed a very stupid man. With all the wisdom he deployed to steer our country Nigeria from colonial rule to independence in 1960, Zik did many foolish things and I think my people have made up their minds to tell him so, even as he rests in his grave.
Don’t get me wrong!
If you wish, do!
I really do not care. But I don’t know how else to interpret the caustic, obtuse rhetoric emanating from a lot of my otherwise educated, enlightened and well-travelled brothers and sisters since it was announced that, contrary to wide expectations and wild hopes, a professor of Nsukka extraction was not announced as Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria Nsukka. And there is no other way to sum these interpretation of the outcome of the VC-ship contest than to conclude our people have all along thought Zik was stupid to have abandoned his native Onitsha to site this Great University in Nsukka.
I am an Nsukka man. I left the area for the first time in my early 20s after graduating from the University of Nigeria Nsukka. So from every angle you might look at it, I am strongly connected to this Nigeria’s foremost institution of higher learning. I want the best for my people. I want the best for the University of Nigeria and it was for this reason that I joined forces with former students of the Department of Mass Communication of this University in a bid to build a befitting, world-class structure for the department that formed all of us.
But I cannot do this at the expense of the larger need to foster oneness and remaining sensitive to the larger environment in which we all live and operate.
Expectations was high in the run-up to the VC election process and it all seemed that the magic want that’d reverse the infrastructure decay and regression in the quality of graduates turnd out from the school can only happen with an Nsukka VC on the saddle. You don’t visit the Social Media without being inundated with conversations around this great hope. It was so bad that many lifted their rhetoric to predictions and then fact. The night before the announcement of the new VC, I saw many posts already celebrating one of the contestants who ended up not even making the top three, with people capturing their hopes as BREAKING NEWS.
What this did was morph what was mere dreams of many people into morbid entitlement mindset, the consequence of which was frustration, hate and unpardonable clannish thinking even by very highly respectable ones, many of whom rose to high positions on the back of merit and broadmindedness of people not from their place of origin.
Zik was stupid. How could he not have seen that the day would come when the people in whose land he sited what was once Africa’s greatest university would one day begin to express hate that someone from his own side of same Igbo land was made a Vice Chancellor at a time the “land owners” had desired same position. Zik never learned from history.
Same fate befell him when he elected to contest the parliamentary position in the south west, thinking we were all one Nigeria, only to have the rug pulled from under him by defecting members of his political party, the NCNC.
Had he disposed himself to learning from this experience, he probably would have anticipated the current conversation around the VC-ship of UNN and sited the institution in Onitsha or nearly Ogidi, Atani or even Ihiala.
I have read a number of people express their views on this. I have seen their arguments. While the most intelligent of them claim that only a Vice Chancellor from Nsukka can and will reverse the shameful decay in the university, the rest merely want the bragging rights of having their kin as VC.
But let us ask the core question: Is it true that only an Nsukka person will reverse UNN’s totally unacceptable decay? I am not sure the answer is a certain “yes”. And I will draw from a few examples.
The best Vice Chancellor this university has had since I began to hear and understand stories around this great institution from my father and an uncle who worked in the university, was Prof Frank Ndili.
He initiated most of the projects currently uncompleted in the university. He envisioned the Nnamdi Azikiwe Library, the biggest of such in Africa at the time. Not sure there has been a bigger one. He foresaw the growth of the university and initiated the Franco Hostels project. He initiated many other projects and was set to continue when a group, later known as The Nine Professors began a flurry of petitions and protests that saw the end of his tenure.
Prof Ndili is from Delta State, then Bendel State. He is not from Nsukka.
Prof Ndili’s exit opened the gates for the decadence. Prof Chimere Ikoku sat through his tenure like he did not know what was going on. Prof Oleka Udelala was accused of corruption and had running battles with the Student Union Government until he left. Prof Umaru Gomwalk, a Sole Administrator that was brought in 1995 spent his days infusing military style management into the university system and although he did not stay long, lecturers quickly acquired this trait and had behaved much the same way every since.
Since Gomwalk, a man who rebuilt the Akanu Ibiam Stadium only for it to collapse not long after, the whole lot of the Vice Chancellors in UNN have been worse than vandals, stripping the institution of all its most valuable assets which are honour, dignity and academic excellence.
UNN became a diary cow to be milked by any person who finds himself in charge. From departments, through faculties to the VC’s office’ from refectories to porters and spanning all levels of support non-academic staff, the rot was pandemic and it became clear that a University VC is a political position where billions could be made at the expense of propriety and good conscience.
This last Vice Chancellor spent his five years in a hail of allegations of corruption and abandonment of due process. Rumours were rife about the employment racket in the institution where people were said to have “purchased” jobs for as much as N1.5 million many of our people did not complain against this terribly flawed process, perhaps because, as I later learned, more than 47 percent of beneficiaries were from Nsukka.
If, as many believe, this outgoing Vice Chancellor was poor in performance, have we conducted any audit to determine how many of our Nsukka sons and daughters were complicit?
The second example, I beg all readers, will be drawn from outside the UNN environment even as it is quite relevant. During the 2011 Presidential elections, a lot of people had expected the then candidate of the PDP, President Goodluck Jonathan to take very personal, the job of lifting his Niger Delta region in the areas of infrastructure and general sense of connection to the Nigerian nation. But Jonathan, from Bayelsa State, won the elections and could not do anything either in his home state or in the wider South South region apart from a big hotel his wife erected in Yenagoa, the state capital.
The politically vexed East-West road was never touched and the Nigeria Delta University he sited in Otuoke made records as the only university where the number or those in the non0academic staff outnumbered the total student population.
It is worrying that we are not strategic in any of our conversations around political issues. I have seem a number of “saints” of Nsukka origin make veiled and open reference to the Enugu State Governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi as responsible for the failure of Nsukka to produce the UNN VC.
These saints with all their halos of wretched anointing failed to see how difficult it was going to be for anybody to perform the magic of driving the interest of Nsukka people when at the onset of the VC-ship contest, more than 60 Nsukka professors threw their hats, hoods and gowns in the ring, each desiring the position.
I think we need to be a lot more strategic. We also need to guard our utterances. The bile spewed from my Nsukka brothers against our brothers from Anambra and other parts of Igbo land since this loss is frightening. I am not sure any one f them is aware that the Vice Chancellor of Federal University of Agriculture, Umudike, is an Nsukka man. Prof Edoga is from Eha Alumona.
I am wondering what would have been the reaction of my people if Umudike people had protested his selection on the basis of where he came from and the fact that no Umudike son or daughter had been VC of the university in their town before.
The energy people have dissipated in moaning and mourning a loss they could never have determined its potential, had it gone the other way, would have been channeled towards engaging the eventual winner constructively on how to arrest the regression that UNN has been made to undergo over the past two decades or so.
The new Vice Chancellor, a man who came to Nsukka as a young boy and who rose to the position from a very lowly position in the non-academic section of UNN should be as much an Nsukka person as any other. People should think of how best to make him work for the good of the university instead of compelling him, through parochial, sectional rhetoric, to realize how distant he has always been from a people in whose land he transformed from an ordinary lab hand to an extraordinary egghead..
This is still possible.
And let me also say this here: if in the next five years, 60 of Nsukka professors line up for just one Vice Chancellorship position in UNN, an outsider will most likely still take it.
House cleaning is important. But more important is the love in our hearts for one and all and the strategic thinking in our heads to fashion the “How-Bests” in making something out of difficult circumstances and the tactical deftness in our hands to be seen to not be spinning hate of potentially xenophobic proportions, masking our latent inability to compete.