Between the World and Me: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Body and the American Dream

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates brings up for conversation once more the danger suffered by the black body and the futility of the American Dream; only this time, this conversation is not friendly as many previous discussions. Seen as a fitting heir to James Baldwin’s thought-provoking essay, The Fire Next Time, addressed to his nephew, Mr. Coates’ essay takes the form of a letter to his son about how the American state is poised to plunder, destroy and vandalize his body.

In a period that has marked the murder of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and many more, Mr. Coates reminds his son of how quickly his body can be extinguished without justice. He takes no prisoners as both black and white officers are blamed for the demolition of the black body. He recalls the murder of his friend whom he met at Howard University, Prince Jones and how class and educational pedigree do not exempt his son from the death sentence passed on his body from decades of injustice.  

Mr. Coates raises many questions but gives few answers. He also raises age-long arguments about the right path to salvation for the black body. He pitches his tent with Malcolm X whom he sees as uncompromising, unapologetic and pragmatic. “I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied, unlike the schools and their façade of morality, unlike the streets and their bravado, unlike the world of the dreamers. …Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard.  He was unconcerned with making people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry he said so…He would not turn the other cheek for you.“

He throws in some spanners in the works of those who believe in the American Dream, calling it a dream for the whites alone, built on oppression, deceit, and violence against the black body: “and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.”

“America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists…I propose to take our country’s claim of American exceptionalism seriously… I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much”

Between the World and Me also presents a paradox of the black neighborhood. The streets are dangerous for the black body in the same way the school is dangerous to the black mind. While many may see the school as a way to escape the brutality of the streets, Mr. Coates disagrees and even calls it a faithful partner in the oppression of the black body. “ I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body.”

Indeed, Mr. Coates’s approach to the issues at stake is more combative than James Baldwin’s. While Baldwin is hopeful that the world could still be made a better place, “if we- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world,’’ Between the World and Me does not pursue this idea one bit. Mr. Coates clearly instructs his son that the task of making the world a better place is ‘not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise.’’

On the exclusivity of Western Civilization, Mr. Coates tackles this question: Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? This was a question posed by Saul Bellow. Mr. Coates believes that the same Tolstoy can be shared by both civilizations and it is inappropriate to think that Africans should be excluded. This is similar to James Baldwin’s assertion during a debate with William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University about America’s racial ambiguities. Baldwin noted that Western civilization will either be opened for all to enter or face the prospect of being demolished by those excluded.

His generalization of the American police and firefighters as forces of evil, even the first responders at the September 11 attack makes him come off as an anarchist. He states that there is no difference between the terrorists and the police who have superintended years of violence against the black body.

Sometimes, the cynicism in Mr. Coates’ meditation does not only rain; it pours even when he claims not to be a pessimist. ‘’I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world’’ he writes to Samori his son, ‘’But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know.’’ His tone in this 2015 book does not give much credit to the changes that have taken place since the birth of the civil rights movement down to the first African-American president of the United States. For all we know, he may be saying that more structural and institutional changes should have taken place between the 1960s and 2015, but his despair in the power of America to remake itself suffocates any suggestions that he believes things will ever change. But what he fails to get in optimism, he gains in his tight prose and careful and beautiful turn of phrases.  

Known and Strange Things 1

There is fatalistic disappointment that comes with seeing life as a race to the finish line, only to be beaten to the lesson again and again that there is never truly a finish line. There are times when we are at a fix and we think that this is the end of it, or when we are in the wraps of a certain excitement and we think that this is the end of all our troubles.

I had one of these moments recently- I always have these moments when life comes tumbling and it seems like I should raise the white flag of surrender, and I also have those moments when I get my way with life and I feel like years of inner darkness are over. There is this friend I haven’t seen for years and recently we got talking online, chatting from Instagram where we first hooked up again after almost ten years down to Whatsapp where we made the first voice call. It was as if there was a lot to catch up on and we will never stop talking. S. said she would be flying into Nigeria and would like us to hang out. Then the chatting continued ceaselessly with taunts and teasing over past events that now seem very awkward to remember. Like when S. misread my affections for her friend and thought she was the one I was hitting on each time I tried to impress the group, until I blurted it out and it almost caused a storm between them.

S. came to Lagos; and after two or three times of meeting up, small talks started becoming conversationally delicate, and because we frequented many bars in the course of the bonding, the chatting started feeling like a flat beer that won’t go down any further because either of us was already full.

My time with S. reminds me of many things I have rushed into in life, especially the many conclusions of pure bliss or eternal disaster. It also reminds me of Barack Obama. In 2008 when the Obama fever was high, when the possibility of a first black American president reached its highest crescendo of reality, many people thought this would be the end of all the racism in America. The references to Martin Luther King Jr prophetic speeches were intoxicating. Obamania was what it was called and people lined up to elect him and wish that it would vanish years of racial tension. But did it?

