Invoking Yusuf Bala Usman

Being a Katsina man himself, it was plausible to assume that he knew Buhari well. Accordingly, a team at Ahmadu Bello University rammed through brain-cracking sessions of five hours each for a total of six weeks to produce what would be published as The Nigerian Economic Crisis: Causes and Solutions. Dedicated and brilliant editing by […]

Being a Katsina man himself, it was plausible to assume that he knew Buhari well. Accordingly, a team at Ahmadu Bello University rammed through brain-cracking sessions of five hours each for a total of six weeks to produce what would be published as The Nigerian Economic Crisis: Causes and Solutions. Dedicated and brilliant editing by Dr Usman pruned out academic jargon; and ensures easy flowing readability. That the book remains outside textbook lists at secondary school and university levels is an alarming testimony to a sustained decline in the quality of gate- keeping to minds of Nigeria’s youths.
The draft of that ‘’Target Buhari’’ work was taken by Dr Mahmud Tukur to ASUU’s 1984 Benin Conference, and would later be published with an alphabetical list of authors  that ensured that Usman’s name came last, while Alkasum Abba, whose name came first, bore the brunt of curses by those who detested the work.
Another enthusiasm over ‘’change’’ of regime has met Buhari’s second bite at power. This time around his emergence is not from the underbrush of a military combat camouflage, but – for northern talakawa -dressed in prayer-filled memories of the Buhari-Idiagbon’s drama of governance terminated in 1985 that rattled Nigerians in diverse ways. The intellectual attire around his assumption of power on 29th May, 2015 carries heavy political campaign combat bricks; brooms aflame with wrath about poverty of youths, and tactical distortions of records about the performance of Jonathan’s team.
 What is shared with1984 are urgent demands on academics on each university campus to dig out ideas from libraries and research laboratories; clear away cobwebs woven over academic cultures by seasons of sustained strikes and heavy losses of senior staff, and produce policy-maps for consideration by both Buhari and State Governors.
Africa has a rich legacy of book publications as ‘’documentary radicalism’’ (to quote the late Ali Mazrui) to support aspirations and struggles for freedom and development. George Padmore used libraries in Britain and literature by the Communist International to produce a devastating portrait of British colonial exploitation in Africa. His 1952 book: How Britain Rules Africa, predated Walter Rodney’s 1972 book titled: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
A prime intellectual combatant was Harvard-educated African- American, W.E.B. Dubois. His doctoral thesis for Harvard University documented nefarious roles by American merchants in profiting from the slave trade. He demonstrated that black Africans as owners of Ancient Egyptian Civilisation were teachers of Greek and Roman civilizations. He propagated pan-Africanism as a vital weapon in wars for freedom
The Buhari administration must also animate the thousands of Diaspora Africans to exploit rich laboratories, libraries and archives of host countries to produce high quality publications in all fields of knowledge. TETFUND’s imaginative support of book publication by local academics should build an out-reach branch. Nigerians who have studied and lived abroad have neglected travel publications and books on foreign countries to match Euro-Americans.
Likewise, the literature prize by Nigeria’s oil sector should create an external branch that rewards high quality publications on Asia, Europe and the Americas by Diaspora scholars. As an example, Nigeria’s tottering democracy would benefit from intensive research and publications of American, British, Scandinavian, Chinese, Indian and Japanese cultures of local, state and national governance. Interviews I had with a Wisconsin State legislator; assistants of a national Senator and an elected local education official in Washington D.C yielded useful data. As an example, a Wisconsin State legislator must, by law, never accept a meal/drink offered by a lobbyist.
Europe has just remembered the end of World War 2 seventy years ago. Voices of African scholars were lacking. Nigeria and the African Union should revive Chief M.K.O. Abiola’s vision of the African side of global history. Dr Akinwumi Adesina’s presidency of the African Development Bank should support building pan-African banks of plant genetics.
Following the 1980s exodus of top academics out of Nigeria, a season of moral decay led to explosions of market-place doctorates that also lured university entrepreneurs into corrupt hawking of honorary feathers to high bidders.  There must be an end to slackness in urging universities to require scholarly discipline to back scientific research meant to animate local industrial growth. That would be vital change.
Once upon a political change, Kwame Nkrumah, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, Agustinho Neto, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Leopold Senghor and Bala Usman linked writing books to their political struggles for Africa.  Buhari’s pursuit of change should promote contact with this branch of Africa’s renaissance.