PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

How to End the Stalemate at A.B.U.

ndajika@yahoo.com

 

Coming Monday September 28, the Council of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, my Almer Mater, would be meeting hopefully to resolve the stalemate that has ensued in the institution over the appointment of its vice-chancellor since the end of the tenure of the last substantive incumbent, Professor Shehu Usman Abdullahi, in May.

           

The tension that has gripped the university as a result of the stalemate is so palpable you can almost cut it with a knife. This, of course, is undesirable for any university, much more so for A.B.U. which is a microcosm of Nigeria with all its ethnic, religious and regional plurality, and is also arguably the largest in Africa, with an estimated student population of 30,000.

           

The tension is particularly worrisome because it has predictably assumed a religious dimension. The source of the tension was the screening in May by the university Council/Senate Selection Board of the nine candidates that had applied to succeed Professor Abdullahi in response to the internal and external advertisement the university published in February.

           

The nine candidates that applied, all of them from the university, were Professors Idris Isa Funtua, Lamido Tanko Zaria, Salihu Adamu Dadari, Shehu G. Ado, Yakubu A. Nasidi, Zakari Mohammed, Andrew Jonathan Nok, Julius A. Gwani and Ishaya Haruna Nock. The last candidate withdrew from the race before the screening.

           

At the end of the exercise, Nok came tops with 86% while Nasidi came a distant second with 62.25% and Zakari a close third with 60.75%. The selection board presented its result to the Council in May for its final choice and subsequent forwarding to the Minister of Education for ratification.

           

That was when all hell broke lose. Very strong objections to the exercise were raised during the council meeting on at least two grounds, first, that the Council Chairman, Malam Adamu Ciroma, abdicated his responsibility to chair the selection board by leaving the remaining four members to their own devises and second, that the members did just that and became highly subjective in scoring the candidates based on a list of eight criteria which aggregated broadly into Curriculum Vitae and interview performance. The first broad criteria was allocated 75%, the second 25%.

           

At the end of the meeting, the council agreed that there were serious anomalies in the scoring as members of the panel could not present their individual score sheets to the council. Instead they said they did their scoring “by consensus.”

           

In particular questions were raised about how Nok, who came first, scored a perfect 20 out of the 20 points allotted to contribution to knowledge in the forms of publications, inventions, etc, whereas his closest rival, Nasidi, who is a much more experienced professor, scored only 5.25%.

           

Again questions were raised about the huge gap Nok gave all the other candidates, including Nasidi, in interview performance – Nok scored 20 out of the 25% allotted to this criterion against the scores of the others that ranged from 15 for Nasidi and 9.5 for Dasari – when the scores of the candidates on all the other criteria had been general close.

           

My suspicion was that someone, or more likely, some group with a hidden agenda correctly read the deep schism between a group led by the then incumbent who wanted Funtua as successor and much of the rest of the faculty that favoured Nasidi as one of the oldest and most administratively experienced professors in the university. Apparently this “Third Way Group”, if I may call it so, decided to move into the breach by knocking out both Nasidi and Funtua. Nok, a clever scientist who recently won the prestigious NLNG Award, perfectly fitted their bill.

           

Unfortunately for the group it reckoned without the likes of Dr. Kabiru Chafe, a senior lecturer in the History department and once a junior Minister of Petroleum, who has led the opposition to the virtual recommendation of Nok as vice-chancellor (and is also equally opposed to Nasidi). Virtual because the Council is, of course, by law not obliged to pick the highest scorer as vice-chancellor. But then not to do so, especially where there is as wide a gap as there was between Nok and Nasidi, is bound to pose a moral dilemma.

           

Chafe has since written to the Minister of Education, Dr. Sam Egwu, ostensibly on behalf of the university’s Congregation which he represents, not only to reject the Council’s recommendation. He has also asked Egwu to dissolve the Council because he believes it has shown itself incapable of overseeing the university .

           

Chafe’s letter has since been countered by several including one from a Professor S. J. Oniye and a Dr. A. A. Liman. These two seem to belong to the group that prefers Nasidi.

 

Oniye and Liman have argued that the stalemate can be resolved without re-constituting the university’s Council. Instead they seem to believe all that is needed is to reconstitute the selection board since it is, in any case, merely ad hoc.

           

I agree with Oniye and Liman. The council agreed that its selection board did a shoddy job, especially because its members could not justify their scores.

 

As the university said in a Special Bulletin published on May 19 after the Council meeting, it “observed the non-presentation of scoring sheets by each member of the Section Board on each candidate that appeared before it to support its recommendation. Council also noted with dismay the non-involvement of Council Secretarial in the process, and the leakage of the Board’s recommendation to the general public before Council’s meeting.

Consequent upon the above, Council directed the Selection Board to submit the scoring sheets used by each member of the Board on each candidate interviewed for scrutiny.

Four months after the exercise, it is too late in the day to ask them to present their score sheets.

 

The most sensible way out, if not the only one, is for the Council to constitute a new selection board and insist on its chairman Malam Adamu Ciroma to chair its meeting in keeping with the university’s statutes.

 

If after this, the council fails to name a new vice-chancellor, then Chafe would be justified to call for its dissolution.