By Obi Nawkanma
Former Vice-President, Mr. Atiku Abubakar, has declared very recently that he paid $1 million monthly to the “American lecturers” at his university, and that it was investment made, and without return yet.

Two issues were quickly raised for me in this publicised account of Mr. Abubakar’s statement and claims. The question most rational people I have talked with about this have asked is, how did Atiku Abubakar make so much money, that he pays $1m monthly, and out of pocket, to the “American lecturers” in “his university?”

But the question is rational, and, therefore, makes sense. But Nigeria is an irrational place – nothing that happens here makes sense. There is frankly no place yet like Nigeria on earth.

I do not say this lightly. It would be quite easy for former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, in fact, to say in Nigeria, that he was injected with a dollar serum that now allows him to piss dollar at will.

That’s how come he could pay the Americans in the employ of the American University in Yola, $1m per month. It is the classic scenario of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It is just simply enough here to point out the clear irony that while Atiku Abubakar pays American lecturers the hefty figure of $1m per month – and we ought certainly ask what they do to earn such mind-boggling sum – indigenous Nigerian scholars are treated like scum, and earn pittance in comparison.

There is a certain abjection to our various forms of self-hatred. It reflects on the ways we treat our citizens and our public institutions. There is utter disregard and deep disrespect of the Nigerian by the Nigerian. Nigerian public universities have thus been shorn, of the best and brightest, the best of whom have migrated abroad for the so-called “greener pastures” – and it is often certainly not all that green in these pastures – and many have migrated into industry, politics, or worse still, into oblivion and inertia.

The quality of people currently recruited into the universities to teach and conduct research in Nigerian universities has declined so radically that output and other measures of assessment are in current jeopardy. Besides the quality of manpower, even among the best, there is in Nigerian universities a blocking of the mind; a lack of adventure for discovery and innovation; a limiting of the mission of the university, and a destruction of its ethos.

The result is the death of the Nigerian university. It was death foretold quite early when the late Dr. Pius Okigbo warned in his 1992 University of Lagos Convocation Lecture, “Crisis in the Temple.” Nothing emblematises this crisis more eloquently than the current crisis at the state universities in Lagos and the South-Eastern states, and in which the universities staff union have negotiated a gridlock.

I am quite in fact here prepared to agree that ASUU has exhausted its strategic goodwill in its current method of organising. But this will be subject for another occasion. What we must bear in mind here, however, is the attention to which their argument for greater funding of the universities and better pay for university staff draws to the significant decline of the ethos of learning and the mission of the universities particularly in the East.

The situation of state universities in the South-East is quite ironic for a region that founded the first state-funded universities – from Azikiwe’s charter of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1956 and its symbolic opening in 1960, to Mbakwe and Nwobodo’s pioneering opening of the second generation state universities early in the 1980s. There was that slogan in the Mbakwe years, that education was Imo state’s highest industry. It was a high-minded regard for the public mission of education.

The ambiguity in the mission of the state universities, circa 2010, is at the roots of its crisis. Reports of Anambra State’s Governor Peter Obi’s apparent mishandling of the negotiations with the Eastern ASUU was, therefore, not quite surprising given his own quite enormous gaps of purpose.

But perhaps more serious and eloquent in its ignorance is the following statement by Governor Obi’s media secretary, Mike Udah, reacting to ASUU President, Professor Awuzie’s reaction of Obi’s handling of the negotiations to get the South-Eastern universities back to the classrooms: “It is crystal clear that people like Awuzie have left the academic world and embraced politics…

They are free to do this; the only funny thing is that they have one leg in the academia and the other in politics or how else does one explain their adamant stance even after government has offered a 50 per cent increase of their pay? Surely, the Awuzies of this world must be those lecturers who recycle one lecture note several decades over because they do not have time to conduct research.

Pray, when did ASUU become a regulatory authority for the universities as to worry over their purported dilapidation? ASUU is only a labour union. The NUC is still alive to its duties and does not need ASUU’s prompting to act. Governor Obi has transformed ANSU – built Mass Communication Department, Law Faculty plus Law Library adjudged the best in the whole of the South-East region etc. Awuzie and co. had better purchase nomination forms and contest elections because they are now politicians,” writes Udah.

This is extreme and outrageous, because, one, the governor’s office imagines that the university lecturer is immune from politics. No, Awuzie plays politics when he speaks for his interest and group. Two, the press secretary personalises the institutional development of the state university.

No, the state university is not the governor’s property. It is the public property and must be treated with respect, and properly funded to carry out its mission. So, indeed, that brings me to the question that we must now generally ask: what is the mission of the public universities in Nigeria?

There seems indeed nothing behind the idea of the Nigerian university besides to continually crank out graduates who are neither properly trained nor exposed to the most current frontiers of knowledge because of the limitations imposed upon the universities by limited government funding. These universities simply are degree mills.

There is a decline of the culture of the university. Universities in the South-East particularly are ghettoes, aesthetically unpleasant; ideologically stultified. These universities have been severed from the umbilicus of the public service – that is, as the frontier of knowledge; as the central think-tank of governments and society, and as the base of all innovations that drive industry, culture, and the productive powers of states and nations.

They currently produce two major characters: religious fundamentalists and quartered minds. The secular enlightenment that drives the rational inquiry is a lost tradition.

This is the problem the problem these universities in the South-East, and it is urgent that we find a long lasting solution to this crisis because we need to build the 21st century universities that would drive the innovative spirit of this era and free the people from the clutches of the darkness of ignorance and fear. It is urgent, and imperative for the governments of these states to pay heed and begin a radical review of the universities under their charge. Our children’s futures are at stake here.