Self-interrogation is imperative for black Africans – Niyi Osundare

Interview

Niyi Osundare

 Niyi Osundare is one of Nigeria’s most important poets whose voice always carries the timbre of a sage. He is poet, dramatist, literary critic and a caustic social commentator whose rage against the manacles that hold Nigeria down is well documented. Trained in Ibadan, Leeds and York University, Canada, Osundare is a Professor of English at the University of New Orleans. He is prolific with over fifteen titles to his name. He is also a winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Noma Award.  

In this Interview with James Eze, Osundare draws attention to what African thinkers and social crusaders may have left behind. Excerpts -  

GH: What have young Nigerians lost by having our best and brightest outside the shores of the country?

Osundare: This time yesterday, it was this kind of song of regret that was being sung by a couple of students who met me on the University campus. “Ah! You’re here sir!” The ASSU strike is still on but somehow a number of them happened to be on campus. And occasionally, students would run into you and say ‘oh you’re so so and so, I came to this University because of you; because when I came the first time I saw your name on the door, then registration time I paid my fees and so on. And I said, but when is this man going to teach us? Only to find after some time that you had left.’

You have asked a very good question. The Nigerian society still has to learn that the quality of the student; that is the future national citizen, is a function of the kind of instruction he or she received and the kind of person that the instruction was received from. Teachers fill a vacuum. This is why developed countries in the world do not joke with them and I think this is also why, they are developed and we are under developed.

I produced three books published by Spectrum about three years ago; Book 1-3, called Books of Poetry aimed specifically at students aged between 10-16, it was a very challenging task and very critical. I was teaching creative writing, Intermediate English 354 at the University of Ibadan. After the first two weeks, I discovered that the students were not really getting the message. I then asked; what is a metaphor?

Only one student knew. Okay what is the difference between a metaphor and a Simile? Silence! I said, haven’t you heard about poetry before? Then I realized that most of them registered because they wanted to be in my class or because of their enthusiasm for poetry and I gave them credit for that. But many of them said they weren’t taught Poetry in secondary school. I then decided to ask these students very basic questions; things we knew even in our last two years in elementary school, things we knew in Form 1 Form 2 in secondary school, but they didn’t know.

Then I said oops! When you tell a hunchback you are carrying a crooked body, he tells you, ‘don’t look at the upper part of my body, look somewhere below my knees’. I decided to look somewhere below the knees. So, I started wondering what to do. I take teaching very seriously and it’s always something I think about when I have left the classroom. So I was thinking about what to do. One week later there was a book event and I ran into Jude Berket and Tony Igbeke; a very very conscientious editor and publisher and it was Mr. Igbeke who then said to me; ‘ Prof, there’s a market for Poetry at the Junior level’. And I laughed and said, ‘you know I don’t run after money’ then he said ‘ok let’s forget market; there’s an audience’.  And I said ‘now you’re talking’. He then continued “your poems are being used in all these poetry books for children, why don’t you do something on your own?’

And I said ‘that’s something to think about.’ He said ‘why don’t you meet us next week?’ A week after, I was there and all the top cadre of Spectrum were present with Jude Berket in the middle. After about 40 minutes they gave me a mandate; I thought I went to spectrum to negotiate for one book, but I ended up with three; book 1, book 2, book 3! In the distance between Spectrum books and the University of Ibadan, my mind was a whirlwind of ideas.

But I got to my house and I stood right in front of that house, I looked to the left, I looked to the right, straight after me, behind me, and I exclaimed, ‘my God! This place is full of materials for Poetry!’ So, the poem On the Guava Tree, the poem On the Coconut Tree, the poem On the Almond Tree, the poem On the Yam, Paw Paw, Banana, Plantain, Flamboyant Tree over there, Oh what about The Mango?! Before I knew what was happening, that night I think I wrote up to ten poems, that is how it began, at the end of three years, I completed the three books.

I decided to dedicate the books to Teachers. Book One I dedicated symbolically to the teachers who taught me in elementary school. Book Two to those who taught me in Secondary School and Book Three to those who taught me at the Tertiary level in different parts of the world; in Nigeria here, UK and in Canada.

