THE harvest of this deliberate policy of militarizing the campuses was bountiful. But the policy, it should be noted, predated Babangida; it took form with the military invasion of the University of Lagos in 1978 to put down a protest by the students of an arbitrary increase in school fees imposed by the regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo.
In the process, a student activist, Akintunde Ojo, was shot dead. Several students were injured and many more arrested. The president of the National Union of Nigerian Students, NUNS, Segun Okeowo, and several other leaders, were expelled.
Lecturers, including the well-known mathematician, political analyst and columnist, Dr. Edwin Madunagu, were dismissed without the slightest regard for the rule of law, and many more kept under surveillance. The Vice-Chancellor of the University, the renowned historian, Professor J. F. Ade Ajayi, was summarily relieved of his position.
This dark moment in the history of higher education in Nigeria is what is popularly known as the Ali-Must-Go free education "jihad," named after Colonel Ahmadu Ali, Obasanjo's Federal Commissioner for Education (yes, he of Garrison politics fame as chairman of the PDP during Obasanjo's second coming as head of state).
Since then, university autonomy and the sacred principle of academic freedom, a basic guarantee of meaningful intellectual inquiry, have been more of a dream than a reality, something that ASUU has tried valiantly but in vain over the years to recover.
From then on, it was only a matter of time before the culture of violence brought to the campuses with the guns and tanks paid for by the people would so percolate to every nook and cranny of university life, and transform the consciousness of the students (save those who remained steadfast, anchored to the local students' unions and NANS), as to lead to the epoch of confraternities as vicious gangs and cults.
It was in the 1980s and 1990s, however, that the policy was implemented with the most sinister intent, driven by the sole aim, it seems possible to say in retrospect, of transforming university campuses into academic barracks - or miliversities, as one might call them.
Vice-chancellors were handpicked and imposed on universities by successive military regimes against the laid down laws guaranteeing the autonomy and integrity of academic inquiry.
Babangida, ever eager to trample where angels dare not tread,would stretch the limits of the ridiculous with the extraordinary step of appointing a soldier, Major-General Sani Kontagora, as acting vice-chancellor of the Ahmadu Bello University!
All appointees had one overriding mission: to ensure that lecturers did not teach "what they are not paid to teach," a clever ruse for completing the work begun by Obasanjo of purging the classrooms of any academic who dared to think independently; in other words, anyone who did not cower and grovel before the regime. Radicals and extremists, they were branded, and that became a one-way passport to dismissal.
In his position as visitor to all the federal universities, Babangida set up visitation panels that functioned as medieval inquisitions aimed at stamping out any whimper of dissent.
The University of Benin where I was an undergraduate law student was a designated testing ground, a laboratory of military annihilation of university autonomy, the height of which was the summary dismissal of Dr (now Professor) Festus Iyayi, president of ASUU (ironically enough, in his case the charge, in effect, was that he practiced what he was paid to teach, though not for private profit as alleged); the late Dr Babs Agbonifo, who may have been more guilty by association with his friend Iyayi than for his own "sins"; Professor Itse Sagay, one of the most respected legal scholars the country has known and dean of the law faculty; and Professor Jackson Omene, a brilliant paediatrician of the medical school and the university's teaching hospital.
In one of the rare instances of victory against the might of the military fully marshalled, the four lecturers went to court and had their dismissal quashed. Yet, when Iyayi returned to the classroom, he was faced with a direct threat to his life.
This was around 1996 or 1997. He had gone on invitation to the reading room of one of the student hostels to speak to a group of students on a hot national issue.
On arrival, he was approached by a student - a sympathetic one, considering - who spoke kindly to him as follows: "Sir, I have great respect for you, but we have been told that this meeting cannot take place.
We have orders to shoot anyone who refuses to leave." And as he spoke, he lifted his shirt to show Iyayi his concealed gun. I got this anecdote from Iyayi himself only four days ago, but you may wish to hear the full details from him!
What about the students? They did not fare much better - in fact, worse. The structure that houses the UNIBEN Students Union offices was originally named "June 12 Building" but had to be renamed in homage to William Obong, its Secretary-General who was shot in 1999 at the end of a meeting with the vice-chancellor during which he had maintained his opposition to a policy the administration had tried to force down the throat of the university community.
The general suspicion was that the university had collaborated with the members of a campus cult to silence him. True or not, one fact remains to give weight to the suspicion: till date, the murderers of Obong are yet to be found, let alone charged.
I could give more examples involving intimidation and infliction of bodily harm, citing the instances of the late Chima Ubani, president in 1987/88 of the Students Union of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka; Emman Ezeazu, of the same university and president of NANS; Omoyele Sowore, president in 1992 of the University of Lagos Students Union, and countless expulsions and rustications but you know the facts as well as I do.
