The deliberate destruction of the Nigerian university environment began in earnest with the appointment of Prof. Humphrey Nwosu as the Chairman of Nigeria’s electoral umpire, known then as the National Electoral Commission.
Nwosu was a lecturer at the Political Science department of the University of Nigeria when General Ibrahim Babangida called him up in 1989 for the position following the resignation of his predecessor, Prof. Eme Awa from the same position.
Prior to the years spent by both Profs Awa and Nwosu as heads of the electoral umpire, the government did not favour members of the academic community for such positions. I recall that the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) which supervised the election of Alhaji Shehu Shagari as Nigeria’s President in 1979 was first headed by Chief Michael Ani a career civil servant, and then by Justice Victor Ovie-Whiskey, a career judicial officer.
It was General Babangida who ingeniously came up with the idea of exposing the members of the Ivory Tower to the field of Nigerian politics with all the slippery slopes and banana peels. There was Bolaji Akinyemi, a professor of political science who served as Nigeria’s External Affairs Minister; There were also; Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, a pediatrician and health expert who was appointed as health minister; Ade Ajayi, a professor of history at the University of Ibadan; Reuben Kenrick Udo, a professor of geography at the University of Ibadan, Omo Omoruyi, former Director General, Centre for Democratic Studies.
The list is dizzyingly long, but the common thread linking the experiences of all of the men was the absence of good stories in the aftermath of their dinner with the political class. Soiled, smeared, and sullied, they were forced to shed their characteristic ideologue philosophies for the more flexible traits of the then-soldier-politician.
Those who were so disgraced slithered off, tails between their legs, and were never troublesome again.
The increased involvement of the intellectual class in election management was a well-thought-out emasculation strategy designed to soak the educated elite in the cesspit of corruption, thus, rendering them incapable of any opinion as the political class fatally rowed the nation’s boat down a waterfall. Having tasted the juice of political corruption, our professors, either fat on patronage or expectant for their turn, turned their backs on the very ecosystem that formed their very existence.
For Eme Awa and Humprey Nwosu, it was an experiment that nearly backfired. While Awa was forced to resign his position, Nwosu decided to dare the military president by refusing to discontinue the announcement of the June 12, 1993 elections in which the candidate of the Social Democratic Party, Alhaji Moshood Abiola was coasting home to victory.
To successfully annul what to date is regarded as the freest and fairest election in the history of Nigeria, President Babangida had to confine Prof Nwosu, who disobeyed an instruction to discontinue the announcement, to house arrest, an ordeal he endured until he was railroaded into exile as the country lumbered down the road of leadership disillusionment with a continued dismemberment of the academia.
Prof Nwosu, from all that has been happening in the country, was the last of the brave Nigerian professors who placed principle over self-aggrandizement. He was the last of the crop of men whose presence turned Nigerian universities into sacred sanctuaries that mere mortals were scared of violating. It is because of persons and personalities like Pro Nwosu that institutions of higher learning were described as “citadels” of learning.
A citadel, in its conventional interpretation, speaks to a fortress, typically one on high ground above a city. Time was when universities were high above everything else; morally irreproachable and mentally ahead of the society in which it exists. Universities were impregnable fortresses of social refinement; they cleansed everything that passed through it of retardants and transformed the raw ores of human society into useful precious metals.
When you encounter the Psalmist in Psalm 17:8-11, you just get this feeling that it the passage was written with university professors in mind. The passage reads; “I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore, my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.”
Professors are, sorry, were gods; they do not die. Because they were seen to have been moulded with the sacred materials that breed knowledge and warehouse the very fabrics of society, they often rose above board, deriving their utility from the wellness they generate and spread in the outer world. They were of ethereal essence, having risen, through the acquisition of knowledge to gain a better understanding of this world. Worldly appeasements are not for them except those which would usher in the greater good.