The Teacher is extremely important. I’m a teacher today because I’ve been influenced by those who taught me. I remember one of my old teachers who saw the dedication and said, ‘I’m 76. This is the first time this kind of thing has been dedicated to me’. Tears were rolling down his eyes, ‘but I might live another five years because of this gesture.’ The man is still alive but I know Poetry is not a doctor. I wouldn’t say that he is alive because of that, but what I’m saying is that it makes a lot of difference when what you are doing is being recognized. In Nigeria, the teacher is regarded as a dispensable beggar, somebody you just treat anyhow. But it used not to be so.

When we were in elementary School, which was between 1953 and 1959, up to the 1960s just before the unfortunate Civil War, the teacher was a role model. The two most important professions in the villages in those days were the teacher and the preacher. And the two were not far from each other. Many of our teachers never bought food. On Saturday, the community would come together and provide large quantities of various food items for these role models. They were very highly regarded. In fact there were many songs in Ekiti which eulogized the teacher – ‘Ala kowe’ and ‘If death does not kill me quickly, I will grow up to be a proud mother of a Teacher and one day I will seat in the car of my child.’

That is translating an Ekiti song. The teacher was on a higher pedestal, and in the elementary school, teachers were so revered that people like us thought they never ate, they never defecated, they never urinated, they were not human, they were supra human. These were teachers in those days, they had respect and that respect robbed off on the students and you dared not disobey the teacher. If you were a stubborn child at home, your parents brought you before the teacher. The teacher was feared, the teacher was well regarded, and the teacher was able to do his or her work properly. Today the money man has taken over completely.

GH: There seems to be a steady drift in our educational policy leading to a situation where the majority of our schools now operate a framework that places the promotion of foreign cultures above the preservation our traditional values. Do you agree with that?

Osundare: Absolutely, one of the most intrepid elements of humanity is culture. Without culture, society disappears. Without culture there can be no civilization. In fact, in some respect, the word culture and the word civilization are used interchangeably. And culture is regarded as the harmonious perfection of humanity. It is systemic because it is like the human body. If your nose, your ears and eyes are not working, you’re not complete. One finger has a problem, it affects the entire body. It is when all the parts are working organically and harmoniously that you have systemic functioning. This is precisely what culture makes possible for society and that is why culture makes society possible, and in a manner of speaking, society also makes culture possible. When you have disjuncture in the functioning of culture, it is bound to unhinge people in society. It is the unhinging of culture that is affecting the psyche of our people. Now let me take it one by one:

I did an essay for “Adunni Olorisha” sometime ago, that is Susan Wenger, an Austrian who came to this country in about 1950 and was touched by Nigerian culture and decided to become a priestess of Osun. There was Ulli Beier who brought another phenomenal woman, Georgina – the roles these three have played in modern Nigerian culture are simply tremendous. Take Mbari, from Igbo heartland; Ulli Beier, went there, understood what was happening and when he came back to the West, he set up a kind of Mbari cultural movement. It was in Ibadan, it was in Oshogbo. Mbari did not only cross the Niger culturally, it also crossed linguistically. In fact for a long time I did not know that the word “Mbari’ was Igbo. I thought it was Yoruba and you can trust the Yoruba, within a short time, they had naturalized it and given it an addition Mbari mbayo- ‘If I see, I will rejoice.’ It became a Yoruba word, it became a Yoruba concept.

What that means is that the cultural traffic between the East and the West is there. When Things Fall Apart turned 50, I still recall the first conference that was held to commemorate that event in Lisbon, Portugal. I was invited to deliver the keynote address. And I told myself, I was going to write an address that nobody had written before. Why? Because, I was going to write it from my own personal perspective. How we got hold of Things Fall Apart in our set in 1964; we were young people in high school and how Things Fall Apart shaped our lives. And the correspondences we saw between Okonkwo and our own Fathers, between Nwoye, between Obierika and between the deities. Amadioha, god of thunder is Sango here, the powerful Egungun masquerade is same in both cultures. And then the impacts of Christianity; our societies were more united before the coming of colonialism, ironically. And two very important factors in the unity were culture and the economy.

My father used to talk about Onitsha; how they would walk all the way from Ekiti to Onitsha. He talked about Agbor, Benin; these were neighboring villages. These were times they had to walk and it took months. Now we have the airplane, we have the fastest means of communication, and yet our country is divided more than ever before. It is the way we have handled Culture.

When Adunni Olorisha said, ‘no, I’m going to worship Olorisha’.The Yoruba people were laughing at her and calling her the daughter of Satan, and saying ‘it is the devil that has touched her ‘and so on. And Ulli Beier translated with the help of Yoruba translators, Yoruba proverbs into English. That book is one of the most authoritative on Yoruba poetry I have ever seen. This was done by a foreigner. So I call them the modern Mary Slessors of our culture.

