The combined 29th and 30th Convocation of the University of Abuja has come and gone with its fair share of sense of fulfilment, attainment, joy, and celebration, especially among various categories of graduating students, their parents and guardians, family members, and the nation at large. However, in consonance with its current inglorious leadership mess, the convocation was blighted by uncultured incongruities throughout the otherwise solemn, august occasion. Only a last-ditch public-spirited intervention by concerned stakeholders aborted what could have been a catastrophic demonstration by disgruntled graduands against the shoddy preparations by the university authorities during the ceremony.
Organised by the tentative, hostage-held-like administration of the eligibility-embattled vice-chancellor, the costliest convocation in the annals of the 38-year-old ivory tower was scandalously marked by an abject shortage of both ceremonial and academic gowns, especially for most PhD graduands. With close to half a billion naira reportedly spent, from an initially approved quarter of a billion naira that was upwardly reviewed, it is shocking that gowns were not made available for most graduands who paid to hire them. Even for PhD graduands who should have had the option of buying from which the institution could have earned substantial income!
It was not accidental that the provision of adequate gowns was not part of the planning and arrangements for the convocation. The planlessness stemmed from the main target of the current managers, which is not to enthrone good governance and development of the university, but self-propelled survival and development. This itself is borne out of the management chaos that has been foisted on the institution in the last year, from which they are profiting. Conscious of standing on slippery grounds and operating on burrowed time, they have continuously been subjecting the University’s activities and operations, if not resources, to their self-aggrandising scheme, which, ab initio, has been their casus belli.
Indeed, the audacious script to promote the ascendancy and takeover of the institution by academic frauds is an intriguing dimension that has so far apparently escaped the close attention and scrutiny of most stakeholders, keen observers, and informed analysts of the ongoing University of Abuja leadership conundrum. Right from the word go, the internal agitations against the appointment of Professor Aisha Sani Maikudi as the University’s 7th substantive Vice-Chancellor were not only about personal envy and politics of hate. It is high time that the egregious machinations to elevate and embellish academic fraud within university administration were exposed.
The so-called G44 members of the University of Abuja Senate who internally engineered the transition crisis, which enabled the government forces led by the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Maruf Alausa, to encourage, capitalise on, and escalate, were merely involved in subjugating the University to the dictates of their criminal enterprise. With the benefit of hindsight, and given the questionable professional and career antecedents of the most notorious members of the group, it is evident that the institution has not yet escaped from the firm strangulation and evil machinations of these fraudulent forces, even with the new administration in place.
To start with, for a long time, questions have hung over the circumstances surrounding the departure of the major financier of the G44, who lost out in the race for the position, Professor Sani Mashi, from the service of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, to join the University of Abuja. The matter has not only been the subject of disciplinary procedure, but this has also been complicated by questions over how he rose at the University to emerge as a documented professor of multiple distinct areas in Geography, including Remote Sensing, Geographic Information Systems, and Biogeography.
This is symptomatic of the proverbial, albeit improbable, academic arena that the University of Abuja has been turned into. Claiming authority over many distinct fields of Geography not only raises questions of superficiality and fragmented research profile, but also provides dubious cover for a lack of recognition and responsibility for any particular distinct field. Eyebrows were further raised about his academic credentials when he delivered his inaugural lecture in an area with few, if any, publications to his credit as a professor.
Hence, it was not surprising that Professor Mashi adopted a do-or-die approach to the vice-chancellorship contest and was wholeheartedly committed to sabotaging the process, which Professor Maikudi won. It was a matter for his survival in the system that, at the time, unearthed his shadowy antecedents and their possible consequences. Even the current scenario may not appear satisfactory. But his consolation lies in the fact that the current vice-chancellor is confronted with his own eligibility crisis, who may not pose a fatal threat to his career survival in the system.
Only recently, the new administration has granted him a dream opportunity to unveil his real agenda and recoup his huge lost investment in the vice-chancellorship contest with an appointment as the Director of Public-Private-Partnership (PPP). To Professor Mashi, it is understood from sources close to him that the downgrade in position is immaterial, so long as the end justifies the means. What matters is survival in the system, which is presided over by someone he previously vowed not to subordinate himself to, due to the latter’s ineligibility for the position.
Several other hitherto high-profile G44 members and serving Directors at the University have now been relieved of their positions, following ongoing disciplinary procedures instituted against them by the University. Two have already been referred to the disciplinary committee, while efforts are underway to exclude another from facing it. Most, if not all, of the cases against them have been pending until now, with their alleged infractions committed before or during the transition process leading to the appointment of Professor Maikudi as the 7th substantive Vice-Chancellor.
