A Tale of Two Nigerian Cities

Ibadan is like that lover that sleeps soundly after a fulfilling night; Lagos is no lover, so she doesn't need to sleep.

The Potential Bright Sides of President Buhari's Medical Tourism

In 1988, a personal tragedy in the life of a US businessman, Ted Stanley, would go ahead to inspire groundbreaking inquiries into the treatment of bipolar disorder in the United States and the world. For three days in 1988, Jonathan Stanley, the son of Ted Stanley, roamed the street of New York after having a false sense of being a person of interest and of being stalked by the United States secret services. Police later found Jonathan in a slum, mentally troubled, and he was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder by doctors. This led his father to commit his fortune of up to $650 million dollars for greater research into psychiatry. Many years later, Ted Stanley told the media that his son's life was saved, and he decided to donate to psychiatric research because : "I would like to purchase that happy ending for other people".

I am glad that President Buhari was able to overcome the recent health challenges that forced him to stay off the shores of Nigeria for over a  hundred days. Be that as it may, there would be endless discussions about many issues surrounding his decision to seek medical care outside the country he swore an oath to secure - mind you, healthcare is part of security.

There are many questions about the morality of the leader of a country running to another country for health services, when he's in a vantage position to secure the same for himself and his citizens in his country, to prevent the frequent and future escapes to a foreign land for treatment. This is not discussing the economic consequences of depleting the foreign exchanges on medical tourism, in addition to the demands of education tourism to the United Kingdom by various Nigerian students  already.

In another light, there is the question of privilege. Many people who genuinely celebrated the return of the president home were the poor, rural and disadvantaged Nigerians without a connection to the policies of the president. Many of them live from farm to markets, providing their own electricity and most of their other social amenities, without benefitting from the political intrigues that come with the arrival or departure of the president from the country. But from the energy in their celebration, one can tell that they believe their lives, their future, their yearnings are tied inexplicably to the survival of their beloved president. The question that arises from their love for president Buhari is what would their lot be if they come face to face with a medical problem that cannot be treated in our general hospitals across the country as the healthcare situation stands today? Is there a robust health insurance capable of coming to their aid in terms of critical health challenges like whatever the president just survived?

For many Nigerians, the bone of contention is about strengthening our democracy and seeking probity. It should be acknowledged here that the Buhari administration has not been the best when it comes to answering questions about the presidency. The silence on the other end bears a semblance of arrogance and sometimes beggars belief. Questions left unaddressed include who was funding the medical expenses of the president for the hundred days? Transparent democracies around the world would have ready answers to this question with the speed of light. Femi Adeshina did not pacify the curiosity of Nigerians when he feigned ignorance on this topic on national television. What is the nature of his health challenges? These are questions that demand transparency once a person puts himself up for public office.

It is pertinent to note that the amount Ted Stanley donated to research in psychiatry in 1988 is almost equal to the amount Nigerian elites spent on medical tourism in 2013 (750 million dollars). What if the president equips a total of six general hospitals in the six geopolitical zones and provide them with the state of the art facilities to cater to the health needs of the underprivileged?  Another issue his last medical trip brought to the fore was a nostalgic feeling of forgotten pasts when Nigeria was a site of medical tourism for the royal family of Saudi kingdom. Some Nigerian doctors who still have faith in the possibility of a turnaround for the Nigerian health sector have lamented how things got this bad. It's not much of a surprise that the Director General of the Voice of Nigeria, Mr Okechukwu, while representing the vice president of Nigeria at a health parley recently, took a swipe at the negative effects of medical tourism on the Nigerian economy. In his words : “We want to stop that trend because it is draining our reserves,”

What if the president, instead of wasting resources every year by budgeting for the Aso Rock clinic decides to take a decisive course of action to spend the yearly estimates for the clinic on remodeling a teaching hospital around Abuja or even a military hospital that could serve as a center of medical excellence? The budget for Aso Rock clinic has become impossible to ignore, considering that it runs into billions of naira each year , only to still be unable to stop the president from traveling abroad for medical attention.

In the end, many will like to argue that delivering on his electoral promises should be of more concern to you and I than what he has to say or do with his medical records or his frequent medical globetrotting. I do strongly agree. But these same people fail to remember the president's stance on transparency when he fired several broadsides at the late President Umar Yaradua during his medical struggles, demanding his resignation as well as removing the veils of secrecy on his health status. Unfortunately for them, the issues of 2009 are still relevant today. And more than anything else, President Buhari should endeavor to do what that US business did for his son and others in 1988, he should purchase a happy ending for other Nigerians who are not as privileged to fly on the airforce one to a private doctor abroad. 

What Are Nigerian Universities for ?