Surprisingly, America baked in the heat of racial tensions during his administration that many question if truly this was the messiah or they should wait for another.  Trayvon Martin happened under him and many more like him and he failed to mention race as a factor in these killings until towards the end of his second term. This man turned Libya upside down.

Another scenario is the Trump ascendancy. Because of his vulgarity and his indecency, many painted his walk to the White House as both political and economic doom for the nation.  A particular case in point is Paul Krugman, a political economist who wrote tirelessly about the negative economic effects of a Trump presidency. I read almost everything he wrote on Trump, admired the clarity of his arguments and how he could explain complicated economic terms to an outsider like me. While the jury is not yet out on the political doom, Americans have seen more jobs created in the Trump era that CNN and the New York Times are finding it hard to report.

But it’s not the ambiguities that bestride the American politics that is of particular concern to me as much as how this applies to humans personally. We often see life in terms of finish lines; let me graduate and I will rest. But the rest never comes, and soon it is the time for job-hunting and when the great job comes, the rest is also put on hold as the stress of the job sets in.  

Most times, a personal upheaval that threatens to milk our joy away sets in and we trouble ourselves to death that this is the end, this is the period when the river stops flowing or the sun stops shining because of this embarrassment.  It could be another rejection, job loss, bad investment, the most unexpected betrayal or even the loss of a loved one to sickness or death. The truth is that just like the happy and sad feelings that came with Obama and Trump or even Buhari, or more personally, with S., there is truly no finish line. The river will flow the next morning in the same gait it has flowed for years; the sun will rise and fall when it is time; the clouds will chase after each other at night while the stars watch in sparkling silence. Do not lose a minute’s sleep. There is always a morning after.

The Quiet Violence in Senator Godswill Akpabio’s Poland Allusion

At a funeral Mass attended recently by Senator Godswill Akpabio, the former governor used the morbid atmosphere to paint a macabre picture of what would come in his state in the next general election. The senator who has fallen out with his godson, Governor Udom Emmanuel, and just decamped to the All Progressives Congress invoked the Nazi invasion of Poland to underscore the preparedness of his new party to win Akwa Ibom State from the Peoples Democratic Party.

In his words, “Recently, I had an occasion in Akwa Ibom State and this is what happened: I went just to make a floor declaration; others do it in the social media, others just sit in their offices, some do it by text messages that they have changed platform, what we call party. But in my own, I just decided to do it in an uncommon way because they call me uncommon transformer. It was watched in 59 countries and somebody asked what happened there, and I said just how it happened in Poland.

Wait for it: “When they asked Hitler’s minister for information how was the war in Poland? He said Warsaw saw war and war saw Warsaw. I will say that in the Ikot-Ekpene arena, when I stepped out, this is my first function after that, Warsaw saw war and war saw Warsaw. We can’t talk politics in the church but in 2019 Warsaw shall see war and war shall see Warsaw. The return will be victory. May God grant us all victory.”

While his knowledge of military history will be greatly useful in strategic studies classes, drawing such comparisons between a historical nightmare and a democratic process that is renowned for massive violence in this part of the world is totally unconscionable. For those who are unaware of the background of this historical allusion, the invasion of Poland by Adolf Hitler claimed thousands of civilian lives and ushered in one of the greatest ethnic cleansings in the history of mankind. Sometimes called the September Invasion, it saw Adolf Hitler’s troops decimate Polish citizens on an alarming scale in 1939 and this was the prelude to what was feared would be mankind’s final war.

Using Lebensraum (living space) as a pretext for the invasion, Adolf Hitler pursued his plans of territorial expansion in Poland and did not rule out the possibility of violence. In an address to his generals in May 1939 before the invasion, he clearly outlined the means to an end in the war, stating that, “with minor exceptions German national unification has been achieved. Further successes cannot be achieved without bloodshed. Poland will always be on the side of our adversaries.”

About ten days before the attack, a war-hungry Hitler delivered a speech to his military commanders at the Obersalzberg; he emphasized his mission of invading Poland in these few words: “the object of the war is … physically to destroy the enemy. That is why I have prepared, for the moment only in the East, my 'Death's Head' formations with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need.”

Nigeria’s heterogeneity has earned it its own share of violence through the utterances of men as high and mighty in the society like Senator Akpabio. Like Hitler, all they need to do is to stretch the rod of violence towards a particular direction and watch men and women who have benefitted from their generosity march forward to unleash a red sea of violence and destruction on their enemies. This has been the story in much post-election violence so far recorded in the country. The post-election mayhem that greeted the 2011 general election is still fresh in mind; it was a case where the cynicism of a particular candidate in the electoral process sparked violence in many states of the North after results were announced. Also, the widespread violence that characterised the First Republic electioneering process, codenamed Operation We-ti-e was one of the reasons the military gave for truncating the civilian rule. The violence was like cancer and spread fast through the Western Region following the disputed 1964/65 general election; prominent politicians and their supporters lost both lives and property from the ensuing mayhem that disgruntled politicians and their supporters unleashed. All that was needed for the spirit of death to visit your doorstep was for the other side to know you belong to the opposing camp.

