Who will call Adamu to order?  

Perhaps there could be a justification if you accuse this column of focusing on the ministers serving with President Muhammadu Buhari as ‘super minister’ Babatunde Raji Fashola was tangentially the focus last week. It has also sounded a note of warning to Lai Mohammed last year on his volubility, which sadly has taken a turn for the worse recently. Or how else does he explain his statement last week that there was no evidence that the controversial 2016 budget as presented by the President was padded even after some of his fellow ministers denounced the budget in the National assembly.

Today, I’m calling out the education minister, Adamu Adamu, for his recourse to jungle tactics in dealing with a matter under his ministry’s purview. Painfully too is the fact that he used to be a journalist who could have commissioned an editorial or even castigate another person for taking a rash decision like he did when he ‘sacked’ the vice chancellors of some federal universities. Regrettably, his minister of state, a professor, does not seem to be adding value to that ministry unless he can show us that Mr. Adamu rejected his advise on this matter. Our dear minister of state seems to take more joy in chasing out journalists from meeting venues even when he is being paid from our commonwealth and enjoys all the appurtenances of being called a minister.

Only someone living Mars will deny that a lot of things are wrong with our universities. As someone who visits a sizable number of these citadels of learning, if they can still be called that, regularly, one cannot but agree with Wole Soyinka’s suggestion years ago that we should shut the universities down for a year to re-engineer them and put them on proper footing. The day I saw a former roommate while we were undergraduates in the University of Ibadan lecturing nearly made me do a somersault. Asked how he copes with such a large class, he said all of those involved in running our universities are pretending – administrators and owners are pretending that all is well; lecturers are pretending that they are teaching while students are pretending that they are learning too. I’ve lost count of how many lecturers I’ve met who said nearly everything in their offices was bought with their own money. This is just a tip of the iceberg, as some of us cannot comprehend the level of rot in our alma mater under successive governments. Just don’t talk about private universities.

All these are just to show that it will be wrong for us to pillory the education ministry under Mr. Adamu for the sorry state our universities are presently. But a lot is wrong and we are going to be worse off when a government whose mantra is fighting corruption is perpetuating illegality with a subtle form of nepotism or cronyism. Universities, by the etymology of the word universite or universitas ‘the whole’ is supposed to be operated on universal standards. This definitely could not be the case when on Saturday, February 13, a terse statement by Mr. Adamu simply said President Buhari had approved the appointment of 13 new vice chancellors for the federal universities established by former President Goodluck Jonathan government and the National Open University. The statement used the word ‘sack’ and journalists, in a show of shame without digging deep, failed to let their readers and listeners know that the tenure of nine vice chancellors of some of these universities will expire on Monday, February 15 so it was more or less a certainty that they were on their way out. Further, they have actually handed over to acting vice chancellors appointed by the governing councils in their respective universities knowing fully well the laws that govern their operations. These and other issues were well articulated in a statement on the matter by the Committee of Vice Chancellors issued by its Secretary General, Prof. Michael Faborode.

The CVC explained further that the universities at Birnin Kebbi, Gashua, and Gusau should not have been removed as they have “an inviolable tenure of five years.”

Trying to be too clever by half, Adamu dissolved the governing councils of these universities the previous day before announcing the vice chancellors ‘sack’ ostensibly to prevent them from naming new persons. Equally galling is the fact that four of the 12 new vice chancellors were picked from Kano University while the substantive vice chancellor of the Federal University, Dutse, was transferred to the Federal University, Wukari. A major question for Mr. Adamu is why the hurry in appointing vice chancellors for these schools without constituting their governing councils? Apart from violating the 2009 agreement between the Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities, this action set us back some notches. While our universities are not yet what they ought to be, we must strive to do what is right. Hopefully our prayer warrior president will spare some time from praying at the grand mosques of Makkah and Medinah and call Mr. Adamu to order.