                     
                                  
 Thinkers have in the past described the word ‘university’ as a term derived from the word ‘universal’. One of the earliest records of the use of this word is found in early Europe. The word university was first applied between the 12th and 13th century, in Europe, to a secluded space that served as a means of providing further training in the professions of law, theology, and medicine; and as a centre of studies for the rediscovered works of Aristotle and the Arab scholars.
A University is established for three purposes: for Teaching, for Community Service and for Research purposes. A good University is supposed to be engaged with teaching and research to push the boundaries of human knowledge.

Without controversy, a University could only achieve these mandates in an enabling environment for teaching and learning. This has been the major, if not the only factor bedeviling our universities in this part of the world, especially Nigeria. Poor infrastructural facilities plus excellent intellectual productivities have not really enjoyed a happy marriage in most of our universities. Hence, the reason we are trailing behind foreign universities.

Today, many Nigerian students are perplexed whenever they interact with their foreign counterparts on topics mutually beneficial to their fields. They are surprised, not because their foreign counterparts are more brilliant, but because their lecturers have adopted modern teaching tools unlike  the ancient of days lecture notes many Nigerian lecturers still rely on for teaching their students. A student in the University of Jos recently wrote a letter to his mentor, a professor teaching in Canada. He complained about how he has attended lectures in a class of over 500 students without a public address system, and how the facilities in the faculty of Agriculture are 'antiquated'(in his own words). These things are however peculiar to all Nigerian universities, including the much praised University of Ibadan which is nothing but that one-eyed man in the land of the blind.

"Generation by generation, universities serve to make students think. They do so by feeding and training their instinct to understand and seek meaning. True teaching disturbs complacency. They are taught to question interpretations that are given to them, to reduce the chaos of information to the order of an analytical argument and to seek out what is relevant to the resolution of a problem. They learn progressively to identify problems for themselves and to resolve them by rational argument supported by evidence: and they learn not to be dismayed by complexity but to be capable and daring in unraveling it. "–Geoffrey Boulton

Again, Harvard University, United States, established in 1636, was the first University in the U.S. just as University of Ibadan is to Nigeria. In the passage of times, Harvard has emerged through thick and thin to become one of the best five Universities in the world. The University today boasts of more than sixty departments, each with its web-site. Besides, the ratio of lecturer to students varies from 1 to 4 and 1 to 7, depending on the departments. Teaching and learning are electronically based.
But the reverse is the case with the University of Ibadan. Being the first in West Africa, its first-born position seems to have been sacrificed on the altar of redundancy. The allocation of suffocating, meagre funds by the government to education, coupled with intellectual theft of the funds is equally militating against its glory. It is a known fact that most political giants, award winning businessmen, relevant scientists, renowned literary giants etc, in Nigeria have either had a bite or full dish of knowledge at the University of Ibadan. In Universities like Harvard and other Ivy League Institutions, these personalities who have benefitted from the fountain of UI’s knowledge will be stalked, tracked down and made to give back to the institution for the continuous expansion of the frontiers of this temple of knowledge. However, it seems that this culture of giving back to universities is not in our DNA.

To remedy the poor state of our university system, the training and retraining of both young and experienced lecturers must be pursued with brutal vigour and tenacity. Lecturers should be sent on routine trainings abroad in order to keep abreast of the dynamic 21st century teaching and learning experience . The world had left Africa behind once as a result of slave trade and colonization. It must not leave us the second time as a result of poor educational facilities and outdated teaching and learning approach.
Furthermore, new courses should be created and lecturers be trained in these courses to meet up with our current realities. Our universities will fail to meet up with its vision of being a world class institution for teaching and learning if we continue to rely on old-fashioned ideas alone in our bid to be relevant in the 21st century. International relevance and problem solving skills in this millennium demand that we reconfigure our curriculum towards fighting unemployment, poverty, diseases and poor power supply. Is it not ridiculous that we have citadels of learning, in this country, that teach Electrical and Electronic Engineering in this country and yet we languish in darkness for the better part of our lives every day?  Is it not utterly pathetic that after years of technologic progress in the area of broadband our country cannot conduct an electronic election? Yet we have institutions churning out graduates of Computer Science on a yearly basis. Any institution of learning that cannot contribute meaningfully in advancing the course of civilization in its surrounding, in particular, and the world in general, is not worthy of being called a university.

This tall order, above, cannot be realized without the commitment of the government and corporate entities.  The Federal government must allocate a greater chunk of its budget to the educational sector if any meaningful development must be achieved in this sector. UNESCO has suggested at least 26% of the total budget on an annual basis. However, it still behooves the university administrators to manage the funds with utmost prudence and impeccable honesty, as many cases abound where administrators were accused of flagrant spending and gross financial recklessness in the management of the little funds allocated to this dying sector. Recently, we have seen our television screens awash with news of indictments of one university administrator or the other over university funds. This is really the height of intellectual betrayal.

