By Pius Adesanmi

Terrorist Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab is the ill-bred scion of privilege that was perhaps destined to be the instrument through which the dead would visit the comeuppance of sleeplessness on a certain vicious establishment that is responsible for the greatest heap of corpses in Nigeria’s history. Let’s be clear from the onset: I am talking about the same people that Wole Soyinka has addressed in such stellar public lectures as “Project Nationhood: The Chosen against all Others” and “The Precursors of Boko Haram”.

I am talking about a certain Feudo-Caliphal establishment in northern Nigeria whose only investment in the Nigerian project is a lazy and parasitic dependency on other people’s oil in the Niger Delta, buoyed as it were by a psychopathological obsession with illegitimate Federal power on the one hand, and the mass production of poverty in their own necks of the woods on the other hand. I have also previously offered my take on this murderous establishment in the extended essay, “The American South as Warning to the Nigerian North”.

What happened as a near-tragedy for the rest of the world and a clear tragedy for Nigeria and Nigerians on Christmas day – CNN’s Rick Sanchez now talks of a “Nigerian nightmare”- in Detroit may indeed be the voice of the young and stupid Mutallab, the hands of the dead, I argue, are also actively at work in those sinewy ways that they work only in Africa to ensure that endless mytho-cosmic traffic between the worlds of the unborn, the living, and the dead. To understand what I believe is going on here, you must be willing to suspend your subscription to the explanatory authority of all the Euro-philosophical and Americo-modern analyses that have attended this event among Nigerian, African, and other pundits and let the African worldview offer an explanatory grid for these things for once.

The African worldview I have in mind here is Yoruba, my primary tool of analysis. Any Yoruba who is sufficiently familiar with his culture knows not to joke with the concept of “ro’ku”. Where the family of the deceased has good reason to believe that there has been foul play – death from natural causes is rare in Africa – in the demise of their loved one, they perform certain rituals – “won ro’ku” – to ensure that the spirit of the dead finds no permanent rest. Once the “ro’ku” rituals have been performed, the spirit in question quits ghostland frequently to roam earthworld in search of vengeance. Tormented by apparitions and other bizarre happenings that could even involve being flogged by invisible hands, the guilty is pushed deeper and deeper into an abyss of irrational and insane actions that may eventually eventuate in a confession of responsibility for the demise of Lagbaja. The relatives of the deceased who decided to “ro” the “iku” (death) of their beloved may then rest in the comfort that the dead has secured vengeance and is now also resting.

Often – and largely due to the influence of Christianity and Islam – a family may elect not to go the ostensible route of “ro’ku” rituals. But even in such cases, there is often a quiet, subterranean actuation of the belief that “ori oku a ja”, literally, “the head” of the departed will fight and avenge itself. Head is to be understood here in the African sense – something like Chinua Achebe’s chi. Here, we are in the domain of indirect “ro’ku” where no ritualistic actions of facilitation or mediation are required on the part of the living. The wicked people who are directly responsible for a death and the structures or people who bear indirect responsibility for the said death through actions of complicity or criminal inaction are made vulnerable to the vengeful whims of the restless and fighting “head” of the dead.

The Yoruba say of such persons and the people or powers behind them – “won o ni sinmi” – they will not (find) rest. Whether through the enactment of appropriate rituals or through simple belief in its potency, the philosophy of “ro’ku” presupposes an endless roaming of the spirit of the dead in order to occasion irrational actions among the living and the guilty. Thus, at any given point, earthworld is crisscrossed by unappeased angry souls that have not been able to find eternal rest and must deprive the guilty among the living of sleep and rest until the society of the living embraces the path of restitution and punishment.

Unappeased angry souls such as that of Gideon Akaluka, the young Igbo trader, whose restless spirit has roamed and haunted the city of Kano since December 1994, “ro-ing” a death whose gruesomeness is only surpassed by the criminal shortness of Nigeria’s national memory. We have simply forgotten him and moved on. Yet, Mr. Akaluka’s family must still deal with the gory spectre of their son’s head dangling from a spike in broad daylight, as a mob of crazy Islamic militants danced with it through the streets of Kano, chanting Allahu Akbar (another Christian infidel down, some 50 million more to go in Nigeria!). The mob that beheaded Akaluka in Kano had enablers and complicitous political profiteers in the northern elite and leadership. Now Akaluka is “ro-ing” his own death. The scions of the politically complicit are misbehaving. And the chicken is home to roost.

