SAY YOU'RE NOT ONE OF THEM

I would like to begin this piece with an apology.  Revd. Fr. Uwem Akpan, S.J., I am yet to read your critically acclaimed book, Say You’re One of Them.  I promise that I do plan to read it someday soon.  But, as you can see from my title, I have taken what I can only hope is not undue liberty to vary your title for the limited purpose of this article.  I apologize.  I hope that what follows, at least, provides some mitigation.

The Nigerian Army just celebrated another of its annual Army Days.  And the President and his Minister of State for Defence were on hand to celebrate with the institution.  Ordinarily, there would be no quibble about the President’s attendance: after all, he is the Commander-in-Chief of Nigeria’s armed forces.  Nor would anyone think that it is out of place for the minister of defence or her junior minister to felicitate with the army or any other wing of the nation’s armed forces.  I must point out, though, that in the specific context of Nigeria and our recent history, there may be some ground for some of us to be ambivalent about and\or possibly object to the full throttle participation of the president and his junior minister in such commemorations.  I belong to the latter group.

Even then, my objection to the president’s participation is mild compared to my absolute objection to and total disgust with the manner of his participation as well as that of his cabinet member: for the umpteenth time in the tenure of President Jonathan, he and his minister of state for defence, Olusola Obada, turned out in military uniforms! [https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4XYc9WusY4pvbOAv52RGekkVqEzz7cawiXLWBq4421Rl_xkgBNDcNac5Rr8X7ZNfIUFLqLrlg-UmPJNa3EBye9XRhwcAkxz4nX3hUKrCvHSLsXJX-z9s3YP1-qlEK_dTny5_u0CuWpyK3/s1600/JONATHAN.jpg] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XYjk0uXVhP4]  From the first time a few years back that I noticed this unthinking and disgusting behavior, I was flabbergasted by it.  I refrained from commenting because I was sure that there are enough educated, yes, educated, members of the president’s entourage who know better than to allow him to continue to do his best imitations of our home video police\military officer-types; that is, that they would tell him to put a halt to his Samanja proclivities.  

Obviously, either they themselves do not know any better or he is one obdurate principal.  I cannot permit myself to think that they all believe that this is something to encourage, maybe to be proud of even.

A ní ká jèkuru kó tán láwo, e tún ngbon owó è sáwo.  When the military left in 1999, the aim, if I understood it, was over time to remove the last piece of military rule’s footprint from our public life.  This is not done merely by having elections and having civilian rulers in place.  No, stamping out the scourge of the military’s intervention in our public life means the purging of all military presence from our polity.  It means that the military revert to where they used to be in the sixties: in their barracks, out of sight and only seen at national day commemorations and similar ceremonies.  Period.  I have no doubt that they were celebrating army days back then and I do not recall images of the military on television when I was first introduced to watching television in 1964.

But what I have said so far regarding the military’s invisibility from public life back in the day pales into insignificance compared to the more fundamental reason why the military are not a regular part of public life: the principle of the civilian control of men and women under arms.  This is a principle that is an element of the wider doctrine of the separation of powers in the modern state.

We do not need to full blown analysis of the doctrine in the present context.  First, the modern state separates power among its principal components—the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary—in order to ensure that tyranny, the concentration of power in one person or institution is preempted.  And each division of the state is meant to jealously guard its power against encroachment by the others and to check the others in order thereby to ensure that tyranny is not established over the people.

Second, the original theorists of the modern state were wary of standing, professional armies.  They held that the defence of the republic over which the state rules must be the business of all citizens with each citizen available, barring any disabilities, for military duty when occasions called for it.  When the growing complexity of the modern polity made citizen armies less practicable or less effective, one of the ways in which they kept the standing army from holding the state it is commissioned to defend hostage is by instituting the principle of absolute civil supremacy over armed force and subjecting professional soldiers, especially their officers, to supreme control by civilian authorities represented by the elected representatives of the people.  Officers of the professional forces receive their commissions from the people and the most senior among them hold their positions at the pleasure of the civil authorities embodied primarily in the president of the country.

What are the implications of what I have said so far?  As president, yes, you are the Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian armed forces.  But what does that mean?  It means this.  You are not a member of the armed forces that you command.  You are not the most senior officer of those forces.  No one expects you to be conversant with the art of war or the intricacies of military strategies and tactics.  The reason that you are the commander in chief is not because you are part of the military.  You are precisely because we do not want the military thinking that they are a law unto themselves or that the defence of the realm—their primary charge—is a task in which they have the last word.  The military do not levy wars; they fight them after the civil authorities, led by you, have decided that war is an appropriate response in the relevant situation.  You are commander in chief to make the military realize that in war, the people whom you represent are with them and when war shall begin or when it shall end are political, not military decisions.  In all, yes, you are the boss of the Nigerian military.  But you are not the boss as in being a general in the army or the equivalent in the navy or air force.  Even a Field Marshall is inferior to you.

This is all because as the president, the representative of the people in whom the sovereign power resides in the modern state, you, sir, cannot be a member of the armed forces.  You are not a superior office to the generals and the admirals.  You are not an officer at all.

