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 1st class, 2nd
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.