Unappeased angry souls such as that of Christianah Oluwasesin, the young Yoruba school teacher, whose restless spirit has roamed and haunted the town of Gandu in Gombe state since March 2007, “ro-ing” a death whose gruesomeness is only surpassed by the criminality of Nigeria’s national memory. We have simply forgotten her and moved on. Yet Ms Oluwasesin’s family still deals with the gory spectre of their daughter’s lifeless body, clubbed to death in broad daylight by crazed Islamist pupils who accused her of desecrating the Holy Koran even as they chanted Allahu Akbar (another Christian infidel down, some 49 million, nine hundred and ninety-nine more to go in Nigeria). The lynch mob in Gandu had enablers and complicitous political profiteers in the northern elite and leadership. Now Oluwasesin is “ro-ing” her own death. The scions of the politically complicit are misbehaving. And the chicken is home to roost.

Unappeased angry souls such as that of Grace Ushang, the 25 year-old youth corper whose restless spirit has roamed and haunted the city of Maiduguri since September 2009, “ro-ing” a death whose gruesomeness is only surpassed by the criminality of Nigeria’s national memory. We have forgotten her in less than five months and moved on. Yet Ms Ushang’s family still deals with the gory spectre of their daughter’s lifeless body, raped and murdered by irate Islamic militants offended by the sight of her in khaki trousers – given to her by the Federal Government of Nigeria, a state she was serving at the time. She wore trousers in Nigeria’s sharianistan and paid with her life in 2009! (another Christian infidel down, some 40 million, nine hundred and ninety-eight million more to go in Nigeria.) The mob that raped and murdered Grace Ushang has enablers and complicitous political profiteers in the northern elite and leadership. Now Ushang is “ro-ing” her own death. The scions of the politically complicit are misbehaving. And the chicken is home to roost.

Within recent memory, Gideon Akaluka, Christianah Oluwasesin, and Grace Ushang are tragic signposts on a bloody trajectory that has taken us from Maitatsine to Boko Haram, accounting for close to three decades of an annual blood fest in the name of religion in a country that will only be fifty years-old in 2010. There are hundreds of thousands more where the troika of Akaluka, Oluwasesin, and Ushang came from. Hundreds of thousands of unappeased angry souls hovering over Nigeria in search of restitution and the ascription of responsibility and punishment to the guilty. Yet, in more than thirty years of regular Islamist blood fest in northern Nigeria, the Federal Government has never arrested and tried a single Islamic fundamentalist. As far as the cretinous status quo in Nigeria is concerned, no one was responsible for the deaths of Akaluka, Oluwasesin, and Ushang. No investigations. Nothing beyond the platitudinous expressions of dismay and the promise to leave no stone unturned until the perpetrators are found.

Unknown to the political opportunists in the northern elite who manufacture the onward Moslem armies of hunger, indoctrinate, and deploy them periodically to gory and devastating ends just to maintain the status quo, and who proceed to ignore the imperative of justice for the dead, so long as the victims answer Christian names from the south or so long as they are faceless and nameless expendable Muslim commoners from the north, every death has been a step forward on the road to Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab. Their nonchalance and neglect of the epidemic of religious violence in northern Nigeria have now been taken to new levels. Now, the dead are “ro-ing” years of injustice and criminal complicity by the northern establishment. The restless hands of the dead are at work. The spoilt children of our friends, who live in four-million pound apartments in London, are joining Al Qaeda and ensuring that their corrupt fathers in the Nigerian status quo will neither know peace nor find rest.

It must be said that the complicity and guilt of the northern establishment finds comfort in the attitude of the Nigerian media and intelligentsia. The imperative of naming names and ascribing responsibility for these things to specific people and fragments of Nigerian society – where evidence abounds – has always given way to clever demission and political correctness. We are always enjoined not to hold a particular religion or a particular segment of Nigeria responsible for anything. Such analyses often veer into inane philosophical abstractions on collective responsibility, systemic, and institutional failure, and other academic platitudes. Reuben Abati, for instance, has written an article on the current disgrace in which he somehow manages to comfort everyone – including the Mutallab family – and blame no one in particular.

