By Yinka Odumakin
SIXTEEN years after General Sani Abacha’s death, a Swiss delegation led by the country’s Federal Councillor and Head of its Foreign Affairs Department, Mr. Didier Burkhalter, and the Swiss Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Eric Mayoruz were with Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo last Tuesday to sign a  memorandum on the return of another $321m  loot by the dark  googled general.

Col. Ajayi (Retd)

It was a paradox of some sort that the same Sani Abacha had the temerity to engage in anti-corruption fight  at some point in the sorry story of this funny country called Nigeria. He hounded a  number of bank chiefs to jail under the Failed Banks Decree in what would now appear to be that Abacha in his era had monopoly over stealing and whoever stole apart from him committed a grievous  offense a gainst him-not the state.

A day after the signing of the agreement that reminded us of the evil general’s rapacity, I met with a gentleman whose ordeal in the hands of Abacha paints  the grimmest picture of man’s inhumanity to man and the excruciating pains of irreparable damage far beyond stolen funds that can be repatriated years after.

Hausa as lingua franca

His name is Col. Gabriel Ajayi  who was retired from the Nigerian Army he joined in 1971 under controversial circumstances.

Ajayi left Secondary school in 1969 under the tutelage of the late Chief Adebayo Adefarati burning with a lot of passion. He was offered a job at the Nigerian Tribune where he honed his journalistic zeal before he joined the army in 1971with a hope of re-enacting the warrior streak of his ancestry.

Three years into his career in the army in 1974, he encountered his first shock of innocence at the army barracks in Ibadan where the Hausa Language was “official” language of communications .Young  Ajayi felt that was not right. He voiced  out that this was supposed to be Nigerian  Army  barracks in Ibadan and there was no reason  Hausa  language  should be  lingua  franca.

His gut to say that earned him 15 days in the guardroom in the hands of a fellow Yoruba commander  who was  loyal to the iniquitous arrangement. The said officer was to later apologise to him later in life after he was dealt a fatal blow by the very system he tried to protect.

Col. Gabriel Ajayi (rtd)  continued his career with spartan discipline and rose to become Colonel Administration and Quartermaster General, Lagos  Garrison Command.

By his appointment at the Garrison Command, he was second-in-command to the then General Officer  Commanding, GOC, Major  Gen. Ishaya Bamaiyi, whose hands  infantry officer alleged were apparent in his travails over the alleged 1995 coup.

Ajayi  along other officers was accused of planning to overthrow General Sani Abacha. He was arrested after taking  Holy communion in a church with Bamaiyi, tried and sentenced to death along side former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the late Major Gen. Shehu Musa Yar’Adua  and Colonel  Lawan Gwadabe, among others.

In the course of being tortured for an offense he insists till date  he did not committed, Ajayi  lost his manhood in the hands of deranged soldiers.

He  was sentenced to death on July 14, 1995 by the Brigadier General Patrick Aziza’s Special Military Tribunal (SMT) before  it was commuted to 25 years jail term. He spent four years in Minna prison before he was compulsorily retired in 1999 when co-convict Obasanjo became President.

Ajayi holds till date that his travail was  over his insistence for justice and that he was roped into a coup because he objected to the annulment of June 12 elections and the murder of hundreds of protesters in Lagos on June 23rd  1993 when Abacha drove through protesters.

He recalls vividly how  his boss, Bamaiyi,once boasted in an army conference that he had only pity for Yoruba women and children whose husbands and fathers  would be gone when the shooting would commence. The shootings indeed commenced and quite a number of Yoruba women became widows while a lot of children became either fatherless or motherless. I see Aliu and Kazeem Abiola every now and then with reminiscences of the unlimited ramifications of evil.

Col. Ajayi  carries eternal scars of the physical and emotional violence done to him and others by mindless fellows who went to Oputa panel to brag that they would repeat the evil they did if they had the chance again.

He carries with him the library of iniquities perpetrated under that dark era. He reminded me of Prof. Agboluaje who left  America in 1997  and was to  have arrived at Murtala Muhammed international Airport in Lagos and has not been seen till date.

Anger wells in you when you see men like Ajayi who have been deeply hurt by Nigeria’s machinery of injustice without any remorse.You are annoyed the more to see prominent men of that evil era occupying prime offices in our affairs today .   And Nigeria thinks it can make progress in the midst of such injustice ? I doubt  it!

