The decay of the university in Nigeria

At the latest count, there are currently some 60 institutions that call themselves universities in Nigeria. And the number is expected to grow in the coming years, given that demand by far outstrips supply. All sorts of mushroom “universities” are sprouting in Ghana, Benin Republic and Niger, all of them aimed at desperate, hapless, gullible Nigerian parents whose children cannot find places in our overcrowded local institutions. There are Nigerian students toiling away in the icy winters of Ukraine and Russia; some are in, of all places, Malaysia and Albania. For my part, I have serious doubts about the actual value of degree certificates acquired from unknown intellectual wildernesses such as Sudan, Malaysia, Cyprus and Morocco. I may be wrong, but then, I think every columnist is entitled to his own biases and eccentric beliefs.

This article is not really about quality and educational standards, important as this is. I am worried about certain reported cases of the abuse of the hallowed traditions of the academe that have come out in recent times.

Whether we like it or not, some sex goes on our campuses. Students and students. Students and lecturers. Sadly, there are campus pimps who arrange for their female colleagues to extort money from senators and the likes. Many of the young women that hang out in the dark seedy streets at night would tell you that they are “students”.

At the risk of sounding holier-than-thou, I must confess that some of us were either too naïve or too stupid to have allowed such adventures to pass us by. Truth is I graduated in my teens totally innocent of that topic. But I know of mates who were living highly active social lives in that domain. All-night live bands on Saturdays offered opportunities for shadowy pairs to wander off into the University Park. I had my arms full of books, heading for Kashim Ibrahim Library; looking for Immanuel Kant; looking for John Maynard Keynes and all the worldly philosophers. Believe it or not, the person who was a permanent fixture to the cubicle next to mine was one Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, who was a post-graduate student while I was still in prelims. They used to close the library with us. As destiny would have it, he re-emerged decades later as governor of Katsina and, subsequently, president of our great Federal Republic.

The problem of sexual harassment and abuse on campus is an old one. But never has it acquired notoriety as it does today. We have been deluged by reports of sexual predation by university lecturers taking advantage of vulnerable girls who have just left the protection and succour of their parental homes.

But there is an important but minor caveat. As a former academic myself, I am aware that sometimes the problem can express itself in reverse. If you are a young, brilliant, and, shall we say, handsome lecturer, you have a big problem with female students who are beginning to form images of what their ideal husband should be. Without claiming to have any of those qualities myself, as a young academic in England, I had once or twice encountered some little difficulty with some female students. The daughter of a francophone president used the excuse of my ability to speak French to come to my office unannounced as frequently as she could. One day she burst into tears and left never to come back when I insinuated that her father and his acolytes killed Patrice Lumumba. Apparently, she had built a castle of how she and myself could inherit some of her father’s billions and live happily ever after in Switzerland or some other comfy bourgeois outpost. On another occasion, one American exchange student broke down in broad daylight, tearfully screaming at me, swirling in a cycle, passing her fingers through the full stretch of her incredibly long hair: “Dr. Mailafia, am I not beautiful enough for you?” Trust Americans.

No doubt about her beauty, which was of the darkly magnetic genre; vaguely reminiscent of an image I have formed of what a spoilt Italian heiress from the posh region of Tuscany would look like. The problem was my wife.

Among the boys, a young Kuwaiti lad once brought me the keys of a brand new top-of-range BMW just to withdraw a report that I had caught him cheating in a test. I gave him a verbal warning, withdrew the report, but told him to keep his keys.

Teachers can also be harassed, no doubt, and it would be sheer folly not to also look at the problem from the other end. A professor needs to be polite but firm with impressionable starry-eyed girls who may be taken in by their intellect and charms. The temptation is real. I avoided it not because I am a saint but because I simply tried to avoid complications that would colour my professional standing and judgment.

In the month July, the story was reported about the alleged raping of a young teenage applicant by an academic of the University of Lagos by the name of Afeez Baruwa. Simply identified as “Caroline”, the eighteen-year-old had been sent by her father to meet with Dr. Baruwa on the Yaba campus in the understanding that he would help her secure admission into that institution. The young woman had arrived at the Yaba campus as early as 7.00 am. The monster had found its prey. He led her like a lamb destined for the slaughterhouse into one of the empty halls, bolted the door and subjected her to a raunchy round of sexual assault.

When the matter got to the police, where the man has been cooling his heels, he conceded that some sex did take place, but that it had been on the basis of “mutual consent”. The University of Lagos was later to declare that Afeez Baruwa is a part-time lecturer, not an employee of the university – as if that minor judicial fact is of any consequence in assuaging the pain of the victim and her parents. The case still goes on.

Hardly were we done with that awful happening at Yaba than we had again another case of rape on campus. This time it was in the calm and tranquil grounds of the University of Calabar. Calabar is one of my favourite cities in the whole of our country. The streets are immaculate, the lawns well kept. The gentle and polite Efik people, with their ancient traditions of good food and warm civility, always make us feel so welcome.