In his own refreshingly different and heartening submissions in the article, “Nigeria’s Terrorism Notoriety”, Okey Ndibe brilliantly analyzes these issues and ascribes responsibility but he falls just short of specifically naming the northern establishment, preferring such euphemisms as “government”, “the Nigerian state”, and “official nonchalance towards the phenomenon of domestic religious violence”. There is a specific establishment behind “government”, “the Nigerian state”, and “official nonchalance” and we must now name and go after them in our critical reflections. Okey and those of us on the same side in the struggle for meaning within the Nigerian conundrum must now realize that the northern establishment has learnt to count on us for such neo-Enlightenment grand gestures of conceptual liberalism. They have learnt to blackmail us as

Islamophobic bigots whenever we move too close to naming them.

We must now call their bluff in our writings and name them. If we can name Helen Ukpabio and hold her responsible for murdering “witch” children in the name of fundamentalist Christianity, if we can name and hold the likes of Enoch Adeboye and Chris Oyakhilome responsible for a brand of fundamentalist Pentecostalism that is too cozy with the corrupt political establishment in Nigeria, we must hold a mirror to the face of the northern oligarchy. We must in fact make a conceptual shift and stop calling the annual carnage that these people condone and refuse to punish in northern Nigeria “religious violence”. They have learnt to live with that designation. It is terrorism pure and simple. We must call it terrorism. We owe the Nigerian people that conceptual shift. For while we are at it, trying to avoid being called bigots, all we get from those who profit politically from Nigeria’s annual ritual of domestic religious terrorism is insufferable arrogance such as we witnessed recently from one of them, Rilwanu Lukman, the irresponsible Minister of Petroleum Resources who abandoned Nigeria to an ongoing fuel crisis to catch up on winter holidays in Vienna in clear defiance of a Vice Presidential order to stay at home and work on the crisis.

We must insist on the fact that it is neither stereotyping nor bigotry to acknowledge and critically engage empirical and provable facts. If it is empirically provable that northern Nigerian has been the locus of virtually every incidence of domestic religious terrorism since independence, if the nonchalance of northern leadership to this gory trajectory of blood is evident and provable (they have never tried anyone for any of the murders), we should go ahead and name them and damn the consequences. Let us harbor no compunction whatsoever in acknowledging the fact that the dead are “ro-ing” their own death and manufacturing Mutallabs. Let us celebrate the fact that those who have denied them justice and their humanity – justice, according to Soyinka, is the first condition of humanity – will now not know sleep and peace. Where Nigerians have been incapable of doing so, the Americans will now guarantee their insomnia and heartening discomfort.

by Pius Adesanmi

My title plays on the title of Professor Femi Osofisan’s inaugural lecture at the University of Ibadan, “Playing Dangerously”, and my reasons shall become apparent presently. First, an anecdote. Back in secondary school, one of my close cousins, Bola Akanbi, fell in love with Professors. Bola and I were then sharing the same bedroom in my mother’s staff quarters bungalow in the sprawling compound of Titcombe College, Egbe.

Bola’s Dad, one of those colonial, missionary-trained, no-nonsense, secondary school principals like my own Dad, was doing his doctorate at the University of Ibadan. Dr Samuel Akanbi and my father belonged in a generation of Spartan educationists who spiced their impeccable Queen’s grammar with Latin and spotted a District Officer “parting” (a straight line carved through the hair with a comb) on the right of left side of their heads. They could drive you home at the end of a school day to “cane you” in front of your parents and be thanked generously for it by your parents before your Dad proceeded to give you “jara” (supplementary) caning for the disgrace. Infrequently, Bola earned a hop-along trip whenever his Dad was going for consultation with his doctoral supervisor at Ibadan. Those were the days.

That was before the academic hemorrhage to Euro-America that Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has analyzed so brilliantly in a number of works. Many of the big names in the Faculties of Arts, Education, and the Social Sciences were still around in Ibadan. That’s where and how Bola’s love of Professors began. Bumping into some of those names must have done things to the impressionable mind of a secondary school kid. Bola would return to Titcombe from Ibadan to regale us with stories of Professor this and Professor that, laced with routine school kid’s exaggerations and a considerable swagger of superiority.