By the way, what rank insignia do you wear?  Field Marshal?  Or the kind of rogue rank that Master Sergeant Samuel Doe knew he had to invent if he was going to show his supremacy to the officers of the then Liberian armed forces: he called himself “Commander General”.  It does not matter.

You do not grant commissions to officers of the Nigerian armed forces because you are their commander in chief; it is because you are the president acting as a surrogate for the electorate.  As a part of this important segment of modern society every member of the electorate is superior to the highest officer who owes his or her commission to the will of this electorate embodied in you, their elected representative.

If the people are beyond rank, you, too, are or should be beyond rank.  When you clad yourself in military fatigues; when you pretend to be a naval officer; when the person you have designated to bear your authority over the armed forces, your minister, shows up clad in military fatigues to represent your authority, you both diminish your office; you turn yourself into the equivalent of those you are by virtue of your office superior to by definition.  I dare say that you and your minister abase—yes, you lower yourselves and your respective offices—by wearing uniforms.

The principle of civilian control of the military is attenuated when you become one of them.  Of course, in monarchies, some kings and other potentates wear uniforms.  In most cases, though, they are honorary members of certain regiments or divisions.  In any case, monarchs can make whatever fools of themselves they care.  It is unseemly for the embodiment of popular sovereignty to degrade the office by appearing to be an officer of the armed forces.

We should be doing all we can to extirpate the footprint of military rule from our public life.  That process is not helped by our elected officials or their surrogates becoming a part of them.

For the sake of all that matters in our march away from the madness of military rule please, Mr. President, say you’re not one of them.  And act as if you believe it.

Fr. Akpan, I apologize.

TO SAVE HIGHER EDUCATION IN NIGERIA

The piece below has been in circulation in Nigeria since December 2012.  I hope that more people seeing it through this medium might offer a jumping off point for many who are desirous of seeing our higher education system rescued but have not thought that what we offer below is an option.

A CALL TO ACTION: CHALLENGING THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE POWERS OF THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITIES COMMISSION (NUC)

1.       We, the undersigned, were all, at one time or the other in the past, associated with the Nigerian university system as students and\or as teachers.  Our current sojourn away from Nigeria has not made us unconcerned with or indifferent to the fate of Nigerian universities at the present time.  It is precisely our concern with the current state of the university system and our belief that urgent corrective measures are called for that have motivated us to write this open letter to all who have a stake in the present and future well-being of tertiary education in Nigeria.

2.       At different times in the past, we each, and in conversations with one another, have expressed misgivings regarding the role of the National Universities Commission (hereinafter NUC) in the current sorry state of our universities.  If we had any doubt that the NUC is part of the problem of the tertiary education sector in Nigeria, recent developments have served to extinguish that doubt.  We refer specifically to the recent announcement by the NUC that it had suspended the licenses of seven private universities for an assortment of alleged infractions.  We are aware that some of those licenses have been restored.  But, as will be clear presently, restoring the licenses does not address the fundamental problem that this write-up makes clear.  The suspension of licenses was merely the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back for us.  Such naked exercise of power, in suspension or restoration of operating licenses, it matters little, by an unelected body over the fate and fortunes of hundreds of thousands has no place in a democracy, properly conceived and practiced.  Nor does it augur well for the future well-being of our society insofar as we desire to be a knowledge society.

3.       We would like to submit that it is time to DISBAND the NUC and constitute regulatory institutions that reflect (1) the federal structure of Nigeria and, (2) the democratic tenor of our polity as at present constituted.  Our reasons follow.

4.       The NUC is a relic of military rule.  It was the military that transformed an advisory Higher Education Division of the Federal Ministry of Education into a hydra-headed executive monster that now lays down policies for the institutions it regulates; policies that they have no option of refusing!  Its powers owe to the centralizing tendencies of military organization that originally spawned it.  The centralization of control and the concentration of power in the NUC is one of the worst distortions of life and thought wrought by military rule.  It is past time it was undone.

5.       Here is why.  Nigeria operates, in however distorted a manner, a federal political structure.  Education is on the Concurrent List and is therefore fit to be legislated on\for by state, local and municipal governments; and private participation is neither excluded nor encumbered.  This means that nothing constitutionally confers on any federal institutions, such as the NUC, the power, prima facie, to expressly permit or preempt the participation of state, local, and municipal government as well as private interests in the sphere of education at all levels or make the latter instantly subordinate to federal authority, however constituted.  Yes, we know too well that the civilian regime validated the military decree that founded the NUC.  The constitutionality of the law is ripe for challenge and that is what we are calling for.

6.       In light of (5), when or whether the federal position should prevail in any dispute within the sphere of education cannot, in a constitutional order, be determined by the say-so of one party to the dispute.  It should be for the courts to decide.  Now, it should be obvious that Nigerian states, not to talk of municipal authorities and private parties have been battered into ceding their rights by decades of authoritarian military rule and the failure by our political authorities to dismantle this essentially military structure that continues to wreak havoc on our governance structures under putative civilian rule.  That our states are not really states and their governors and lawmakers, including private proprietors, all legitimate entrepreneurs in the education industry are unaware of or unwilling to claim their powers does not make the military-inflected NUC power grab legitimate.

