THIS TRIBUTE to Comrade Professor Nuhu Omeiza Yaqub, scholar, committed intellectual, patriot, and humanist, is at once a testimony to a life lived by an exemplar on all counts and a cathartic response to the loss of a friend and colleague.
My feeling, since the news of Nuhu Yaqub’s transition broke, is curious to me because its depth cannot be measured by any real “closeness” of a friendship or any “formal collegiality”.
I settled into a most exciting teaching, and research and community service experience at the University of Abuja observing at an unobtrusive distance Nuhu Yaqub’s unique, dedicated, and unpretentious leadership. I struggled constantly to acknowledge Nuhu’s friendship and camaraderie without imposing any burdens that might compromise his administrative responsibilities. I enjoyed the certainty that Nuhu continued to respect the principles that underpinned our previous contacts and the demands which ASUU and labour movement principles made of us in the circumstances.
Nuhu Yaqub was thus like a phenomenon out there with high intensity of visibility, audibility and tangibility. All of these created an experience, for me, of a phenomenon that I took for granted. And, with the benefit of hindsight, I took Nuhu Yaqub for granted! Needless, to add, this business of taking Comrade Nuhu Yaqub for granted arose from an intellectual tradition of “the university” and the specific variety, of it that struggled to raise objections to the project of recolonising Nigeria, especially in the 1970s and early 1980s.
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The objections and resistance to recolonisation mentioned above led to the production of a significant segment of faculty and studentship in the Nigerian university system. The development of that segment generated organisational imperatives that led to the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS), on the one hand, and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), on the other. The third segment of that resistance was the labour movement which, in spite of its programmed bureaucratisation by military the dictatorship under Obasanjo, rediscovered its patriotic liberational mission under the leaderships of Comrades Hassan Sunmonu and Ali Chiroma.
The period between 1976 and 1984 was the crucible in which the patriotic and intellectual character of Nuhu Yaqub was forged at Bayero University (Kano) and Usmanu Danfodiyo University (Sokoto) as a student leader and as a leader of ASUU.
The significance of that period (1976-1984) and immediately beyond was that it was when the triad of resistance, made up of National Association of Nigerian Students, Academic Staff Union of Universties and the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), became solidified and organic. Each segment of that triad of resistance had waged, at different levels of intensity and effectiveness, a consistent and patriotic struggle on the side of Nigeria’s working people and their children against the conspiracy of the imperialists and their local agents that have superintended the varieties of World Bank/IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) since 1977 till today.
As VC and Chairman of UNIABUJA Senate, Professor Yaqub constantly expressed his reservations about “ASUU Strikes”. One or two of us on Senate floor also constantly advanced ASUU’s logic on the issue of strikes asking the Vice Chancellor to provide “alternatives to strikes” in situations of habitual government irresponsibility which compel the use of strikes, quite often, as a weapon of last resort by ASUU. These exchanges were always structured and without recrimination and without the VC losing his “cool” or flaunting any airs.
We will return to today’s situation of our universities (including University of Abuja where Nuhu Yaqub was Vice Chancellor between 2006 and 2011), especially regarding the unending “siege” on higher education and the state of the “rescue mission” on which Comrade Professor Nuhu Yaqub and a handful of others like him invested their lives.
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My first substantive encounter with Professor Nuhu Omeiza Yaqub was in 2001/2002 when an ASUU “State of the Nation Conference” Committee, nominally chaired by me, nominated Nuhu to give the Keynote Address of the March 2002 Conference at the NUC in Abuja. I said, I was merely a nominal chair of the Conference Committee because most of the coordination and organising of the Conference was carried out by our late indefatigable Comrade Dr Bashir Kuna (University of Abuja) who was then the “liaison” between ASUU National Secretariat (then at the original Mellambly Hall, University of Ibadan domicile) and Abuja City. I will return to my rather “fateful” Conference Committee encounter with Comrade Bashir Kuna regarding the “idea of a university” community, correctly, and as a duty, which intellectuals took for granted.
In 2006, I needed a job in a university in Nigeria to utilise my fifteen-month pre-retirement leave from Obafemi Awolowo University at Ile-Ife. As usual throughout my career as a university professor in Nigeria, no university was enthusiastic to offer me a contract appointment – not even in the University at Ogbomoso at the back of my mother’s house. The leave was about to be forfeited when I chanced on Nuhu Yaqub in June, 2006 at the “Rethinking the Humanities in Africa” Conference. I told Nuhu, casually, that I need a fifteen-months contract to utilise my terminal leave which I was certainly going to forfeit if I couldn’t secure an appointment. Again, taking Nuhu for granted, I told him: “Only you or Attahiru Jega will be able to give me a job but I will prefer to be as near Ogbomoso as possible because my mother was nearing the end of her sojourn on this side of eternity”. Nuhu asked me to send an application to the Registrar (University of Abuja) and forward an advanced copy to him: within three weeks of forwarding my application to the UNIABUJA Registrar, I got a letter appointing me as a contract Professor of Botany.