Much ado about university ranking

By Adeboye Oshinaga

IS UI the best university in Nigeria, or is it UNN? Your answer will depend on whose ranking you use. Just two weeks after the release of Webometrics ranking that placed University of Nigeria,UNN, top and the Press went agog about this piece of news, the National University Commission, NUC, came out with its own list stating that the University of Ibadan was the best in Nigeria. The Press, again in usual fashion, went toting the news with the same fervour, confusing some and forcing others to choose what to believe. It’s easy to be sentimental about which ranking standard to believe, but come to your own conclusions only after the facts have been stated.

Global  relevance

What is Webometrics ranking? The Webometrics University Ranking  is a ranking system developed by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), a state-owned research institution in Spain which attempts to infer the global relevance or prestige of universities using the level of a university’s presence on the web as an indicator.

In other words, CSIC uses data got from its web crawlers to measure a university’s web mentions, domain traffic, number of sub-pages, scholarly articles, interlinks with other universities and so on to predict its global relevance. While universities have taken notice of this technology-driven type of ranking, it is generally agreed that it does not present a strong evaluation of the scientific research or the academic performance of universities. Its usefulness is at best limited to measuring the amount of “web publications” made by the 18,000 universities it evaluates.

If what we are looking for is to be able to see where each university in Nigeria stands with respect to the pedigree of its lecturers and the brilliance of their scholarly works or the quality of the teaching and the academic environment, then the ado about Webometrics rankings which come out twice every year may well be misplaced.

Lack of genuine  stories

You could view the Press harping on this particular ranking as the underpinning of a larger problem: a lack of genuine stories coming out from universities.

Thankfully, this plague that causes the Press to focus on dud news to fuel public debate is not entirely Nigerian. In Namibia, the Press constantly pits state-funded tertiary institutions against themselves in a never ending competition citing Webometrics rankings. Using Webometrics ranking, journalist would argue  over and over again about whether the most popular state-owned university, University of Namibia,Unam for short, is experiencing  falling standards or not.

While National Universities Commission,NUC, would like us to view it as the definitive standard on matters like this, the opaqueness and narrowness of its methodology leaves much to be desired. According to a document of the NUC in 2005, 65 Nigerian universities are ranked by “the number of scholarly research articles published in prestigious international academic journals, and the number of citations in scholarly indexes”.

According to NUC, Obafemi Awolowo University was the best university in 2014, University of Lagos was the best university in 2015 and University of Ibadan is the best university in 2016. Considering the yearly shuffle, a good question might be: in these years, what changed? Going by the quoted statement above, the answer would be that UI released more scholarly papers than its predecessors during the period of review, most likely in 2015. This is not a clear answer however as it is difficult to drill down to a published scoring system (nothing is to be found on the NUC website about this). This is not a sufficient explanation either as scholarly citations alone do not make a great university.

More standardised global rankings have been used to gauge how Nigerian universities rank in comparison to other universities in the world. Two of the most reputable ranking systems have been Academic Ranking of World Universities, ARWU, provided by the Institute of Higher Education of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China and the Times Higher Education,THE, ranking by a British magazine with the same name.

Being the more widely observed one, THE sets a standard for a well documented and accessible scoring system, weighing  in relevant factors such as teaching and learning environment, research influence and income as well as international diversity.

Unfortunately, since its inception in 2004, Nigerian universities failed to get into the Top 1000 universities ranked by THE, leaving  us with a depressing narrative that Nigerian universities do not have the quality to be in these rankings. This changed recently when University of Ibadan became the first and only university to join the Top 800 universities in the World ranking in 2016, securing the 601 position. This is double honour for UI and can also be  brandished by the NUC as a pointer to the accuracy of its methodology.

Learning  environment

But to match global standards, National University Commission needs to expand its criteria to include the quality of the teaching and learning environment. It also needs to publish its scoring system so it can be easily validated by any body or organisation. We need a ranking system that creates healthy competition among our universities down to their various departments and faculties, public and private institutions alike, and gives us a true picture of the gaps in our universities, which are many.

In conclusion, the Press needs to report rankings to the public in a way that helps them to differentiate the various kinds of rankings, the extent of their usefulness and their relevance. When students writing JAMB make their choice of  university  for undergraduate studies, the teaching and learning conditions will matter more than the number.