Soon, things extended beyond the University of Ibadan and Bola came to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of the names of Professors in most Nigerian Universities. His hobby was to reel out names of professors, stressing every syllable of that word, looking at us like primitive baboons when we professed ignorance of those names. “You mean you don’t know Pro-ffe-ssssor Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi?” “What about Pro-ffe-sssor Obaro Ikime?” “Pro-ffe-ssssor Eskor Toyo?” “You don’t know them too? Suegbe l’eyin boys wonyi o”. And Bola would strut away like a royal peacock, hissing and bemoaning the fate that placed him in the company of such ignorant peers as us. In essence, if you were a professor in Ade Ajayi’s generation in any Nigerian university and you were worth knowing, Bola knew you in his little corner of the world in Titcombe college.

Then the radio announcements came in dizzying succession in the 1980s: “I Colonel Joshua Dogonyaro of the Nigerian Armed Forces” (1983); “I Colonel Joshua Dogonyaro of the Nigerian Armed Forces” (1985). “I Brigadier this, I General that”. Coups and counter-coups. We gradually became a generation that new more about martial music coming early morning on national radio than we knew about fuji or juju music. National ethos was changing. All the values we knew were being bastardized by the military before our very before. Principals like my Dad or Bola’s Dad had better watch out. You had better be able to recite the national anthem or pledge “with immediate effect” or a considerably younger Group Captain Salaudeen Adebola Latinwo, Military Governor of Kwara state, could barge into your office – through the window, always through the window – and ‘frog jump’ you. On national TV, we saw those despised soldiers publicly frog jump Nigerians in our fathers’ generation. We saw them slapped and horse-whipped in the street. In graver situations, the soldiers could deny you your share of “essential commodity” (essenco).

These changing scenarios were playing out as we approached 100 Level. During our transition from secondary school to University, Bola’s diction had changed. Now, that’s a paradox. Here was a school kid who spent his time in secondary school memorizing the names of a mind-boggling number of Nigerian Professors. This same kid got to the University and Army Generals became his new fascination. His encyclopedic mind dropped the database of Professors and replaced it seamlessly with a brand new database of Generals. He was also now less enthusiastic about University education. He was only just there at the University – going through the motion. His mind was really at the Nigerian Defense Academy in Kaduna and he spent a couple of years trying to get in. Like most Nigerians in my generation, Bola was seeing possibilities of himself as a newly commissioned military officer first serving as ADC to a military governor before participating in a coup to become a governor himself. In my own moments of messy privacy in the toilet, I would practice on top of my voice: “Fellow Nigerians, I, Major General Pius Adesanmi, of the Nigerian Armed Forces”… That sounded kinda cool.

There is however a lot more to why Professors crashed from their Olympian pedestal and eventually disappeared from the mind of Bola Akanbi. If we admit that there is a story here that we may now tentatively entitle “the rise and fall of Nigerian Professoriate in the mind of one Nigerian school kid”; if we also agree that Professors Ayodele Awojobi and Charles Soludo are at antipodal ends of this story, we need to begin to critically map and understand the trajectory that took us from Awojobi’s brightness to Soludo’s penumbra. We need to know when, where, and how the rain began to beat Nigeria’s professoriate, especially in view of an uncomfortable history of dangerous and unethical demissions that Charles Soludo has inadvertently but tragically come to symbolize.

Daniel Elombah, the prolific publisher of elombah.com has recently offered an excellent dissection of Professor Soludo’s ethical about-turns and moral summersaults. What needs to be added to Elombah’s treatise is the fact that there are broader national contexts and histories that have led us to Charles Soludo. It is a national malaise, not a regional or Anambra problem. Those contexts and histories are, in turn, linked to what Obi Nwakanma, a prominent Nigerian poet and public intellectual, likes to discourse as the collapse of “the University idea” in Nigeria. Whereas most analysis always reduce the crisis in our Universities to empirical and material details – collapse of infrastructure, outdated libraries and laboratories, etc – Nwakanma has always contended that we have in fact lost the idea behind the derelict structures. The fortunes or misfortunes of the professoriate in our recent history is a good place to start engaging the loss of the University idea.

