This new year I have resolved to give attention, thought-provoking attention, every now and then to matters and subjects that would always influence and compel readers of this column to speak of it with utmost goodwill. I tried in the gone past to do this. But now I shall do so in a really charmingly manner and in an exceedingly charming manner. Let me be open here by way of displaying an aspect of this column’s exceedingly good manners. As far as possible, in the year of expected newness this column shall not in any way be allowed to be contaminated by any suggestion or thought of low company.
Our political class displays this from time to time at the dictates of the political education of its members – which our president demonstrated, for instance, in his Monday, January 1, 2024 address to the nation. The speech/address from whichever angle we view it tells me that there are no Nigerians left in your country my country our country. What we have are faceless preys, faceless wraiths, faceless ciphers whose resolves are too feeble to pass as resolves hence President Bola Ahmed Tinubu could address Nigerians the way he did on the opening day of January 2024.
But the resolves will resolve themselves into a tempestuous tempest which substantial Aso Rock Force cannot stop and halt. E go be like magic!!! But I must skittle out the president and his magicians from this column’s brain, mind and heart forever.
Now we must go to Professor Ibrahim Bello Kano’s (IBK) eulogistic reaction to Professor Olu Obafemi’s bloomy and blossomy treatise on “Nigerian university education in constant transition” which the column concluded on Friday, December 15, 2023. Of course, the series voyaged richly for five Fridays. Now it is fitting that the column justifies itself in its first outing this year with the enormous intellectual fortune of a splendidly patriotic and forward-looking radical scholar whose perfumed pen is wooed by the perfumed subject of his very senior radical profound thinker who is equally a patriotic, quintessential and forward-looking one of numerous parts.
Enjoy IBK’s perfumed flaming words, O my readers who are my readers, His flaming brevity is drawn from the waters from the purple hill of purple ideas. This is no exaggeration of the unduly or duly exaggerated kind.
Professor Obafemi’s perspective on, and Wise Counsel about Education and the University system is faultless, cogent, and in line with the views of thinkers since Classical Antiquity. Yet his views clash frontally with the Neoliberal economic agenda of many a Nigerian administration since 2015: private sector-led economic growth, deregulation of even the air itself except the perks of the members of the Establishment, private investment in and for education and its institutions, massive funding for the parasitic state apparatus, the weakening of unions in all the sectors of the economy and society, disdain for Critical Thinking, the pegging of the local currency to the imperialistic U.S. Dollar, secular preaching from the President’s Pulpit (“I Feel Your Pain”), a certain kind of political romanticism, elite parasitism, bureaucratic disrespect of/for intellectuals, a bankrupt messianic streak that hides the intellectual bankruptcy of official thinking and programmes, and, not least, a set of officials rampaging through well established structures and traditions.
Yet Prof. Obafemi should rest easy: his warnings about the educational sector would come to pass with the impending death or emasculation of the sector (which ever should come first). He should rest easy because things would surely implode or explode (one of this would surely come first) and then his views would be vindicated by the coming Apocalypse. For me, let there be the Apocalypse in this sector; let there be the Final Crisis of the Armageddon. Prof. Obafemi is the Good Sage, the Correct Daylight Warner of the Troubles Down the Road. Heed his words or not, dear Political and Economic Romantics, soon the crisis would be upon them and us, the NUC and the Presidency. The dilly-dallying and the flip-flopping that are slowly becoming the order of the day since May 29, 2023. Professor Olu Obafemi, our modern Horace and Matthew Arnold, has spoken and our Heraclitean Tony Afejuku has passed the Word in a kind of salt-giving to the Obafemi’s wisdom. Let the Chief Romantic in Aso Village and his coterie of Malthusian Officinados heed Obafemi’s Words of Wisdom. One sound counsel should prickle the conscience of the wise.
Professor IBK’s is among other numerous readers’ radiant thoughts that found me but which, sadly, I lost to a malfunctioned phone which I have recently replaced. My sadly sad sadness that I could not retrieve them disturbed (and still disturbs) me disturbingly, I dare say. But IBK’s voice has voiced aptly their respective intellectual voices of egg-heads that are egg-heads-including those who reached me via calls. I hope Mabel Evweirhoma, Omajuwa Igho Natufe, Jacob Oshodi, Owojecho Omoh, Albert Onobhayedo, Muyiwa Awodiya, Ayodele Suyi, etc are reading this.
Happy Yunyen – dear folks. Happy Yunyen. Ene bodon titon. Ene yor. Happy Yunyen!!! The Warri way. The Itsekiri way.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.
