UNILAG: More Than Just a Name
President Jonathan said the renaming was to immortalize Abiola “for making the ultimate sacrifice in the pursuit of justice and truth”, adding that Abiola deserved recognition for his “martyrdom and public spiritedness and for being the man of history that he was”. The sustained torrent of negative reactions that greeted the announcement shows that the […]
President Jonathan said the renaming was to immortalize Abiola “for making the ultimate sacrifice in the pursuit of justice and truth”, adding that Abiola deserved recognition for his “martyrdom and public spiritedness and for being the man of history that he was”. The sustained torrent of negative reactions that greeted the announcement shows that the president’s gesture, even if well-meaning, is a deeply unpopular one. Almost immediately, students of the university poured on to the streets, blocking several highways and the Third Mainland Bridge in Lagos to protest the move. Noted academics and intellectuals, both within and outside the UNILAG, including Professor Wole Soyinka, have roundly condemned the name-change. The UNILAG alumni association has denounced it, as has many others. Indeed, the UNILAG acting vice chancellor, Professor Rahman Bello, disclosed that the name-change was news to him. Underscoring the volatile situation that the president’s announcement had precipitated, the institution’s management ordered a two-week shutdown and asked the students to go home. It does the government no good either that the gesture did not go down well even with Chief Abiola’s family, with the late politician’s daughters, Hafsat, quoted in the media denouncing it as diversionary. Once again, the president has misjudged the mood of Nigerians. It is clear also from these protests that when it comes to Abiola, there is no universal attitude among Nigerians as to what he represented in the country’s politics.
It was wrong for the president to have taken the matter for granted. To be sure, the president, as Visitor to all federal universities, can initiate the change of name of any of them. Even so, there is a limit to which he can act unilaterally in such matters. Confrontational, I-don’t-care-what-happens attitude like the statement credited to the Minister of Information, Mr Labaran Maku, that there was ‘no going back’ on the matter only serve to inflame passion farther.
It is not just the widespread condemnation of the announcement that makes the president’s action ill-advised. What is a particularly bigger mistake is renaming an institution with 50-year academic reputation with a fiat.
You don’t rename a school as you would a city street.
Reputable institutions such as the Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom, or for that matter University of London, or Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States had not had their names changed at the whim of some vainglorious politicians even though there had been great men and women in those societies.
It is not the matter of the personality of Chief Abiola that is the problem; he deserves the honour the recognition and honour that the government may deem fit to bestow on him. At issue is the renaming of an institution that has been existence for five decades, established by an Act of parliament. The University of Lagos, like its peers around the world, should develop along that trajectory and maintain the prestige it acquired for itself because of the UNILAG name. The name UNILAG commands respect in scholarship within and outside the country. Staff and graduates of the university will be short-changed of the reputation which the UNILAG brand provides. Name-change, especially if it is arbitrary, as in this case, affects the pedigree of an institution that has a long history. The same UNILAG under the name “Moshood Abiola University” would have to start all over again to build another reputation for the new name.
Immortalizing a hero, after all, does not necessarily end with renaming a public place after them. Naming national edifices such as the National Stadium, National Theatre, International Conference Centre, is another way of bestowing honours those who deserve them. If the president considered that the only way to immortalise Abiola was to name a university after him, the logical way to have gone about that could have been naming one of the nine newly-established federal universities after him. The one that readily comes to mind is the Federal University in Otueke in Bayelsa state. It is new, and when it takes off, it would build its pillars with the Abiola name.
President Jonathan’s decision was not fully thought out; if it was, the procedure for implementing it was flawed, and came at a time when, unfortunately, the UNILAG was in mourning, with the death of its vice chancellor, Professor Babatunde Sofoluwe.
The president should be politically sensitive enough to conclude that his move was wrong and take steps to correct it. If he is bent on it, it would be proper to follow the procedure by going through all the processes prescribed in law. University autonomy would be meaningless if their councils would not be consulted on issues as crucial and complex in their ramifications as name-change.