For what, in fact, Bola Akanbi had plugged into back in secondary school wasn’t just the title of Professor or the considerable body of knowledge that the wearer of that title is normally deemed to have acquired. That school kid plugged into an over-arching halo, aura, and awe that devolved from the considerable socio-political, moral, and ethical capital that the Nigerian professoriate had come to acquire in the public space largely due to the critical interventionism and public activism of a long line of engagé Professors symbolized by the likes of Ayodele Awojobi, Wole Soyinka, Pius Okigbo, Eskor Toyo, Omafume Onoge, Bala Usman, Adebayo Williams, and Attahiru Jega, just to mention those few randomly. Add to this the collective public profile of the hot literary lefties of a certain era – Professors Biodun Jeyifo, Niyi Osundare, Femi Osofisan and others. Such critical and activist modes of inhabiting the public sphere was what created a certain national idea of the Professor-as-demiurge or the Professor-as-vates – the image and idea that mesmerized a secondary school kid.

By moving beyond the cocoon of academia and making knowledge production an expression of the people’s will and desire, in the people’s language, and always in opposition to the organized banditry otherwise known as the Nigerian state, these engagé Professors carved a Gramscian trajectory that came to define the public face of Nigerian professoriate. You will recall that the Italian, Antonio Gramsci, by far one of the most famous thinkers of the 20th century, gave us the idea of the “organic intellectual”. In addition to analyzing social life according to systemic and scientific protocols, the organic intellectual harmonizes and expresses the consciousness and feelings of the people. In this academic professor, town and gown meet and a social vision/mission is born and pursued often at great personal costs.

It is often wrongly assumed that Ibrahim Babangida, the military despot who ruled Nigeria from 1985 to 1993, destroyed education by deliberately underfunding the Universities, wrecking academic and non-academic unions, and triggering a mass exodus of the Professoriate by making the words ‘Professor’ and ‘poverty’ much more than a matter of poetic alliteration. Those are mere empirical consequences of a much more symbolic and graver assault on meaning. Babangida was far too sophisticated a buffoon to be content with merely undoing the Professor materially. He targeted the aura and the halo, demoted the demiurge, and vanquished the vates. What Babangida undermined and put on life on support were the idea and the ideal that society had vested in the professoriate. General Sani Abacha only needed to remove the oxygen later.

Babangida’s strategy was brilliant. Part of the professoriate’s capital with the Nigerian public was the idea that an indissoluble union of character and learning inhered in it. Babangida would have none of that Siamese twin. He performed a surgical operation, severed character from learning, and threw the former into a septic tank. To demystify the professoriate, Babangida manufactured two Professor types and unleashed them on the Nigerian public: Professor Errand Boy and Professor House Nigga.

Professor Errand Boy was the man Babangida somehow convinced to leave campus and come on board “on national assignment”. He gave this Professor sufficient perks and resources to discourage any idea of a return to campuses he was simultaneously starving of funds. But the real intention was to make his public image pedestrian. That was achieved by bouncing him from post to post and office to office like ping pong. Chairman of some special agency or parastatal today, Minister of some Ministry outside of his zone of competence tomorrow, Ambassador to some backyard country next tomorrow, back to Chairman next week. Professor Errand Boy would, of course, be inherited by subsequent regimes and administrations and bounced around just like his inventor, Babangida, did.

The bouncing back and forth had consequences: in the public’s mind, the boundaries between Professor and office messenger got dangerously blurry. One would almost need a calculator to tabulate the posts held under the military by Professor Jerry Gana alone. The more aura, halo, and social capital they brought to the table, the better for Babangida. Hence he also got Professors Tunji Olagunju, Adele Jinadu, Sam Oyobvaire and a host of other distinguished academics to constitute an unimpeachable pool of knowledge producers in Aso Rock. And they ran errands with unalloyed love for the military puppeteers. Those who today make grandiose claims about the “legacies” of the professor-servicers of Babangida forget too easily that whatever the said professors did in terms of bringing so much intellectual fire power and ideas to the governance of Nigeria at the time was subsumed within the symbolic economy of Babangida’s subterranean politics: demystify the professoriate. With Professor Errand Boy, the awe was gone. The rash of quota Professors being manufactured in the northern part of the country did not help matters in terms of public respect for the professoriate.

