PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

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

ndajika@yahoo.com

On September 23, I wrote on these pages suggesting a way out of the stalemate that had gripped Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, over the appointment of its vice-chancellor since the departure of the last substantive V-C, Professor Shehu Usman Abdullahi, in May. Nine candidates had applied but one had dropped out before screening by a selection committee of five appointed by the university and headed by the chairman of its council, Malam Adamu Ciroma, veteran politician and Madakin Fika.

At the end of the selection exercise Professor Andrew Jonathan Nok, Dean of the Faculty of Science, came tops with 86%, followed at a distance by Professor Yakubu Nasidi, a former deputy vice-chancellor, with 62.25%. Professor Mohammed Zakari came a close third with 60.75%.

The selection committee then presented all eight candidates with their scores to the council for its final choice. Instead the council meeting ended in stalemate as a result of serious objections to the selection exercise by some internal council members and some of the contestants. Their grouse was that the exercise lacked transparency.

First, they said, it was strange that Malam Adamu, as the chairman of the selection committee, left the selection proceedings at a critical moment. This, they said, gave some of the remaining members who supposedly had a hidden agenda an opportunity to allocate scores arbitrarily. Proof that these members apparently seized this opportunity, said the objectors, was that they could not produce their score sheets for examination as required by council.

Second, said these objectors, Nok was present as dean at a council meeting which modified the template of the Nigerian University Commission for the appointment of vice-chancellors of first generation universities. Among the most important of the criteria was that only professors of at least ten years standing are eligible for vice-chancellorship. Nok was made a professor in 2006 with effect from 2003.

Third, they said, for the first time in the university’s history, the result of the selection exercise was leaked to the public ahead of the consideration of its report by the full council. It was as if someone wanted to confront the university authorities with a fait accompli.

My article of September 23 was written ahead of the second council meeting scheduled for September 28 during which it was hoped that the stalemate of the previous meeting would be broken. There were suggestions that the selection committee should be reconstituted before the rescheduled meeting. Some even suggested the dissolution of the entire council. I said in my piece that all this was unnecessary since the same members could be prevailed upon to behave with more transparency than they had displayed in the first exercise.

The September 28 meeting came and went with no solution in sight. A suggestion allegedly from one of the council members that the three top candidates should meet and agree among themselves how to share the university’s top jobs predictably, and mercifully, got nowhere. Since then Malam Adamu has resigned as chairman, apparently the first casualty of his inability to resolve the stalemate which many believe he created, to begin with.   

Not surprisingly supporters of Nok, who came first, have since embarked on a media war that has tried to portray the stalemate as a manifestation of the intolerance of a faceless Muslim Establishment that supposedly has the university in its grip.

Hardball, the anonymous daily columnist on the back page of The Nation, for example, reduced the stalemate to a purely religious and ethnic affair in his/her piece on November 12. “The only reason a candidate cannot emerge at ABU,” Hardball said, “is because of their religious belief and ethnicity. It has absolutely nothing to do with the academic and administrative accomplishment of the winner of the selection exercise.”

A special report in the Vanguard   of November 15 made pretty much the same argument as Hardball. “Although Professor Nok, currently the dean of the Faculty of Science, hails from Kaduna State,” said the report by Emeka Mamah, the newspaper’s correspondent in the state, “his apparent offence is that he comes from the Christian dominated area of southern Kaduna who have consistently alleged marginalization by the Muslim dominated northern Kaduna state.”

Obviously for both Hardball and the Vanguard correspondent it did not matter that Nok is a reltively inexperienced professor in a contest where there were professors of more than 15 years standing and who have held every top administrative job in the university except the vice-chancellorship.

In any case the main issue here is not the academic and administrative credentials of the contestants. The main issue is that of transparency and it is as clear as day light that the selection committee made a harsh of their mandate. So far none of the members of the selection committee has been able to explain how they scored the candidates.

 It is a similar lack of transparency that has thoroughly discredited the general elections of 2007 in the eyes of the world including those of the Nigerian media. I am amazed and amused, though not surprised  – in the eyes of much of the Nigerian media as in the eyes of the global media, a Muslim is presumed guilty often even when proven innocent -  that some elements in the same media will hold politicians to one set of rules and academics to another.

I was equally amused the other day when one Nnamdi Akaleme, who styled himself “a bloody Igbo man from that God forsaken territory” reacted angrily to my column of September 23 by calling me a “religious bigot who is infested with the northern virus” for daring to suggest a revisit to the selection exercise. So blinded was he by his anger that he chose to put words in my mouth.

ABU, he said I said, is the “best” university in Nigeria. He then proceeded to spend nearly a third of his article in the Daily Trust of October 13 in denouncing me for saying what I never did, and of course, for other sundry crimes. What I said was that ABU was perhaps the “largest” in Africa with its estimated student population of 30,000. How Akaleme, who I suspect is lecturer in ABU who chose to use a pseudo-name, will mistake size with quality is truly baffling.

Akaleme concluded his vitriolic piece by asking me “what happens if the exercise is repeated all over again and Prof. Nok comes first? Who would be fooling who then?”

I would’ve thought the answer was pretty obvious. No one would me fooling any one. So long as the selection exercise is transparent no one, certainly not me, would object to Nok coming tops again. After all he would not be the first Christian and ethnic minority to head ABU.

With the honourable resignation of Malam Adamu as council chairman, the country’s education authorities have an opportunity for a fresh start in appointing the V-C for the university. They should quickly replace Malam Adamu with someone who has a reputation for firmness and fairness and who has an inside knowledge of the politics of the university; someone like Professor Adamu Baikie, a veteran educationist or Malam Abubaker Gimba, a former president of the Association of Nigerian Authors.