Finally, building of additional well-ventilated lecture rooms will do a lot in eradicating the disease of limited venues for lectures in our universities. With the foregoing, if considered, University education in Nigeria will become an epicentre for teaching and learning and research in Africa, if not the world; for it is only then that our universities can be a part of our solutions instead of creating more problems.

What Has Kept the Biafran Dream Alive?

Today is being marked as a Remembrance for the millions of Biafrans who perished in an unjust war Nigerians want to forget quickly. Hard as they try, this scar has refused to clear after the wound. Sometimes, there some levels of injustice that are immune to collective amnesia, and the Biafran war is one of them. 

In a nation afraid of its own past, I was fortunate to have studied history in secondary school. The subject had already approached its endangered status in Nigerian  school curriculum by the time I encountered it. So I was lucky enough to have had a teacher for that subject, but I was again unlucky to have had one who reduced the over three million deaths recorded in the war simply to a desire of one man to carve out an empire for himself. I had read a bit about the war before that class, I had read Wole Soyinka‘s prison notes on the war and I had interacted with Alexander Madiebo's account too. So I didn't let the argument end on that too simple note when I reminded her again that it's an unjustifiable genocide against the Igbos. But I guess she didn't care much about my opinion that day,  and she expected me to write what she said was true for her tests. 

Sadly, I have come to realize that many Nigerians are more like my history teacher. They think the war is justifiable because it didn't happen against them. They abuse your rights to honour the memory of the war, they curse your sensibilities for remembering the dead. Because they are not you, they consider all your experiences and feelings in the Nigerian space invalid, they rubbish all your complaints about marginalization. Granted, the governing class in South-east Nigeria, the cradle of the Biafran dream,  is not doing much to develop the South-east, but this doesn't invalidate the cries of injustices against the Igbos, be it at the hands of the security agents who killed many Igbos during a peaceful vigil last year or the continued neglect of the Eastern region by the Federal Government. If you are going to ask me for evidences of neglect, try traveling on the federal roads in Eastern Nigeria  to confirm that with your life at stake.

Again, many are of the opinion that they will not lend their support to the Igbos for the restructuring of the federation because of the hate speeches of Nnamdi Kanu. These people are only displaying their ignorance of the injustices against the Igbos. They are quick to forget that before Nnamdi Kanu, their was a cause. They are quick to forget that Nnamdi Kanu is a voice today because the Nigerian state made him a voice. I am not going to align myself with Nnamdi Kanu's methods because I believe his is a degeneration of the loftiness of a genuine struggle. However, I will like those who think a section of humanity must lick their feet before it assumes its full humanity that with their approval or not, Nigeria has come to a stage where a confrontation of our collective existence must be debated. I will also like them to take responsibility for the mess that is Nnamdi Kanu. If the government has adopted a more pragmatic way of resolving this problem, the thousands of Igbo youths aligning themselves to the dangerous rhetorics of Kanu would not have been.

I read the speech delivered by the Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osibanjo during the first round table discussion of the Biafran war.  No doubt, the Acting President should be commended for acknowledging what past governments have struggled to deny without success. But at this point, acknowledgement of inherent flaws  in the way Nigeria is currently constituted is not enough. No one wins a medal for acknowledging a disease,  we must look for the cure. This will involve addressing the lopsided nature of the current alliances of tribes that is called Nigeria. 

More than acknowledging the scars of the Civil War, the federal government should ask itself why this Biafran dream has refused to die. It should seek to know why Rwanda is progressing as one,  indivisible nation after the genocide and Nigeria is heading for another bitter division, if not handled with tact and diplomacy. I read somewhere recently that students in Rwanda are taught their history alongside conflict resolution skills from primary school. 

The Nigerian government should summon up some courage to allow more  discussions about the existence of this country and stop dangling the worn-out phrase "non-negotiable" whenever the existence of this nation is being interrogated, as the makeup of Nigeria is something that should be constantly questioned and negotiated. It is only in this part of the human divide that separation from an unruly marriage is seen as a deep, personal weakness. 

More than anything, the Federal Government should stop viewing every mention of Biafra as a call for secession. Sometimes, this word could mean injustices, and a call for redress. 

As Acting President Yemi Osibanjo clearly and rightly said, "we are greater together", but he failed to add this,  "with a dose of justice and fairness to all" . May those who fought and died for the Biafran dream never die in vain. And may the living receive enough wisdom not to go down the road of war again.