Why is this happening? Civilization has wrecked a terrible havoc on Nigerian and African culture. I remember when I was to leave for elementary school; it was as if my father knew. I was young and my father said; in fact the way he behaved reminded me of the way Achebe’s characters behaved. He said, “now that you are going to the white man’s school, regard yourself as going there with one hand. When you come back to my house, I want you to have two hands, you will take this one there, add that other hand to this one, it is only when you have two hands that you can swing them by your sides. It is only then that you can run your fastest,’

That is to say that that man who never went to school knows that the best cultural behavior came by additive not subtractive processes, adding to what you already have. Unfortunately what I see around us today is the replacive phenomenon. You have to destroy what you have first before taking on what is foreign. The foreign is revered, is idealized …

When I see what is happening on Television, the way African culture is denigrated by Africans themselves, I just wonder. I teach in the United States and I know how many African-Americans regard African culture. So many people rush to my class because they want to be taught by an African. They want to hear about Africa from the horse’s mouth in a manner of speaking. And they ask me questions, they are very enthusiastic.

You go to Brazil, Cuba and Haiti, it is the same thing. Then you wonder, in fact, in some parts of Brazil, ancient dialects of Yoruba are spoken. In fact, I as a Yoruba don’t understand them because they died out here but they retained them. They worship African gods, they do all these things and they wonder “how come you Africans are so deracinated?

GH: What other Factors may have influenced this despoliation of our culture?

Osundare : The economy. You remember, Achebe was saying in the third part of Things Fall Apart ‘the white man did not only bring the Bible, he brought a trading store, and a school.’ Now palm oil and palm kernels fetched a lot of money. Christianity didn’t come alone, it was a packaged deal. For you to have education you must belong to one of the Christian sects and then the economic traffic was monetized. You had something now and you could sell it and get money and that money was capable of purchasing so many things. It raised your status, you used it to send your children to school, you could even use it to acquire more titles.So, money also played a very important role here and it is still playing a very important role. The role models in our society today unfortunately are the moneyed people and we all know how they evolved their culture of wealth. So, money has played a very important role.

And then Technology, it is human nature when you see a motor car, something that eats up the distance and you look up and you see an iron bird in the form of an airplane, you are bound to appreciate the people who brought them. Now if your reaction ended with appreciation; that would be simply good. But with many of our people, it boils down to abasement. You feel inferior when you see all these things that other people have invented. And therefore you are ready to accept whatever they bring and reject whatever is yours.

GH: How come, other cultures had similar contact with the West, particularly the Asiatic peoples and they seem to have managed and in fact, used it to their own advantage?

Osundare: A very important question you’re asking, but unfortunately I don’t know whether you can ever get a comprehensive answer from me or from anywhere for that matter. I asked this question too when I was in Japan, when I was in Malaysia or a couple of months ago when I was in Korea. All these countries have been colonized before, how come they are able to retain the kernel of their culture? In fact when I was in Japan, you see people coming out in their three piece suits in the morning, corporately dressed. In the evening, you’ll see them in their Kimono going for dinner or going for an occasion. There’s really nothing wrong in that bilingual, bi-cultural, way of doing things. This is really what should have happened in Africa; the additive process. But in Africa, it is basically subtractive.

I don’t know but I know that we have been very submissive people, we Africans, extremely submissive!

Vietnam reacted against colonialism in a way that is very different from the way we reacted here. First it fought French colonialism and defeated them, and then it defeated in a manner of speaking the most powerful country in the world, the United States. It simply said “I’m going to have the kind of government that I want; you can’t impose this from abroad. What happened to us as Africans? Why did we, like knock-kneed people simply collapse at the onset of this very powerful Western influence? And it’s not just Western influence. Before the Western influence, there was Islamic influence. From my experience of Boko Haram, we can see that there is a lot of malady in the way many people are absorbing this foreign thing.

We have to look at ourselves in a very hard way and ask ourselves; why is the black person so submissive?

