-
A reply to Professor Jonas Okoro and Dr. Peter Okechukwu’s article with the above headline, by FELIX OGUEJIOFOR ABUGU
First, let me make a statement of principles. I did not attend the UNN; I attended the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT), Enugu, from where I graduated with an Upper Credit and 3rd best graduating student (permit this self-indulgent disclosure) in my class, in the department of Mass Communication.
The closest I came to any academic programme at the UNN was when I did a post-graduate diploma programme, also in Mass Communication at its Lagos outreach centre, to qualify for a Master’s degree programme at the UNN or elsewhere. However, shortly after finishing the programme, I was attracted to another post-graduate diploma programme at the Pan Atlantic University (PAU), the ‘mother’ university of the Lagos Business School (LBS), where I did a post-graduate diploma in Community Relations and with it, finally enrolled for a Master of Science Degree (M.SC) in Media and Communications (specializing in Media Enterprise), at the university.
But I come from the Old Nsukka Division, which comprised seven local government areas, until the gerrymandering of 1996 when Isi-Uzo was excised from Nsukka to facilitate the creation of Enugu-East Senatorial District (no thanks to Old Anambra Governor, Jim Nwobodo leveraging his position as Minister under Abacha to empower his people and throw Nsukka under the bus – politically speaking). Today’s Enugu North zone, Nsukka now comprises six local government areas.
I come from Enugu-Ezike in Igbo-Eze North LGA of Enugu State, less than 20kms from Nsukka, the university town. Our ancestors provided the sprawling expanse of hilly, temperate-climate like land on which the great Zik built the UNN, the nation’s first full-fledged university (and for which we were tagged foolish because we donated enough land to house a university community!).
So, I have more than insurable interest, as they say, in what happens at the UNN and, therefore am qualified to speak to issues raised by Professor Jonas Okoro and Dr. Peter Okechukwu in their diatribe against Nsukka, symbolized by Nkpkokote Nsukka, a voluntary online meeting group of Ndi Nsukka from within and outside the country, which is campaigning for an Nsukka-born VC of the UNN – for very good reasons to which we shall revert shortly .
Implicit in Okoro and Okechukwu’s condescending article is that beyond asking for ‘unmerited’ privileges for hosting the UNN, Nsukka has nothing else to offer the UNN, especially in terms of academics and knowledge, hence ‘their clannish’ quest for the position of Vice-Chancellor. The great English poet and translator was to describe any educated person with such a low view of others as ‘The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, with loads of learned in their head’. While we are used to such belittling vituperations by educated illiterates (an Enugu community once allowed themselves to be ceded to a neighbouring State because the ‘Okafors’ didn’t want to be kins any longer with the ‘Odos’) and no longer put much store by their nonsense, I must add that even Okoro and Okechukwu themselves know that they are not exactly spot-on in characterization of contemporary Nsukka and people.
But, like the Osu caste system that has refused to die, colouring the truth to sustain the narrative that there is neither wisdom, knowledge, intelligence nor education in Igboland or among any other Igbo group outside of the Igbo South, sits well with the likes of Professor Okoro and Dr. Okechukwu, who may well not possess the personal strengths by which to thrive, but must constantly hide under a sub-group’s supposed intellectual superiority to stereotype and bully others to be able to move ahead in life. To paraphrase the Good Book, it suits them to continue to parrot the view that nothing good can come out of Nazareth, even though Jesus was a Nazarene.
I wouldn’t know how long Jonas Okoro has been a UNN Professor. I would know even much less about Okechukwu. Were he to be a thoroughbred like the great Soludo, he would have been around at least in the past 15 years or so to know what transpired in the past three or so UNN VC selection processes, including the very controversial one from which the retired VC, Prof. Charles Igwe eventually emerged the preferred candidate. He must have known all the candidates who participated in the interviews – their qualifications, pedigrees, experiences and performances in the interviews. And in case he did not know or simply did not care to know, this much is for free:  two of the three shortlisted candidates for the final selection interview in one of the selection processes, where the third eventually became the first, were neither from his part of town nor did they come that far by quota. It must also interest him to know that two of the candidates shunted out of line by the heavily compromised selection process were later to be appointed VCs of two specialized Nigerian universities, one owned by the federal government, the other by a State government.
There are two contexts in which to address the theme of Professor Okoro and Dr. Okechukwu’s article – the question of ‘Nsukka clannishness’. One is the context in which clannishness becomes an accusing finger pointing back at the two academics. I do not know where Professor Okoro comes from, but as names in Igboland, go, he must come from the same part as the nine professors of one Igbo sub-ethnic group’s extraction, who once conspired to chase away the most progressive, all-round performing vice chancellor the UNN has ever known in its 60+-year history.