A repeat of these mindless killings in the power tussle between Akin Omoboriowo and Governor Adekunle Ajasin in the old Ondo State will again form another reason for the termination of the Second Republic. Nigeria has so far survived many more of these insensate electoral violence that one should hope that today they will serve as one of those chilling ‘never again’ reminders in the toolbox of our collective national memory; but the reverse seems to be the case as each generation struggles to outdo the previous in the cycle of despicable bloodletting. 

The destruction of electoral materials in the recently canceled constituency election in Rivers State and the death of two people in the August 11 bye-election to fill the vacant position of Lokoja/Koton-Karfe Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives are reminders that these nightmares are once again upon us all. Therefore, rather than seeing political power as a do-or-die affair, as former President Olusegun Obasanjo once described it –he even used terms like “capture” to describe his party’s victory in elections-, politicians and the general public should remind themselves that it is about service to the nation and nothing more. Likewise, there is no better time for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the National Orientation Agency (NOA), and civil societies to reinvigorate their message of non-violence than now that politicians have started equating electoral victory to mass murder. The clock is ticking fast.

Segun Adeniyi's Against the run of play: the past in this present

Reading is sometimes the only way to make sense of a national disaster. Nigeria, as it is today, is a disaster and I try to escape this daily affliction of my senses by reading a book. Only this time, the book was not a source of refuge but a confirmation of what is not working with this country: its leaders.

The said book that refused to act as a source of escape for me was Segun Adeniyi’s Against a run of play which chronicles how the first incumbent in Nigeria lost an election. I had put off reading this book for over two years now- each time I begin, I never get past the first chapter, and sometimes, I move around sentences in a paragraph with the same gait the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, only it didn’t take me forty years. The author had previously chronicled a turbulent period in the life of our nascent democracy, focusing on the death of former President Yara’dua and the vultures that hovered over Aso Rock to prevent a constitutional transmission of power. So my lack of interest in his second political blockbuster book was not against his craft but rather because I read reviews which presented the book as a series of interviews with the myrmidons of darkness- this I later discovered was partly true.

But the book is relevant today more than ever before because of the series of political events playing out in the country that bear striking resemblance to the reasons presented in the book for the defeat of former President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015.

Among other things, President’s Jonathan seeming tolerance for corrupt officials in his cabinet, his personal vendetta with Rotimi Amaechi and some other Peoples Democratic Party governors, insecurity in the country and his fixation in the illusory idea that his party will survive the defections that marred it are some of the reasons that the book explores. Missing crude oil proceeds involving former Petroleum minister, Allison Madueke, and the Stella Oduah bulletproof cars scandal writ large in his hubris. But the most poignant of all is his loyalty to these accused ministers. The opposition party then was battle ready at all times to play the foibles of Jonathan’s ministers on the screen of public conscience at all times.  Do not add the impropriety of his wife to the pile.

However, there is a replay of some of the flaws that led to the fall of Jonathan. First, the nation is witnessing another era where party in-fighting is taking the centre stage instead of good governance. The Bukola Saraki face-off with the All Progressive Congress and the President Buhari silent involvement in attempts to ensure his impeachment is a chilling reminder of how the federal might was used to ensure that Rotimi Amaechi didn’t get it easy in Rivers State after the fallout with President Jonathan. Under President Buhari, the Nigerian Police has exercised unconstitutional powers by barricading the Assembly Complex to prevent the Senate President from performing his constitutional duties. At the same time, the Police have been accused of also preventing the free movement of the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu who is seen as a staunch loyalty to his boss.  As if this wasn’t enough affront on the rule of law, the Department of State Security wasted no time in showing who was making the calls when they decided to station masked uniformed men to prevent senators from sitting- another case of preventing a constitutional duty. But for the intervention of the Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, the DSS menace would have gone unhindered.

Likewise, the Buhari administration has not been free from the corruption it has tirelessly claimed to fight. Babachar Lawal, Kemi Adeosun, Abubakar Malaima, and the DG of the National Health Insurance Scheme are people who have been placed on red alert for sharp practices but are still holding their positions or have not been prosecuted. These cases have turned his great fight against corruption into a deodorised bullshit. What we are left with is the pursuit of defected governors from the ruling party by the anti-corruption agency- the same governors who before their defection were not considered corrupt.

What about his promise to combat insecurity? This has almost become a pipedream as under the current administration, BokoHaram has not only continued to thrive but another terror wing has been added to it. The herdsmen crisis has become more than a concern. No other bunch of bandits has committed gross atrocities against the Nigerian state with reckless abandon as much as the herdsmen. It is hard for many not to see them as carrying out their crimes under the state’s protection.

Maybe Segun Adeniyi should consider writing a sequel to his book.

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.