Talking bitterness

The degree to which negative factors like malice, lies, cover-up and jealousy muddied up the ritual was always a challenge. What is of interest here was the value put on collecting and digesting information to ensure increases in levels of achievement.The culture of information assumed a peculiar form under colonialism. British district officials – who […]

The degree to which negative factors like malice, lies, cover-up and jealousy muddied up the ritual was always a challenge. What is of interest here was the value put on collecting and digesting information to ensure increases in levels of achievement.
The culture of information assumed a peculiar form under colonialism. British district officials – who were often also intelligence officers – wrote memoranda to be circulated for views and insights.  Collective consideration at a seminar evolved policy options. A former British ambassador to the United States recalled that during his tour in Afghanistan, their group recommended that Britain should incite the Second World War if Germany’s economic power and imperial drive was to be stopped. The National Archive in Kaduna holds a file on agriculture with a comment by an officer on the paradox of farmers in Northern Nigeria growing pyramids of groundnuts used for feeding livestock in Europe while livestock in the region starved and walked long distances in search of food. The lesion here is that information, linked with high quality intellectual work, was used for social engineering a dominated society.
This tradition of linking information to public administration did not, however, include the participation of colonized peoples. As an example, reports collected by District officials about widespread starvation in Sokoto Province following able bodied men prevented from planting food crops by being hauled  away and  forced to dig railway lines; build courts and residences for officials; cutting grass for feeding horses; and digging mines on the Jos Plateau. Colonial departments of information did not, however, use information on this drama for boldly informing local public opinion, a tradition which later emerged in the BBC.. As an independent public agency, the management of the BBC has become so protective of their autonomy that they boldly told Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that she had no monopoly of British patriotism. She was bitterly critical of their reports of Britain’s strategies in her war with Argentina for the Falkland Islands/Malvinas. It ensures itself from overt intrusion by business groups by not carrying advertisements
The BBC has a strong tradition of intensive and vigorously intrusive investigative reporting. Its documentaries are infused with high quality foresight. Its management have, for example, shown a rare genius that is turning a mundane game called ‘’football’’ into a virus that is colonizing billions of brains from China to Barbados. For the size of an island which Russia’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev, once mocked as a ‘’floating warship’’, Britain has produced a large share of academic Nobel Prize winners. By 2013, the BBC is ‘nesting’ in many African radio and television broadcasts.
Similar information power has eluded Africa’s universities. Under dictation by the World Bank regular undergraduates at Makerere University in Uganda became ‘’academic orphans’’. Lecturers began teaching ‘’informal students’’ who pay cash for lectures delivered from 4 p.m. As knowledge merchants, lecturers direct their energies at the ‘’ informals’’, while skipping lectures for regular students. In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, university ‘’butterfly lecturers’’ flutter from campus to campus in efforts to maximise earnings to supplement regular salaries from their employer universities. These ‘butterflies’ become too exhausted to do research and read academic books and journals. There are no fat research grants to counter the lure of nomadic academic work. Data gathering suffers.
It took angry criticism by Professor Mahmud Mamdani at Columbia University to draw attention to the malaise and decay of academic standards at Makerere. In Nairobi, complaints by regular students failed to attract intensive investigative journalism. Media workers were also beneficiaries of ‘’after work’’ academic programmes for earning diplomas and degrees. The lack of investigative reporting denied publics in Uganda and Kenya opportunities for intelligence-based discourses over implications for national development of these deformed cultures of scholarship.
In Nigeria, the media’s silence did not prepare a visitor for the depth of decay at   the Samaru campus of Ahmadu Bello University in 1996. Following reckless enrolment practices, excess numbers of students slept in classrooms. That turned grounds around offices and lecture theatres into toilets. On my next trip in 2003, however, the late Major-General Mamman Kontagora – with the support of a team led by the late Dr Yusuf Bala Usman – had undertaken a vigorous weeding out of student numbers to enable his successor, Professor Abdullahi Mahdi, climb into the luxury of replacing sewage stench around the Administration Bloc with beds of blooming beautiful roses. The media ignored this drama of decay and renaissance.
The media also failed to direct intensive investigative work at an agency of the Federal Ministry of Education led by Professor Yakubu Mahmud. He persuaded the National Assembly to legalise the use of Education Trust Fund solely for fixing decay in federal colleges and universities. The funds were collected from taxes on companies’ profits. Vast resources went into building information technology; laboratories; libraries; sending hundreds of young academics to acquire doctoral degrees in universities ranging from Australia and Malaysia in the Far East to Cuba, the United States, Canada and Russia. Masters degree studies by academic staff are done in universities in Nigeria except where beneficiaries earned their first degrees.
Lack of investigative reportage on this project denied the public a red flag to waive at ASUU’s leaders for an enlightened dialogue. It would have been a case of collateral benefit if ASUU had drawn attention to failures by the Nigerian Television Authority and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria to tell TETFUND’s story with a level of excellence that would get the BBC coming for lessons.