Nobody can call me a racist because I am a black man myself. We need a lot of self-interrogation, self-investigation, self-questioning, self-apprehension is necessary here. What is wrong with us, why did we collapse so easily? At the end of Things Fall Apart, that is the question I asked. When I see Okonkwo’s body dangling from that rope, I saw Okonkwo’s body as a metonymy. It is the entire African culture dangling there. Why do we collapse so easily? Is it because of the atomistic nature of our culture? Take Nigeria, we have well over 350 languages and ethnic groupings in this country. It was so easy to divide our rulers. Could it be why the English Language has remained paramount because you cannot talk about culture without talking about language? There are so many languages and our societies are so disparate.

When we talk about culture per se, we also have to talk about political culture. How did Nigeria come about? 1914, Northern Protectorate, Southern Protectorate, Knock them together! The British, Mr Lugard who did that didn’t do so because he loved Nigeria but because he loved Britain and he wanted a large sphere of influence in the centre of French dominated part of Africa. You know Nigeria is surrounded by Francophone countries. So that kind of political culture led to the inauguration of Nigeria. What kind of culture do we have now? The northern part of the country is mostly Islamic, hermetic and so on. The Southern part, Christians and, though some would call them animists, but I would say they are traditional worshippers. That division is so much there. The Nigerian story reminds me so much about the situation in the Sudan before the final independence of the South and both countries are really not stable. The question I keep asking is why did we collapse so readily?

I’m still asking because if you look at the contemporary situation, people still jump at whatever is foreign, at the expense of whatever is indigenous. We have to look at ourselves very well because it is affecting not only our culture but also our economy. Look around you, this is the Nokia I use from Finland. A friend of mine has Erickson from Sweden, this is Motorola from America, Samsung from Korea, everything around us comes from another country. We cannot even manufacture the car we use. Culture is so comprehensive that we have to look at it from these different angles, we are too interested in what comes from abroad, I’m not against what comes from abroad. I’m wearing a pair of jeans, the next moment I could be in my Yoruba attire, two hands in my hands! As JP Clarke once said ‘what has happened to one of our hands?’Our politics has not helped. The kind of education that we’ve had has not helped.

GH: As a teacher do you see Education playing a role in this quest for self-rediscovery, this self-rebirth that you speak about if we as a people are not to go extinct as a people? Again, crippled as the sector is right now, can it really salvage itself and in turn the nation?

Osundare: The educational system as we have it in Nigeria today cannot salvage anything. In fact the way things are going in this country today, we are nose-diving towards jeopardy, there’s no doubt about it. You started about colonial times, and the period after colonialism and then you compared that with what we have now. If you plot a graph of Nigeria’s development, what you’re likely to have is something like this; from independence right to the present day, what we have is some kind of terrible decline, everything seems to be in decline.

Eh! You are right, in the first six years of Nigerian independence, we had five universities, but suppose somebody tells you, well, now we have over 90 universities. But we do know that the devil is in the detail, it is a matter of quality not quantity.

Nigeria is a country of interminable ironies. The irony of the Nigerian situation today is that the more universities we have, the more illiterate our citizens become, just as the more Churches and Mosques we have, the more implacably corrupt our rulers become, our country is a country of interminable ironies, yes!

What has happened is that, in the 1960s if you posted a letter in Lagos, it would get to Owerri within one week, in fact within 4 days. If you placed order for goods in the UK, within two weeks, they would be delivered at your door. Honestly! Everything worked, the roads, tortuous and colonial as they were, were solid; they were not washed away by erosion. It was a colonial economy quite right but there was no inflation. All these things were there that time and that is why education was so solid too. I don’t know if you’re familiar with my valedictory lecture at the University of Ibadan, July 2004. The title is The Universe in the University - A Scholar- Poet’s Look from Inside-out. It is precisely what you are saying that I was trying to say in that lecture.

As somebody who has been in the University system for over 30 years, I just decided to take account of what was happening and present the university system through the University of Ibadan to the public. A month before then, I was in France for a presentation of one of my books that was translated into French by UNESCO. Just before the show, the translator decided to take me round France, and we went to the Sorbonne. The Sorbonne was established in 1120 almost 1000 years ago and I sat in the lecture room, the wood was solid, the roads were paved, everything was well taken care of. Old buildings were shored up so they wouldn’t collapse. The University of Ibadan is the oldest University in Nigeria, it was founded in 1948, I’m one year older than that University. But that University is already aging whereas the ones founded about a thousand years ago are waxing stronger and stronger. So I was asking our people; people talk about Nigeria as a failed state, can we start talking about the University of Ibadan as a failed University?