This not only depicts the group as congenitally opposed to law and order and due process, but also confirms that their transition game plan was to truncate the University’s otherwise smooth leadership trajectory, to capture it, and to domesticate their nefarious agenda within the institution. To unhorse Professor Maikudi from office was therefore a fair game to them. It was also a tonic they needed to boost their survival in the system. An epitome of this has been the most senior professor of education and chief merchant of sectarian politics at the University, who has recently emerged as a brand-new director of a major academic centre. He always lays claim to being an elder, but his self-centred opportunism has continued to sow discord and dichotomy in the system.
In fact, the genesis of the prevailing ethnoreligious divisive bickering in the university community could be traced to his early days in the institution when he first served as a director. A reportedly reckless imposition of an unauthorised levy on the then educational consultancy students ostensibly to execute a religious project, disastrously cut short his tenure in office, from which he has become a champion of divisive politics, leveraging religion and other fault lines.
However, the most spectacular and scandalous representative manifestation of the ugly face of the G44 members is the active role of the current Dean of Postgraduate School, Professor K. M. Waziri, in the unfolding scheme of affairs. A professor of law, but without the requisite law school certification in his credentials, it is shockingly surprising that he has defied a long-standing directive to produce a Nigerian Law School Certificate without suffering any consequences.
It is an open secret within the University of Abuja community that Waziri’s appointment with the institution was suspended following the implementation of the Government White Paper on the 1999 Presidential Visitation Panel to the University. He was suspended from lecturing for not possessing the requisite Law School certificate. Several other G44 members are also known to have been affected by successive Visitation Panels’reports, but the case of Professor Waziri stands out.
Following the consideration of his appeal on the matter based on the pursuit of a Master’s degree in Law at the time, the Governing Council of the University decided to reinstate him on completion of the programme and submission of a result. However, this was on the condition that he would thereafter immediately apply for a fellowship and proceed to the law school to obtain its certificate. This has yet to be carried out by Professor Waziri, who has since remained in the system. Given that one cannot give what one does not have, the monumental cover-up of this odious case by successive administrations at the University stinks to high heavens!
It is particularly concerning given the crude double standards he displayed in his capacity as a Senate Representative on the Joint Council and Senate Selection Board for the appointment of Vice-Chancellor in the transitions appointing both Professor Aisha Maikudi and the current Vice-Chancellor, Professor Hakeem Babatunde Fawehinmi. His deficient legal background appears to have affected his approach and unprofessional conduct. During Maikudi’s appointment, he vehemently resisted, contrary to provisions of the Law, the Council’s shortlisting of candidates for interview, claiming that it was the duty of the Selection Board, which the former had usurped. This engendered the crisis culminating in the unlawful removal of Maikudi and dissolution of the Governing Council.
However, for Professor Fawehinmi’s appointment, he acquiesced and participated in the process long after the Governing Council had similarly shortlisted interview candidates. In addition, he was said to have sufficiently harassed all internal candidates who appeared before the Selection Board, rendering them unemployable. He was allegedly not comfortable with the prospect of an internal candidate familiar with his antecedents emerging as the new substantive vice-chancellor.
Curiously, Professor Waziri has now emerged as the current Dean of the Postgraduate School and a powerbroker in the new administration. But there is no doubt that his past disregard for a valid directive of the Governing Council to obtain the Law School certificate cannot be wished away or covered up forever. To continue lecturing to churn out lawyers from the institution without being a lawyer himself is not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination.
By and large, the current leadership crisis at the University of Abuja was triggered and fuelled by both personal envy and fear of the unknown of the dramatis personae involved in its orchestration. Having spectacularly lost the race to a younger professional colleague with stellar credentials, and faced with prospects of ‘disciplinary annihilation’ on account of past misdemeanours, the so-called senior professors in the G44 confraternity were driven to manufacture and escalate both a face and career-saving crisis. Shamefully, some interested forces within the Tinubu administration bought in and assumed ownership of the patently false narrative, leading to subversion of the University’s governing laws and erosion of its autonomy. In consequence, the University of Abuja, with an ineligible candidate currently at the helm of its affairs, stands worse off today than it was one year ago in all ramifications. What a national shame!
Professor Michael B. Ojo writes from the Faculty of Arts, University of Abuja.