It was perhaps this vanishing fountain that Prof Humphrey Nwosu was drawing from to resist the jackboots of the military in his effort to defend the values of democracy. Imbued in the traditional “pen is mightier than the sword” school, he summoned all that he stood for into a one-man resistance against what he must have righteously perceived to be an affront to the sensibilities of the entire country.
For him, the military couldn’t annul the transition to a civilian government the success of which he and many other revered eggheads like him had worked so hard to achieve.
There are many secrets of the June 12 annulment that Prof Nwosu is taking with him as he returns to his maker, but what most were not aware of was also the fact that the cojones, honour, integrity, and intellectual depth that made the Nigerian academician command ready respect and exercise soft power and influence over the state has gone to the great beyond with the revered prof.
Since Prof Nwosu’s failed attempt, there has not been another free and fair election in Nigeria. Supervised from the local council electoral zones, through the state and federal elections, these faulted electoral processes have all been supervised by university professors who willingly connive with certain political power sources to trample the wishes expressed on the ballot by the electorate.
Rather than the intellectual and ideological conscience of the nation, professors have reduced themselves to political thugs on the payroll of political actors, the only difference between them and the more popular miscreants being the type of weapons brandished: the urchins hired from the streets used machetes and guns, while our learned profs deployed the full weight of the authorities in their pen and grammar.
The sham that was the last election in Nigeria rose to its Olympian height of ridiculousness by the heft university professors gave to the infamy. From the head of INEC itself down to the lowest returning officer, Nigerians were exposed to the conspiracy of the intellectual class to undo democracy and, by extension, the people.
The increased involvement of the intellectual class in election management was a well-thought-out emasculation strategy designed to soak the educated elite in the cesspit of corruption, thus, rendering them incapable of any opinion as the political class fatally rowed the nation’s boat down a waterfall. Having tasted the juice of political corruption, our professors, either fat on patronage or expectant for their turn, turned their backs on the very ecosystem that formed their very existence.
Those who didn’t make the politicians’ cut, rather than wait for their turn, made their academic environment a place of harvest; students began to pay handsomely in cash and in kind to pass exams. When this was not doing complete damage, it became the trend that postgraduate students earn their degrees after entertaining supervisors with coolers of rice, peppered chicken, and A-3 envelopes fattened with cash.
Professors and senior academicians thus became low-budget illiterate beggars whose titles were used for nothing except earn them tickets to the corridors of power where they beg for favours. I have been in a meeting where the sitting vice chancellor of a federal university was groveling before a governor, begging (note that I neither used “asking” nor “lobbying”) for favours and getting insulted in the process.
The relationship that has been advocated to happen between town and gown is not the ridiculous abasement where the gown goes mouth awide and cap in hand to the town. On the contrary, it speaks to a photosynthetic exchange of value in which the gown supplies the researched material and intellect with which the town can grow and improve society.
What is happening today is an annihilation copulation that has consistently been bringing our intellection to a predetermined ruination. It appeared that the stronger the bond between Nigerian politicians and the hitherto revered professors the nearer our education system to its nadir.
Prof Humphrey Nwosu left this world and took with him the courage and independent intellect that made academia a community that bred contentment. Many believed that the increasing recruitment of people from the academic community into political positions may therefore have been intentional – expose them to, and feed them with the forbidden fruits of political corruption and thus stop them from continuing to think they were holier than corrupt politicians.
The problem with the cancer of corruption is its ability to affect all the cells, eventually slowly killing the person affected. It was no wonder that having been constantly exposed to the peculiar ills of the Nigerian political ecosystem, those who picked the affliction from outside introduced the disease to their primary constituency. Under this condition, the rot runs riot, affecting everything, including the quality of output and the strength of character and courage that were hitherto the traditional accompaniments.
As Nigerians bid Professor Humphery Nwosu a final farewell on 28 March, 2025, may those preparing his funeral oration elegy find the energy to infuse lines that would possibly reawaken the Nigerian academic to their purpose, especially to the Nigerian society and state. They must be made aware that the conspiracy between them and a corrupt state will result in nothing but the obliteration of the grounds that earned them the call to the table in the first place.
