Dear Messrs Etuk Bassey Williams and
Ibrahim Abubakar,
I have just finished reading your letter to
President Muhammadu Buhari on behalf of what you have identified as the
“Coalition of Civil Society Groups”. The
purpose of your letter is to contend that in the matter of the removal of 13
Vice Chancellors of Federal Universities, the president has breached the
constitution. You further submit that
the new appointments breached the federal character principle and are, for the
most part, tainted by cronyism.
Since your letter did not contain the list of
the groups on whose behalf you claim to speak, it is difficult to see how representative
your “groups” are of what, by definition, is civil society and the multiplicity
of groups to be found therein. If I were
the president, or I were advising the president, I would promptly ignore your
letter for its facelessness. This is not
a charge to be taken lightly. Here is
why.
You have accused the president of a
constitutional breach. That is not a
light charge in a well-ordered society based on the rule of law. It would therefore be necessary to be very
clear who are those making the charge and on what basis. As an ordinary citizen who, by definition, is
a part of the civil society from whose ranks your “groups” are selected, I find
it difficult to take this charge seriously.
Where were you all when the initial
appointments were made? If the president
had the power to appoint those vice chancellors without more, how come the
president no longer has the power to remove them, without more? When you kept quiet when the initial
appointments were made, what gives you the legitimacy now to protest when
“illegality” upends a previous “illegality”?
As a Yorùbá saying might put it: “Olè gbé e, olè gbà à” [A thief steals
something, another thief divests him of it].
There is a lesson here that we all can learn
and it is the principal reason why I decided to write this little
rejoinder. In a decent society—very few
think of our country as a decent society—those who are just appointed would
reject the appointments or at least ask that “due process” be followed before
they would accept their appointments. I
am certain that none of them would take this course. When, therefore, two years into their tenure,
their appointor has a change of mind, for any or no reason whatsoever, I
definitely will not be extending myself on their behalf.
The real reason here is that the entire
structure of the administration of tertiary education in our country is built
on legal quicksand and political chicanery.
To begin with, no vice chancellor has anything that resembles autonomy
in the running of his or her institution: they, one and all, are beholden to an
organ, the National Universities’ Commission, whose bona fides are not exactly
sterling. As some of us have argued in
the past [http://forevernaija.blogspot.com/2013/05/to-save-higher-education-in-nigeria.html]
that the NUC cannot be a part of the revival of university education in
Nigeria. It is, I would argue, an
unnecessary dissipation of the president’s time to be losing sleep over the
appointment of administrators of universities.
And when we do not insist on the decentralization that would make civil
society, yes, civil society the real locus of control of a quintessential civil
society outfit like educational institutions, it is insincerity of the highest
order, perhaps even fraud, to protest specific irregularities like the one that
has attracted your disapprobation.
When those who have just been dismissed were
appointed, what “due process” was put in place?
Where were the advertisements for the positions they were appointed to
fill? What interview processes did they
go through? What constituencies of their
respective universities did they interact with before their appointment? What plans did they use to sway their
appointors to pick them over competing others in the process?
One last word to the new appointees: welcome
to the line of prospective dismissed vice chancellors, somewhere down the road
[apologies to Barry Manilow].
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