From the standpoint of the soldiers, Professor House Nigga was an improvement on Professor Errand Boy. Here, we cross the threshold of errand running into the territory of faith. Professor House Nigga’s work for Babangida was not just an assignment he mistook for service to the nation. He saw his job as a sacerdotal mission because he was a true believer who was genuinely in love with his master. Like the house nigga in American lore, if Babangida was sick, Professor House Nigga declared to the nation: “we are sick”. If Massa Babangida went to France to treat radiculopathy, Professor House Nigga wore sackcloth, poured ash on his own head, prayed, and fasted till Massa returned. This pathological love of Massa has been known to subsist long after Massa has left office.

Consider this scenario: more than a decade after Babangida left office, you are ill to the point of death in a Boston Hospital. This man, whom you served so faithfully at the risk of your own professoral reputation, does not lift a finger to help. Yet, you remain a believer, constantly trying to smuggle the tyrant into a nice corner of Nigerian history in broad daylight. Then Babangida’s wife lands in a California clinic and you are the first to release an online statement urging prayers for her. What greater love hath a man for his Massa? We are effectively in the province of what Wole Soyinka calls “inhuman” love when discussing Senghor’s infinite capacity to forgive the colonial atrocities of France and still find a wuruwuru way to place France on the right hand of the Father “among the white nations”. This love for Babangida by a Professor he somehow convinced to believe that a research centre could forge democratic ethos under jackboots and a pile of decrees is inhuman – inhuman because “superhuman” according to Soyinka. Are we surprised that our subject is still online today celebrating his role as one of the “founding fathers” of Nigeria’s current constitution – a flawed, illegitimate document imposed on the nation by a bunch of arrogant Generals who dared to utter the solemn words, “we the people”?

In Professors Errand Boy and House Nigga, Ibrahim Babangida demystified and pedestrianized the Nigerian professoriate. This was a sophisticated way of preparing the ground for the gaggle of Professor-servicers that Sani Abacha would instrumentalize later in his own much cruder fashion. What Abacha added to Babangida’s template was his ability to convince so many credible and impeccable Professors that it was possible to work for and with a killer like him and somehow come out of it all with the squeaky-clean reputation with which most of them went in.

The combined effect of Babangida’s and Abacha’s assault on the professoriate was to erase the halo, aura, and ideal that society had invested in those persons. Ironically, lowered ratings and expectation by society meant freedom to descend even lower in the logic of he that is down needs fear no fall. This explains a new phenomenon that emerged with the advent of ‘democracy’ in 1999. I was still in graduate school at the University of British Columbia. I would phone Nigeria and ask casually after Professor X or Professor Y. You got an answer that became increasingly frequent and worrisome: “ah Prof has left o. He has gone back to his Local Government to contest for Chairmanship o. Prof is now a PDP Chieftain in his Local Government Area”.

The problem wasn’t that Profs were leaving in droves to join politics. I believe that our tragedy as a nation devolves from the fact that the best among us have abandoned leadership and governance to the Orangutans among us. The problem was the kind of politics the Professors joined and the terms of engagement – electoral politics as defined and determined by the PDP, by far one of the most corrupt and oppressive institutions ever to bestride the African continent. This is no place to rehash the sorry, disgraceful, and embarrassing profile of that bastardy of a political party. Suffice it to say that unrivalled ability to lie and loot and a one hundred per cent deficit in integrity are the two most important membership requirements of the party. When Wole Soyinka described Abacha’s regime as “the open sore of a continent”, he was describing a counterfeit or “bend down” open sore. The Peoples Democratic Party in Nigeria is the genuine or original open sore of the African continent.