If we cannot create new structures, how come we are unable to maintain the one that we have? We are talking about culture, culture is impossible without education. Education is culture and vice versa. Education is the missing link between culture and civilization. So our universities, what has happened? A lot of the blame will have to go to our University people, I’m one of them. In fact, as I said in that lecture, the caterpillar that eats leaves lives among the leaves. We have to look at ourselves from inside-out.

We have some of the best academics in the world; very enterprising, very hard working and very inventive, but the system constantly and vigorously denies them what should make them world class intellectuals. This is why many of them rush abroad. Many people say our intellectuals are running away, they’re unpatriotic, they want the dollar. I for one have been charged with dollar chase. I know money is not my problem. I don’t have money but it is not my problem. It is for family reasons that I’m there. I had a daughter that was wasting away because she had a challenge; I had to take her abroad. There are quite a number of Nigerians who have such problems. Then there are many Nigerians who are abroad for professional reasons. I have spoken with many Nigerian scientists who came home; they obeyed the patriotic call and they came home, six months, nine months, one year, and they’re still in the University guest houses and there are no laboratories, and you know what happens to a scientist without a laboratory. Out of frustration they will just pack their things and go back to the United States or go back to Europe - another loss for Nigeria. Each time we have a conference in the US and I meet the likes of M J C Echeruo, Isidore Okpewho, Abiola Irele, Omolara Ogundipe, Tanure Ojaide etc. And the younger people too, Pius Adesammi, Olu Oguibe, Uche Nduka, Godwin Ibe, Mike and Angela Nwosu, Akinwumi Adesoka etc they are all gone. In fact, it is not only the older ones that are gone; the younger ones are also there.

These are the ones we know that are there. Call them exiles. The most excruciating case comes from the exile within; that is those who are in Nigeria only nominally, whose minds are fixed on the Visa offices and they are doing everything to escape the hell that we call Nigeria. They are nominally living in this country but psychologically, they’re absent. Their minds are constantly in overseas countries. Every time you go to the US embassy, there are thousands of people there trying to run away from the Nigerian. The Nigerian government simply doesn’t do a thing.

In the military era, a Commission of Enquiry was set up to investigate the issue of Brain Drain. I think the Commission came out with a very enlightening conclusion that Brain Drain was not bad for Nigeria because it brought in foreign exchange. That will show you how philistine our government really is. When last did our president read a new book? When last did any of the governors read a new book? Do they know what is happening in the movies? Do they even know what is happening even in the Newspapers?

We are talking about Culture; they don’t know what culture is. Beyond the parade of bare breasted girls, shaking their breasts or bodies for foreign dignitaries at the air ports, that as far as they understand, is the meaning and extent of culture. But you and I know that culture goes beyond that, the most important aspect of culture actually is invisible. It is that thing that is in you that makes you a civilized, refined human being. Our educational system is not out to develop them.

When we were in elementary school, we learnt our indigenous languages; we also learnt English and we had to learn the Bible anyway. Teachers were hard working.  

When I entered the Grammar school in 1961, there was only one graduate teacher and that was our principal. We were taught by Grade Two teachers. We were taught by those who had finished High school and were preparing to go to the University. But those are the people who laid the foundation for the education of people like us. They taught us so thoroughly and so conscientiously, we knew where we were. Today the whole place is full of graduates, you pick up a PhD dissertation today in English, and you can’t finish the first paragraph without running into grammatical errors. Many of the PhD Theses are not as good as first year essays written by undergraduates about twenty years ago.

You cannot give what you do not have. Our educational system today is collapsing because the mediocrity that used to exist at the lower level has circulated upwards, if you permit that contradiction in terms. It has seeped upwards and that is what they say ‘if you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind.’ Nigeria sowed the wind by not taking care of education, that is why we are now reaping the whirlwind. As I said earlier on, there are more Universities now in the country than at any other time in the country’s history. The illiteracy rate is very high. Literacy now is not just the ability to read and write. I’m looking at literacy now in more metaphoric terms; Doctors that do not really know where the inner organs in the body are, graduates in English that cannot compose two sentences logically, electrical engineers that cannot make NEPA run, graduates in Computer Science that cannot move the mouse efficiently. All these things are part of the culture, so the culture of mediocrity is what we have now.