On 29th August, so the story goes, law students were put through the ordeal of an exam in a sweltering Saturday afternoon. Extant university rules, I am told, outlaw the holding of exams outside normal teaching hours. First illegality. Twenty minutes before the exam was due to finish, the dean swaggers into the hall and bellows, “Time-up!” Second illegality. Shocked, some of the students that were nearest to the professor resignedly handed over their scripts. Those who were farther from his reach wisely kept on writing until he directly approached them. He walked to his nearest victim, pulled her paper as she was desperately scribbling away, tore up her script and threw the bits of paper at her face. Despairing, she humbly bent low and picked up all the bits and pieces.

The young woman in question is a 400-level student, barely age twenty. As she was leaving, to her surprise, the man was waiting for her in a corner. He ordered that she comes up immediately to the dean’s office. Show of power. With much trepidation, she obeys. On arriving at the man’s office, she was greeted with a bottle of wine.

The only person I know from history to have used wine as a means of intellectual stimulation was the French eighteenth-century enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, we are told, wrote his best while savouring vintage wine and dressed in his most expensive gown. He believed that you could not consort with the ancients without showing some respect.

No progeny of Rousseau, the young woman declines the wine. He asked her to feel comfortable and offered to allow her to rewrite her paper in the comfort of the exalted office of the dean. Third illegality. She was no doubt elated to salvage what would otherwise have been a zero in that paper. As she was rewriting her paper, the professor poured some wine in his mouth and approached her for a wine-filled kiss. Getting more and more alarmed, she vehemently declines. He savagely attacks her for being a miserable hypocrite. He said he was aware of old tricks by girls like her who pretend to dislike it, when, in actual fact, they are veritable sex machines.

While all this theatre was going on, our dean had firmly locked the door and taken custody of her mobile phone. Forced imprisonment. Fourth illegality. Chibok girls. Boko Haram in the academy. Getting bolder, he openly demanded sex and would not entertain any remonstrations or feigned demurs. He forcefully removed her clothes, tearing apart her undies like a wild animal. Several times he forced himself on the defenceless young woman. Rape and rapine. Fifth illegality. After he was done, he told her she was now free to leave, lamely asking if he could drive her home. She wisely turned down his offer.

She wandered, zombie-like, into the embrace of her anxious fellow students. After narrating her ordeal, they earnestly urged her to report to the police and, of course, her parents. Her mother, Mrs. Irene Akpan, narrated the terrible assault to which her daughter had been subjected to in all its gory detail, insisting that the law must take its full course. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.

As the news broke out, former students of the Law Faculty released a joint communiqué stating that succeeding generations of their colleagues had been victims of Ndifon’s predatory sexual assaults going back over two decades. Most of his victims were either too ashamed to talk about it or were simply afraid of ruining their university studies. Most kept mum, bade their time, collected their degrees and moved on with their lives. The Akpan case gave them the boldness to come out in the open about what this wicked man has allegedly done to them.
As I understand it, the vice-chancellor of the institution, Professor Ivara Esu, has put together a disciplinary panel, in accordance with existing statutes, to look into the allegations and to recommend a course of action.

I was deeply troubled about both the Baruwa and Ndifon cases. The latter was the last straw. I decided to do a little Google search on the man. I discovered that he is a no mean jurist, as would be expected of anyone who makes it up the greasy pole to the exalted position of Dean of Law at a respected second-generation university like Calabar. I have never met the man in person, but I hear he is a charismatic and well-spoken intellectual. He is also, ironically, closely related to the Kingdom Business Group, a broad fellowship of African Christians who believe in the ethical approach to business and professionalism; seeking to apply the whole gospel to life, work and community. I happen to belong to the same movement. He is also an evangelist of sorts. Christ re-crucified by wolfs in sheep’s clothing!

Cyril Ndifon has recently written highly learned disquisitions in a European law journal on the problem of Amnesty and Obligatio Erga Omnes in Humanitarian Law Violations, in which he notes: “The issue of the criminal liability of individuals in both their personal and official capacities is central to human rights adjudication. But this notion becomes a farce if states grant to individuals certain immunities – such as amnesty, asylum or any other exculpating factors.”

We hope the disciplinary panel that is hearing his case will not allow it to become a farce and that, if the allegations of his criminality are proven, he will receive his just deserts. The rot in our universities must be cleaned up once and for all. If a university community cannot prove itself to be a model of excellence, civility and good form, it has no right to be called a university whatsoever. And we would be the worse for it both as a country and as a civilization.

Sitting in the calm comfort of my study and tapping away at dawn on my quiet laptop as the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, it is easy enough to rush into moralizing judgment about these things. Pray ye unceasingly, that ye fall not into temptation. Fear and trembling.

Matter of fact, I feel sad and pained by it all. For all the people involved. For our country. For their hapless victims most of all. I find it particularly sad because Ndifon is one of the rising giants of the law whose vocation is to prepare the next generation of jurists and judges. If people trained in the law cannot enjoy an ambience of freedom, decorum and justice, what will become of our future as a nation? What will become of the fountain of the laws which is the foundation of all free nations and democracies the world over? For all you know, our almighty dean could easily have become a SAN, and, in due course, a Justice of the Supreme Court.

The world was his oyster and he blew it. Big time. He ought to have known better than anyone else how to behave. To whom much is given. That he could not muster the moral fibre to behave in the manner of a jurist, scholar and gentleman – that he abused his authority in such an evil and blatant manner – requires that he pays for his misdeeds. Justice crying to the high heavens. He must be made an example of, for the sake of our children and our future.