This purulent political institution benefited immensely from the demystification of the professoriate by the military. With the road to demystification smoothly paved by the soldiers, all the PDP needed to do was to create a worse personage than Professors Errand Boy and House Nigga. Enter the PDP’s Professor Nutin Spoil. Where Professor Nutin Spoil is not a regular jobber like Professors Errand Boy and House Nigga before him, he is neck deep into everything that makes the ordinary people of Nigeria sick and tired of the accursed democracy that has held them hostage since 1999. As electoral umpire, Professor Nutin Spoil is otherwise known as Maurice Iwu; as participant in and beneficiary of the PDP’s culture of electoral violence, massive rigging, and and daylight political robbery, his name is Oserheimen Osunbor.

This, in essence, has been our compulsory rite of passage to the unfolding tragedy that is Professor Charles Soludo, Nigeria’s latest and, according to Daniel Elombah, palpably most disappointing Professor Nutin Spoil. Suddenly we are dealing with the familiar and the strange united for better for worse in the same body. There is the Charles Soludo that we know: one of Africa’s most brilliant economists. A stellar academic trajectory saw him become one of the youngest full Professors of Economics ever to emerge from Nigeria. Then there is the Charles Soludo that we don’t know: he becomes Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank; becomes an overnight billionaire; buys up choice properties in London; sends his kids to private schools in London that only the kids of Middle East oil Sheikhs should be able to afford; joins PDP politics; gets himself an offshore godfather in a dubious character like Chief Tony Anenih; participates in the subversion of democratic ethos within the PDP to emerge as the party’s governorship candidate in the forthcoming Anambra elections; roams the land now in a convoy of thugs and loads of money that he is distributing to buy the election.

Where is the Professor of Economics? Where is the Economics he taught as a Professor at the University of Nigeria? Even in secondary school Economics when we read those famous textbooks authored by O. Teriba and O.A. Lawal, one sort of got the impression that Economics is all about the prudent management of scarce resources. Would the students Professor Soludo trained – especially the doctoral students he supervised – be able to square up his gargantuan profligacy with the theories he taught them? What did he teach those students about looting and plundering the resources of the state in Africa? Did he attend graduation ceremonies in his years on campus? Did he wear an academic gown? Did he mouth the usual platitudes about “character and learning” as the graduands filed past the academic staff? What does he think of all these things now as he spends looted in the attempt to buy the office of Governor of Anambra state? How does he plan to recoup that investment? What’s in it for Chief Tony Anenih, his offshore godfather from Edo state? How does the Professor feel about bringing himself so low that a charlatan and a buffoon like Chris Uba now feels sufficiently enamoured to ask Nigerians to determine who the criminal is between himself and Charles Soludo? The horror! The horror!

Questions. Questions. Questions. Yet, Professor Soludo just happens to be the most famous Professor Nuting Spoil around. Others abound in the system, contributing a restless run of nails to the coffin of what they once professed. Sometime last month, some Professors in the Senate of the University of Benin, led by Professor E.P. Kubeyinje, acting Vice Chancellor of the University at the time, put their heads together and somehow concluded that it was a great idea to invite Elder Chief Stakeholder James Ibori to deliver the University’s 2009 Founder’s Day Lecture! A thoroughly embarrassed Nigerian cyber community has sufficiently addressed this unbelievable violence inflicted on the very idea of the University by the Professors in Benin.

Here are some facts that the specific Professors Nutin Spoil responsible for the invitation knew about James Ibori: (1) he was convicted twice in London in the 1990s for theft and shoplifting; (2) he is wanted in London for money laundering and other related charges; (3) he is still standing trial in Nigeria for corruption. None of these facts discouraged these Professors in Benin from giving this convicted felon a university pedestal to address graduating students. Apart from Professor Kubeyinje, the Nigerian people need to know which Professors actually sat down in a lecture hall to listen to James Ibori. Hopefully, they had the decency to at least forget their academic gowns at home?

When next our folks in Benin want to invite a guest lecturer, let them borrow a leaf from Obafemi Awolowo University. OAU has just reduced the shame brought on us all – us is the Nigerian academic community – by the University of Benin when it recently invited the globally acclaimed human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, to deliver its Distinguished Alumni Lecture.

Let the Professors in Benin not tell us that they can find no better alumnus of Uniben than a third class graduate of that institution convicted twice for theft by the Queen of England. If James Ibori wants to invest part of his huge loot in education as part of a broader process of restitution, there are ways to do it.

