I frankly don’t care
whom the governor chooses to appoint as his political aides, but passing over
the most qualified candidate for the job of Vice Chancellor for a barely
qualified intellectual parvenu because of where they come from is just outright
condemnable. That’s not how to govern a heterogeneous polity—and certainly not
how to run a university.
Governor AbdulRahman
AbdulRazaq of Kwara State recently appointed Prof Muhammed Mustapha Akanbi,
said to be the son of the late Justice Mustapha Akanbi, as Vice Chancellor of
the Kwara State University (KWASU). But Akanbi’s most crucial qualification for
the job is his being from Ilorin—like the governor. Here’s why.
The acting Vice
Chancellor of KWASU, Prof Sakah Saidu Mahmud, who is also the school’s
substantive deputy Vice Chancellor (Administration), was adjudged by the search
committee to be the best of all the candidates who applied for the position of
Vice Chancellor. Akanbi was third.
It’s easy to see why
Mahmud came out on top. He had been head of the KWASU's Social Sciences and
Global Studies Department; Academic Coordinator to the VC; Provost of the
College of Humanities, Management and Social Sciences; and Deputy Vice
Chancellor (Admin), which is next in hierarchy to the VC. In other words, he
has been everything that anyone could possibly be at the university, except the
position of substantive VC.
Before he was
recruited to KWASU in 2009 by Prof AbdulRasheed Na’Allah, the founding VC of
the school, he taught at many US— and Japanese— universities for decades. He
resigned as head of the political science department at Transylvania University
in the state of Kentucky to join KWASU.
He studied at the
University of Denver for his MA and PhD (after earning a BSc in Government,
which is now called Political Science, from ABU in 1976.) He speaks French and
Japanese, is the author of two critically acclaimed books and dozens of
well-cited journal articles, and is the recipient of prestigious fellowships
including the (American) National Endowment for the Humanities and the
Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship.
His doctoral
dissertation was a comparative study of early Meiji Japan and Nigeria, which
required him to live in Japan for an extended period and to learn the Japanese
language well enough to read and understand archival materials written in it.
So he has a broad, global vision for KWASU that is consistent with the founding
VC’s idea for the university.
Why did Governor
AbdulRazaq pass over this well-published, experienced, and cosmopolitan scholar
who was part of the founding professors of KWASU for Akanbi, a 1993 OAU law
graduate, from the University of Ilorin who has never taught at KWASU and who
has little administrative experience under his belt?
Simple: Mahmud is
from Baruten, a marginal non-Yoruba-speaking part of Kwara that is constitutive
of what is called “Kwara North” in the state’s political vocabulary because of
the cultural similarities between that part of the state and Nigeria’s far
North.
Akanbi, who came
third, is not only from Ilorin but is also the son of one of Ilorin’s prominent
families. That’s the chief reason he was appointed VC. It's inter-generational
perpetuation of privilege with a dash of ethnic bigotry. But this will
ultimately destroy the university. We are talking of a university that has
distinguished itself since its founding as a "different" Nigerian
university that is modelled after American universities. Akanbi has no idea how
to sustain what Na'Allah started. He has neither the experience nor the
training to do so.
Elders of “Kwara
North,” drawn from the non-Yoruba-speaking local governments of the state—
Baruten, Kaiama, Patigi, and Edu—condemned Akanbi’s appointment in a public
statement published in Premium Times, saying the appointment is “quite
nauseating and very insensitive because it goes extremely against the
principles of equity, justice and fairness in a symbiotic and heterogeneous
political entity like our beloved Kwara State.”
The statement said
the appointment follows an emerging pattern. Even though more than 80 per cent
of voters from “Kwara North” voted for AbdulRazaq in the governorship election,
which eclipsed the percentages he got from other parts of the state, the
statement claimed, his appointments have been invidiously exclusionary and
Ilorin-centric.
I frankly don’t care
whom the governor chooses to appoint as his political aides, but passing over
the most qualified candidate for the job of Vice Chancellor for a barely
qualified intellectual parvenu because of where they come from is just outright
condemnable. That’s not how to govern a heterogeneous polity—and certainly not
how to run a university. I hope the governor reverses himself and apologizes.
Full disclosure:
Prof Mahmud and I are from the same hometown, but I haven’t communicated with
him in the last two years. When he told me in 2009 that he’d resigned from
Transylvania University to help establish KWASU, I didn’t think he made a good
decision, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that because he is many years
my senior. Nonetheless, when he said he wanted to “give back to the community,”
I thought he had his heart in the right place.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
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