Between Bafarawa and University Education

By

Dahiru Maishanu

Sokoto

 

 

It was a breezy June afternoon in the City of London. The year was 2005 and I had just finished giving a lecture to a group of teenage black children in Peckham which I do every Saturday in a supplementary school that catered for ethnic minority children. My mission was to visit the visiting Governor of Sokoto State, Alhaji Attahiru Bafarawa to intimate him of an application I had earlier submitted to the State Scholarship Board for the government to pay part of my MBA tuition fees to The Hague University of Professional Education, my then immediate Alma Mata.

 

That was the second time I had set my eyes on the lanky seemingly harmless figure that emerged from the staircase of no. 9, Radnor Place, London. The first was in 1987 when as a young reporter, I went to interview him on a lingering shortage of diesel oil in Sokoto metropolis being an independent petroleum marketer which did not end well. The confrontation only revealed to me the level of something close to arrogance even at that young age and the beginning of my career as a journalist. May be out of naivety or sheer innocence or both, I didn’t think much of that ever since, but my story reflected a person whose idea of business and human relations was different from the norm.

 

There we were, face-to-face, after 18 years on another continent and in another city as he put forward his long arm to me for a hand shake. After niceties, I went straight to the point to tell him my mission. Mission completed, I set to get out of the house when his soft voice suddenly called my name: ‘Mallam Dahiru’, he said, ‘I’m not in London for government work.’ He continued scolding me endlessly while an Indian national and another Nigerian both of whom looked every inch lackeys and surrogates kept looking amazingly. I simply told him that I thought he was my governor and legal representative and therefore bound to at least be nice to me. The humiliation was total and the lackeys seemed thoroughly entertained by his endless ranting.

 

From that very day, coupled with what I learnt later on, I knew I was not the target of that humiliation. The mere fact that the subject matter was education was enough to make my governor green with envy as he is fundamentally deficient in formal education. Unknown to me, the governor had a phobia for education and was ready to exert his anger at the slightest of provocation. The fact that, we were talking about a master’s degree was enough to court His Excellency’s wrath and warrant this humiliation.

 

Having known the disdain and loathe the former governor had for the elites especially, one would think he would never be tempted to attempt going back to school in any guise. Wonders, they say, never end as just last week, the international media caught up with the governor registering for a degree program in international relations at an American university. It is laughable for people like us who experienced first hand, Bafarawa’s avowed hatred of the educated to see him trying to go back to the system he so openly hated and castigated while in power.

 

This is a man who ‘awarded’ himself a professorial chair in politics and told the whole world that he was better than any university professor in the land where the art of politics was concerned. This is a man who made the educated a laughing stock by scolding PhD and masters degree holders who served as his Commissioners and Special Advisers by saying an empty A4 paper was worth more than the degrees they had. This is a governor who institutionalized sycophancy as a format for governance at the expense of competence.  He brought semi illiterates and made them over-lords to everything and every one that had any thing to do with his government. We cannot forget in a hurry how one Ummarun Kwabo, a little known hustler prior to 1999 suddenly became super rich and De-facto governor without a secondary school certificate.

 

Where arrogance and ill education combine to form a character that has any influential role to play in the society, doom is the word for that society. With all the utterances against western education and the sheer neglect education received during the Bafarawa years, one remains at a loss to the sudden interest the former governor suddenly developed by personally going back to school. After eight years in government, the man left more than twenty percent of schools in the state without roofing, basic teaching materials were lacking and the only school that had a semblance of normality was the school he named after himself and tricked Saudi authorities to sponsor.

 

To the George Mason University Washington DC, the school the former governor is alleged to have registered; pertinent issues are bound to arise. The course is a two year course in international relations and Universities are supposed to have laid down requirements for admission into their courses. One is therefore left wondering what kind of qualifications the former governor possesses that would enable him get admitted into a short-cut two year degree program. This is in view of what we all know to be the former governor’s ‘pivotal’ educational background as obtained in a crash program that absorbed the less intellectually endowed in the 1970s as an alternative to formal secondary education.

 

Knowing the American educational system, the first two years of American University system is known as the Associate Degree which when translated into British and Nigerian systems means the Ordinary National Diploma (OND) that we have here. This means that our ‘professor of politics’ is actually enrolling for a diploma course and yet he told the international media that he was enrolling into a degree program. Or on the other hand, the University is cashing in, on the ignorance of our governor by placing him in a diploma program while at the same time telling him that he was going for a degree program.

 

Be that as it may however, I congratulate the governor for having the courage and audacity to at least attempt going back to school after having spent more than fifty years on the face of the earth. This is commendable for many reasons; this is a vindication of our stand that his government was opposed to the progress of education and on which they spent millions of naira on hired writers trying in vain to blackmail us when he was in government. This is a triumph of the truth. This a vindication that education is the most veritable weapon for development as opposed to sheer arrogance in the approach of governance that was synonymous with the Bafarawa administration.

 

Furthermore, this is also an admission on the part of the governor that he lacked a very vital ingredient in the engine of governance while he was on the driving seat. It is equally a vindication for some of us who went abroad to study and who his government refused to sponsor, that after all educational pursuit is legitimate and worth-while despite all the antagonism we received by his agents and hired writers. Finally, the fact the governor opted for international relations as his chosen course is an admission of guilt that both human and international relations were conspicuously absent in his government hence the need for amends even if he is no more in power.  We wish him good luck and reminds him that if he is go the whole hug, he needs to spend four years in DC before he gets a full degree and may miss 2011. I salute His Excellency, Alhaji, Dr., and Professor of politics for resting all these qualifications for an ordinary diploma in far away America. Nothing is further from the truth and every dog has its own day.