Yet, Nigerian Professors abound, at home and abroad, who are doing this thing the way it ought to be done: quietly, diligently, and steadfastly. From Toyin Falola to Eghosa Osaghae, from Jimi Adesina to Aduke Adebayo, from Demola Dasylva to Obioma Nnaemeka, from Dele Layiwola to Onookome Okome and thousands like them, Nigerian academe remains the root and home of so many bright stars in the firmament of global academe. But, in the nature of things, the good apples don’t get to define the public face of the professoriate. The political jobbers do.

by Pius Adesanmi

I assume that the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Foreign affairs, Ambassador Joe Keshi, read George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, before authoring the face-saving memo that was reportedly responsible for President Yar’Adua’s volte-face in the Nasir el-Rufai/Nuhu Ribadu passport saga.

Acting on “orders from above”, Ambassador Keshi sent a memo to Nigeria’s diplomatic missions abroad instructing them to deny consular services to Nasir el-Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu, two “enemies” that President Yar’Adua now imagines he sees “under pillow, inside cooking pot” everyday (apologies to Fela).

After obeying the reckless order, Ambassador Keshi, I guess, remembered that he owes his reputation and impressive profile as one of the most cultured minds in the foreign service in part to the years he has spent working in civilised climes where civil servants are not robots and have sufficient latitude to decline unconstitutional assignments.

For instance, President Obama can expect his orders to be disregarded if he wakes up one day and orders Hillary Clinton to have even a lowly clerk at the State Department circulate a memo to American embassies around the world denying consular services to a neo-conservative loony guilty only of the ‘crime’ of running his mouth against the Obama administration abroad.

You don’t get to order unconstitutional actions against a citizen of the United States even if you are president.

Remembering these things, Ambassador Keshi fired a second memo to the knuckleheads who made him do it in the first place:

“I write to acknowledge receipt of your letter Ref No 28/Vol.13 dated 15 September, 2009 on the above subject and to attach herewith a copy of the action taken in compliance with your letter mentioned above. However, having implemented the content of your letter, under reference, I am directed to raise some concerns of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose advice on the issue would have been useful in the first instance.

“The decision not to renew the former Minister’s passport may unwittingly portray the Federal Government in bad light within the international community as a government that is too sensitive to criticism.

“The decision could engender more sympathy for him, which he could utilise to greater advantage especially if he opts to pursue the matter in court. That sympathy could also, as in the past, lead to some sympathetic country granting him temporary travelling documents, which will in the end defeat our purpose and render our action irrelevant…

“Equally, is the view that the criticism of the Government could increase resulting in an unnecessary distraction that Government could do without at the moment. The best antidote to the Mallam el-Rufai menace is to generally ignore him, monitor his movement and where necessary respond without delay to some of his most stringent comments.

“It is our silence and inability to respond promptly, extensively and effectively to his numerous comments since he left Nigeria that has hurt us most than the things he has said…” There are several red flags in Ambassador Keshi’s memo.

“First, a cultured diplomat advises a civilian government in a supposedly democratic dispensation to “monitor the movement” of a citizen of Nigeria! Who is next? Second, Keshi creates an “us” and “them” binary between his rule-of-law government and free citizens of Nigeria. Imagine the number of possessive adjectives – our this, our that – in the memo!

These people in Abuja sure have a way of thinking that they own Nigeria. Imagine calling a citizen who exercises the right to criticise your government – never mind that he played a tragic role in dumping the Yar’Adua nightmare on Nigeria – a menace! If this is the quality of advice that the Yar’Adua administration is getting from its most cultured minds, we are truly in trouble.

If Ambassador Keshi lifted the Big Brother option from Orwell’s novel, what would less cultured fellaslike James Ibori and Andy Uba have advised? Perhaps, Joe Keshi can be forgiven for the 1984-ish character of his memo.

“He was in service in the military era when the Big Brother thing was woven into our collective psyche and we are yet to rid our ethos completely of it. Enter The Guardian to provide the final act of this saga! In its edition of Sunday October 18, 2009, The Guardian praised Joe Keshi for saving “government from reproach”, conveniently forgetting the fascist undertones of Keshi’s memo.

“If conscience is an open wound, very few Nigerian newspapers are prepared to buy the balm of truth needed to nurture it!