I am a life member of ASUU because I believe in its ideals. The demand we are making, and that ASUU is making from the government is; if we cannot give 26% of GDP to education recommended by UNESCO, at least give something reasonable. There was a time the Nigerian allocation to education fell as low as 2%. It wasn’t enough to pay teachers adequately; it wasn’t enough to set up capital projects in institutions of higher learning. The labs have collapsed, there are no Libraries, and there are no book stores, even in the universities. What education are we talking about? And then I ask all the time, if the laboratory is the way it is, how have our colleagues managed to produce 1^st class, 2^nd class and whatever every year? The PhDs you produce, where do they carry out their experiments? So government has ruined education. We who work in the vineyard, also have to ask ourselves honest questions. We have been collaborating with the government in ruining the educational system. ASUU frequently goes on strike, asking for better working conditions. You cannot imagine how many academics, so called academics are working with the government to frustrate the strikes, to frustrate the struggle.

So we cannot talk about culture without talking about education, but the way we are at the moment, education is in the doldrums.

Finally, we also have to distinguish between two kinds of education. There is the education we have in Nigeria for the award of diplomas, I call it ‘nominal education.’ It is never deep. Then there’s education for liberation; that is the kind of education that empowers you to ask questions. That is the kind of education that empowers you to read between the lines, not just along the lines. Many Nigerians don’t know how to read between the lines, many Nigerians are not trained to ask questions. I have heard lecturers in the university blame their students for asking questions. An interrogative student should be a joy to his teacher, a student whose mind is full of fire, whose mind is full of ideas, should be a joy to his teacher. That kind of student can only be a joy to a teacher who knows, who is not challenged, who is not intimidated by the knowledge of the student. The category of people teaching in our universities today, the quality of their education will have to improve. And then our Professors, our Nigerian Professors, and I stress this, our professors, many of them have stopped reading. Many of them have stopped professing anything. The fashion in Nigeria today is you keep struggling, and struggling, you play all your politics, the day you become Professor, you sit in your chair, so called chair, you sink into it and say “from now on , it is Ija aye, it is Ari ya’ no more writing, no more teaching”. Many of the Professors farm out their lectures to junior colleagues. And then what do they do? They go all over the place looking for political appointments. Many of our professors are fake professors. Many of them should not move near the walls of a university in an ideal situation. This is partly because we have students who cannot ask questions. In March in one of our Universities, I’m not going to call its name. I ran into a student who came to me and said ‘sir, we’ve seen our teacher only twice this semester” and it was the end of the semester. I said ‘two times?’ and he said ‘yes’. In a fifteen week semester, the teacher saw the students two times, at the beginning of the semester, then the last week when he came to give them assignments. That kind of teacher should be tied to the stakes and whipped, after that he should be put in jail for wasting our money, wasting the students’ time and for contributing to the corruption of the youth.

No! Teaching is serious business! We are talking about culture and education. Quite a number of the teachers in our universities don’t see it that way. This is not to take the credit from the hard working ones. There are many hard working ones who are so persevering, who are there, but many of our professors should be made to defend their professorship.

At the University of New Orleans where I teach, whether you’re an instructor, whether you’re an associate professor or assistant professor, it doesn’t matter. At the end of each academic year, you have to submit what is called Faculty Activity Report FAR. That is from August the previous year to May of the present year, what have you done? The lectures you’ve given in different places, the papers you’ve published, your contribution to community development, including articles you’ve written in Newspapers, interviews you’ve had on Radio, everything you’ve done has to be done. At the beginning of the next semester, it is that,  in addition to your teaching activity, that would be responsible for whether you’re going to get promotion or not, or going to get what they call merit pay. Here, whether you work or not, you get your promotion. In fact, the very moment you become professor, its enjoyment forever. In fact you have to defend your tenure. Many of our academics here are superannuated mediocre. And that is why the educational system is the way it is. They are not inspiring to the students. I am what I am today because I was lucky to have been taught in the best universities and by the best teachers, including the University of Ibadan. The University of Ibadan laid the foundation for my education. Now things are different. We blame government and we should blame government, but what have we done to improve the situation in the country?

Finally, the down turn in our educational system began with the military. The military waged a war against the university. People Like us were called ‘undue radicals’ and pursued and persecuted in all kinds of ways. It came to a height in the time of Buhari and Idiagbon, then went low with Babangida who did his own in a very indirect way, then accentuated in the time of Abacha, the University was reduced to nonsense and the kind of ministers of education the military used also helped to destroy the universities. Many of these ministers of education were themselves professors, they helped the military destroy the university system.