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Comrade Dr Bashir Kuna was the first person I informed about my appointment at the University of Abuja. I found out immediately that Nuhu Yaqub enjoyed incredible goodwill in the University community.
On the occasion of the famous 2009 ASUU Strike, the University administration decided to pay all professors and, may be, other academics who may or may not have indicated that they were not on strike. Being very openly active in ASUU, including being a member of the Strike Coordinating Committee, I was surprised that I was paid. I promptly wrote a letter to the Bursar pointing out that I was on strike and that I suspected that since lecturers on strike were not paid, my being paid must have been an error; I attached my personal cheque in the amount of the salary which I considered to have been paid in error.
I requested Comrade Bashir Kuna to ask if the Vice Chancellor would be able to find me a temporary accommodation at Gwagwalada. Comrades Bashir and Altine (a.k.a. Osama Bin Laden) decided to take that burden off Vice Chancellor Nuhu Yaqub by lodging me in a hotel (at their own expense) for two weeks while looking for an apartment for me. They gave me lunch every blessed day until I settled in my apartment. Comrade Bashir Kuna later informed me they did all of the settling-in for me, because they knew Nuhu would do all these from his own personal resources.
I settled into a most exciting teaching, and research and community service experience at the University of Abuja observing at an unobtrusive distance Nuhu Yaqub’s unique, dedicated, and unpretentious leadership. I struggled constantly to acknowledge Nuhu’s friendship and camaraderie without imposing any burdens that might compromise his administrative responsibilities. I enjoyed the certainty that Nuhu continued to respect the principles that underpinned our previous contacts and the demands which ASUU and labour movement principles made of us in the circumstances.
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On one occasion, Nuhu (the Vice Chancellor) appointed me to chair an investigative committee. On another, I was a member of another investigation committee. Both investigations, which had to do with students’ complaints against lecturers’ misconduct against students, indicted the lecturers. Nuhu also got personally involved in invigilation of examinations.
Whatever Comrade Professor Nuhu Yaqub’s success as VC (UNIABUJA) may entail, had to do with the confidence which scholarship generates and reinforces in the scholar – confidence arising from openness and the collegiality which unrestricted contemplation and debates engender in the academy.
As this essay was being written, the University of Abuja was going through another major crisis. A significant segment of the faculty was raising loud objections to the process via which the academic leader (the Vice Chancellor) of the community was installed. That crisis at the University was a disaster that was waiting for at least five years to occur. Anybody who had paid even scant attention would know that the disaster was orchestrated over time and at different levels of decision-making. When the community (well, segments of the community) finally woke up, as a community, the disaster had matured fully. We can only hope the academic communities, in these circumstances of despair, renew the struggle towards all-round re-invention not only of a robust academic tradition but of intellectual commitment.
As VC and Chairman of UNIABUJA Senate, Professor Yaqub constantly expressed his reservations about “ASUU Strikes”. One or two of us on Senate floor also constantly advanced ASUU’s logic on the issue of strikes asking the Vice Chancellor to provide “alternatives to strikes” in situations of habitual government irresponsibility which compel the use of strikes, quite often, as a weapon of last resort by ASUU. These exchanges were always structured and without recrimination and without the VC losing his “cool” or flaunting any airs.
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On the occasion of the famous 2009 ASUU Strike, the University administration decided to pay all professors and, may be, other academics who may or may not have indicated that they were not on strike. Being very openly active in ASUU, including being a member of the Strike Coordinating Committee, I was surprised that I was paid. I promptly wrote a letter to the Bursar pointing out that I was on strike and that I suspected that since lecturers on strike were not paid, my being paid must have been an error; I attached my personal cheque in the amount of the salary which I considered to have been paid in error.
That Professor Nuhu Yaqub ignored my audacity as a contract professor, a lecturer who Vice Chancellors would sack summarily, surprised many of my colleagues and fellow professors. But I was not surprised because I already knew that Nuhu Yaqub was a “university person” with full internalisation of what a university is all about. I will return, later, to the demolition of “what a university is all about” under some of those who preceded or succeeded Nuhu Yaqub at the University of Abuja and in the Nigerian University System at large.