 

7.       It is time to take the constitutional order seriously and undo the damage done in the area of higher education by military rule.  We look forward to a brave private proprietor or a consortium of private proprietors willing to challenge, on behalf of the rest of us, the constitutionality of NUC’s powers.  It is a preeminently constitutional issue.  We affirm that the existence of the NUC is incongruous with the federal structure and is out of tune with the democratic tenor of these times.

8.       Beyond its suspect constitutional status lies the NUC’s destructive impact on the university system in our dear country.  If nothing else, the evidence is overwhelming that the decline of our universities has accelerated as the powers of the NUC have grown under successive administrations, civilian and military.  As it morphed from an advisory into an executive body, it did what all bureaucracies do: arrogate more power to itself while denuding the institutions it regulates of all meaningful powers to govern themselves, set their own directions and, generally, carve a niche for themselves in the competitive world of global higher education.  The NUC’s overreach has effectively made it impossible for Nigeria’s universities to be meaningful in this global competition to make an impact on the world of knowledge.

9.       Before the emergence of the NUC, each federal university carved its own identity in competition with the others and, later, with regional universities, all under the guidance of their respective governing councils.  It is easily forgotten that before 1976, there were only two federal universities! As befitted a genuine federation, the highest authority a regional university answered to was the Premier of the region and the regional legislature.  Everyone now says that that was the golden age of tertiary education in Nigeria.  Decentralized control did not mean diminution in the quality of the institutions and their products.

10.   Military rule changed all that for the worse.  It made federal all the state universities—mind you, without compensation—and began to centralize the business of running them.  This legacy of centralization is carried on by the NUC’s commandist structure, unwittingly abetted by state authorities and private proprietors.  As a result, the Nigerian university system is now in the vise grip of uniformity, characterized by the absence of imagination that is palpable in the one-size-fits-all template of the NUC.  Now all BA’s look the same; all departments have the same name; plans are afoot to turn out so-called benchmarks for MA’s and Ph.D.’s and we all go along as if this madness is not taking place.  Of course, the homogenization is smuggled under the innocuous-sounding euphemism of ‘benchmarks’.  The more uniformity NUC has imposed on our universities, the faster has been their decline and the more nondescript they have become as institutions.  We can’t even talk of the kinds of innovations that, for example, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, brought with it at its inception: the Cumulative Grade Point Average system of scoring; the Course Unit Model; the semester system, etc.  As one of Nigeria’s foremost scholars recently put it: “Uniformity cannot yield excellence.”

11.   We know that there are many academics in Nigeria who share the sentiments in this letter and have expressed them at different times and in different contexts.  But the fact that many have gone along with the present unsavoury situation that we have been describing does not make it right.  Given the excessive battering that Nigerian academics have endured these past forty years from the depredations of military misrule and its legacy of which the NUC is an integral element and a sad reminder, it is understandable if people have become numb to the fallacies and incongruities that characterize the founding instruments and operations of their institutions.  What is more, we now have such limited institutional memory that many young operators in the university system have no recollection of a decentralized system: they think the present order is natural and inevitable.  Needless to say, the system rewards the conformists in order to perpetuate itself.  Such is the logic of systems.

12.   For the much-needed rebuilding of the university system, a condition for the rejuvenation of the education sector in Nigeria, the NUC must be disbanded.  The governors who are fond of sermonizing on the need for true federalism must seize the bull by the horns and assert full control over the institutions that their legislatures have chartered.  Private proprietors must come together as a group to challenge the constitutionality of the powers that the NUC, via the military, has usurped. For the rest, the market should  be allowed to determine—as it did with the earlier generation universities—whether the products of their institutions are worthy of the tasks society expects them to accomplish for the latter’s progress.  All must prove their worth in the market and none should use the instrumentality of the state to cartelize the education sector.

13.   To those who wonder what should replace the NUC, we leave that open to the outcome of the debate that should follow the acknowledgment that something is amiss in our present arrangement.  We have different opinions in our ranks and we, too, jointly and severally, cannot wait to join with our respective individual suggestions on how we can assure that our universities become great again.  Realizing a need for a new beginning is the minimum requirement for this process to move forward.

Signed:

Name                                                                                         Institution

Wale Adebanwi                                             University of California, Davis, CA

Adeleke Adeeko                                           Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

Adewale Adekunle                                        Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, Accra, Ghana

Akin Adesokan                                             Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

Revd. Fr. Iheanyi Enwerem, O.P.                  University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

Femi Euba                                                     Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA

Olubunmi Fatoye-Matory                              University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA

Ebenezer Obadare                                        University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS

Tejumola Olaniyan                                        University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

Olasope Oyelaran                                         Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, MI

Tola Pearce                                                  University of Missouri, Columbia, MO

Olufemi Taiwo                                              Seattle University, Seattle, WA