That gifted academic and administrator was the late former UNN VC, Professor Frank Ndili, who hailed from Asaba in today’s Delta State. Ndili’s only crime was that he was from Asaba, not from the ruinous nine professors’ part of town. Would Okoro not know that it was after Ndili’s controversial ouster that Nsukka’s decline set in and has continued till this very moment? Now, even if we agree that there was nothing clannish in the destructive exertions of those nine misbegotten hounds of professors, what about two brothers from the same community becoming Vice Chancellor of the same Nsukka in quick succession, not on the basis of unbeatable academic and administrative records but on the basis of political consideration – the case of one of them, in particular? Nothing clannish there too? Or the fact that an Abba man handed over to an Awka man in a VC race that was defined more by mercantile rather than Okoro’s academic and or so-called research interests? We can’t call anything done by the blue-blooded South clannish, can we?
But Nsukka? What did anyone expect: that the zone and people would be weighed on the same scale as people of the South? Say wetin happen?  Only Nsukka is capable of deploying clannish considerations, meaning ‘our turn’ (in the fashion of ‘emilokan’) in the quest for a worthy VC for UNN, of course! And yet, in the context in which clannishness can be used to define the character of Nkpokote Nsukka’s campaign, it can only refer to the people’s sense of shared destiny with, and emotional attachment to, the UNN, which our brothers from the other side no longer have, I dare say. And that is what UNN needs now, to be sure– a VC not only qualified in learning, character and experience, but also one with an emotional attachment to the university. This is qualification can only be found among candidates from the Nsukka cultural zone, without any fear of contradiction.
Professor Okoro and Dr. Okechukwu’s unbridled animus towards Nsukka is understandable. While it may look obtuse, given the socio-economic dynamics of contemporary Igbo society, it is most likely borne out of the fear long stoked by the oppressors’ realization that their game is over, what with the oppressed now wide awake. For, were we to ask any question, it would be this: exactly what does the other side still have to sell to us? Can teacher still teach us nonsense? (apologies the late Fela).
Okoro and Okechukwu spoke glibly about ‘merit’, ‘research’, the need to choose the best to run the UNN in the 21st century and all that. But for over 50 years, their best have run that university and only succeeded in running it aground. Of all the first-generation universities in Nigeria, Nsukka is the lowliest, in terms of infrastructure, at least. It has the highest number of abandoned projects among all the first-generation universities in the country.  23 blocks of flats bequeathed to the university by the late Zik of Africa for use as first-year students’ hostels have since been abandoned by Professor Okoro’s dog-in-manger kinsmen, who have all but turned the place into a dumpsite. The university’s other on-campus hostel accommodations are without running water or functional toilets. You know why? Because those in charge at UNN constantly steal the university blind and use the money to build private hostels (a big business in Nsukka), which rent out to students at exorbitant prices. Their personal avaricious interests are not served by running clean, well-maintained official on-campus student hostels. It’s like a relay game: you run your stretch and make your money and hand over to your brother! That is how UNN has been run for years on end now, a sordid state of affairs that Okoro and Okechukwu find nothing wrong with because it is a game of the chosen.
By their disingenuous campaign against Nkpokote Nsukka’s aspirations, Professor Okoro and Dr. Okechukwu are simply telling the world is that what matters to them is that their brothers are allowed to continue to run and plunder the UNN for as long as they please, an abuse of office and authority that has been going on for decades and must continue because it serves Okoro and Co.’s convoluted idea of ‘appointment on merit’. Here are a people without any sentimental attachment to anything commonly owned, whose overweening mercantilist and individualistic bent won’t let them develop such a mindset. It’s beneath them to be sentimental; only fools are.
The lack of sentimental attachment has been made even worse for Nsukka by the establishment of more federal universities in the South East. At the last count, all five South East States now have their own conventional federal universities (except Abia which has a university of agriculture). So, there is no longer much to protect about Nsukka as a common inheritance, hence the fierce contest for vice chancellor not to run the UNN to restore the dignity of man but to plunder and accumulate as much as possible for self, sponsors and triumphant VC’s community.
Okoro and Okechukwu betrayed their small-mindedness when they mocked Nsukka for not leveraging Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi’s governorship of Enugu to foist an Nsukka-born VC on UNN. Unwittingly, they made a case for the nobility of the Nsukka spirit of accommodation and freedom as exactly what UNN needs to lift it out of the dark pit where the pushy, mercantilist horde has dumped and kept it all these years. Ugwuanyi knew Nsukka had projected two of the three best candidates for the VC in 2019 and had confidence that the university establishment as a self-driven system would always choose the best for itself. How was he to know that the mercantilists would hijack the system and bring the third up to become the first, a common southern magic where the fourth beat the first, second and third to become the Governor of Imo State!
I repeat that as it is today, only Nsukka possesses that degree of sentimental attachment that is required of a contemporary UNN VC to run that great institution most transparently and efficiently and, by so doing, restore it to its old glory. I wager that no other group in the South East has that inclination. Otherwise, they would not have so badly run down the place.
So, let this notice be served on people like Prof. Jonas Okoro and Peter Okechukwu: the UNN is not for them and their people to plunder any longer. And no amount of blackmail and or insults will make Nkpokote Nsukka and, for that matter, the cultural zone as a whole, halt the campaign to find a good, brilliant and pragmatic man or woman, with a high dose of personal integrity, to redefine UNN’s administrative paradigm and take it to the top of the comity of the nation’s universities.  The mercantilists must be flushed out.