Two important events illustrate the limitations which confront our colleagues who “manage” the current crisis of neoliberal fetters in our universities.
One is how to manage actually-existing physical and administrative processes confronting those who seek or are persuaded to accept Vice Chancellorship in our universities. The second one is how to manage the irresponsibility of political decision-makers – irresponsibility that flows directly from the class, ideological and consequent policy commitments of the Nigerian ruling class.
On the first issue, I remember the visit of a UNIABUJA Chancellor, a Sultan, to General Obasanjo, with VC Nuhu Yaqub in tow, to appeal to the President of Nigeria directly to put more funds in the University of Abuja. Obasanjo assured the Sultan that he would not put money [“my money”, he said] in public-funded universities, he boasted that private universities would soon displace public ones.
The sort of academic leadership provided by Nuhu Yaqub is necessary for the re-invention of our universities in their current circumstances of siege by the Nigerian ruling class and their external sponsors. But that sort of leadership, and the hope it engenders, is not sufficient. The university communities need an alert and courageous academic community that constantly checkmates the growing political and ideological control by the ruling class via proxies that include some of the University Governing Councils, parastatals, bureaucracies, the Vice Chancellors, and other Principal Officers that the ruling class keeps manufacturing.
Dealing with the second issue, which is directly related to the first, may be exemplified by the movement of the UNIABUJA Gwagwalada Temporary Campus to the poorly built (but already decaying) Permanent (Giri) Campus of the University – a Federal University at the seat of the Federal Government of Nigeria. The constructions on the new campus were not only in a state of uniform uncompletedness, the facilities were terribly inadequate, insufficient and badly finished! Nuhu Yaqub’s administration decided to move to the “Permanent Site” anyway! The movement had, necessarily, to be in phases.
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The argument for not delaying the move was, regarding Professor Yaqub’s tenacity on movement to Giri, was to guarantee ameliorative action that would prevent a total collapse of the poorly executed and decaying facilities and ensure provision of additional facilities that would enhance full relocation from the totally unacceptable condition of the old campus at Gwagwalada. The entire pioneering work by Professor Yaqub’s administration was perhaps the single most foundational transformation of the University of Abuja.
My take, overall, is that the period of Nuhu Yaqub’s administration of the University of Abuja was a period of restoration and consolidation. This was notwithstanding the overall crisis that had been imposed on the higher education sector in Nigeria since 1984 and the consequent collapse of the authenticity of university communities (and their tradition) since that time. The University of Abuja, in these circumstances had experienced specific and particularly debilitating demands of this crisis with unique intensity, before Nuhu Yaqub and after, as we have witnessed again in the last five years.
As this essay was being written, the University of Abuja was going through another major crisis. A significant segment of the faculty was raising loud objections to the process via which the academic leader (the Vice Chancellor) of the community was installed. That crisis at the University was a disaster that was waiting for at least five years to occur. Anybody who had paid even scant attention would know that the disaster was orchestrated over time and at different levels of decision-making. When the community (well, segments of the community) finally woke up, as a community, the disaster had matured fully. We can only hope the academic communities, in these circumstances of despair, renew the struggle towards all-round re-invention not only of a robust academic tradition but of intellectual commitment.
The sort of academic leadership provided by Nuhu Yaqub is necessary for the re-invention of our universities in their current circumstances of siege by the Nigerian ruling class and their external sponsors. But that sort of leadership, and the hope it engenders, is not sufficient. The university communities need an alert and courageous academic community that constantly checkmates the growing political and ideological control by the ruling class via proxies that include some of the University Governing Councils, parastatals, bureaucracies, the Vice Chancellors, and other Principal Officers that the ruling class keeps manufacturing.
The academic communities need to maintain such level of alertness and truthfulness to university tradition that enables them to checkmate “traders” and other opportunists among them who get vocal only when their private or primordial interests are threatened! Notwithstanding, the embattled University of Abuja academic community should be given all necessary and appropriate support in the current circumstances.
In our situation of constant despair, only the tradition of consistent intellectual commitment can be relied upon to guarantee hope of victory and renewal. In his own modest way, that was the lesson we learnt from our interaction with the late Professor Nuhu Omeiza Yaqub!
Emeritus Prof. Olorode is a member, Secretariat Collective, Movement for Socialist Transformation (MOST), and can be reached via: mostng2023@gmail.com, omotoopo@gmail.com