I have not even bothered to list the atrocities of the cults, whether committed during inter-gang warfare or as violent robbery or as outright robbery and rape of innocent citizens.
The pages of our newspapers - "'bulletin boards' for reporting the daily exploits of members of secret cults," as Rotimi puts it - are replete with sordid and gory details of such attacks, including two just last month: see the report, "Citadel of Violence" in The Insider Weekly of December 17, 2012 involving gun fights between and among members of the Brotherhood of the Blood (also known as Two-Two or Black Berets), Vikings, Black Axe, Buccaneer and Eiye, as well as the story "Cobbler Caught with Gun" in Saturday Punch of January 5, 2013 in which the cobbler, one Nonso Eze, explains how he came to be in possession of the gun, a tale in which he claims to have been caught unknowingly in a reprisal attack involving Black Axe and Eiye.
I have taken up much of the time and yet there is more to say, so I must move on to ask whether the militarization of the campuses from without aside, the confraternities are in any way complicit in the rise of this deadly culture of violence.
I raise this question because, clearly, it is time to move beyond the lazy and mendacious blaming of the Pyrates for the degeneration into gangsterismand cultism, or indeed any mutual finger-pointing by the spokesmen of the confraternities.
The "foam" in their eye: hierarchical structure, machismo and chauvinism of confraternities: As seen at the beginning, the manifestoes of the five oldest confraternities, taken as the model of most if not all of the others that followed the Pyrates, are highly idealistic.
There is hardly anything to fault in them, other than, perhaps, in mere matters of style. So how then did they become so easily prone to co-optation for ends diametrically opposed to the ideals of freedom, justice, egalitarianism, racial pride and authenticity, fair play, non-discrimination, solidarity and service to humanity in general that they so stirringly espouse? I will not waste time here. I have two speculations; I will hazard them and move on to the concluding part of this lecture.
Firstly, it seems to me that the hierarchical organizational structure of the confraternities, borrowed wholesale from the Pyrates despite any accusations of undemocratic leadership or betrayal of the original ideals levelled by the Buccaneers, rendered them easy targets for infiltration, being in that way akin to the command structure of the military.
"Odas is odas," say the Pyrates, who explain that it is merely a by-word for "discipline," but you might say the same thing of the military too! "Blud for blud," the Buccaneers say, claiming divine retribution or karma for all evil deeds, but in the reality of daily existence, this might more easily connote a unilateral sense of right and wrong to justify unreflective acts of vigilante justice, echoing as it does the Mosaic injunction of an eye for an eye which the latter teacher, Jesus Christ, felt compelled to rewrite as "turn the other cheek" for an ethic of forgiveness.
This hierarchical structure betrays the tenets of freedom and democracy that their respective creeds trumpet. And the names and nicknames of their leaders as well as of the groups themselves are revealing: Cap'n Blood, Grand Eye, Seadogs, Sea Lords, Air Lords, Axe-men, Supreme this-and-that Confraternity. Indeed, one confraternity, the Eiye, an Afrocentric philosophy notwithstanding, observes a Rambo Day!
And then there is the ethnological marvel of Norsemen, a branch of the Germanic race to be found in the Nordic countries of Europe, who, unknown to the world, turned all black at some point in history, relocated to Nigeria and formed a club (kclub, that is) that also goes by the name of Vikings! Secondly, there is the tendency I can only describe as unbridled machismo, a vaunted masculinity that undergirds the exclusion of female students from membership, a practice at variance with the non-discriminatory, radical egalitarian humanism proclaimed by their manifestoes.
It is not enough to disavow male chauvinism; the very exclusion of females from the social activities that promote fellow-feeling and group solidarity, from the internal deliberations on issues during which questions of power within and without the organization are resolved, has to have some bearing on the structure of thinking of the male members regarding daily collective existence in the larger society.
In particular, the impact of that mode of navigating the civic space, which is necessarily a shared one, on the weaker minds among them, the sort allegedly expelled from the Pyrates, leading to the chain of factionalisation and mimic groups.
But let me be clear: I am not levelling a specific charge of chauvinism against individual confraternity brothers but only making a general observation as to the way our mode of existence, of social interaction, can affect, mostly unconsciously, our attitudes.
Rhetorical excess
Is this contradiction, perhaps, what the metaphorical inaptness or rhetorical excess of confraternity self-naming points to? I am speaking here of the outlandish notionof pirates, buccaneers, sea-lords and air-lords who only "sail" and "fly" on land! No more than puffery, probably, and a pointer to the "boys'/men's club" spirit of the whole thing for a start, the idea of a male-only society devoted to bonding and camaraderie and so well-served by tall tales.
Indeed, one might wonder if all members are at least required to be swimmers or "astral travellers."As the faithful majority of confraternity members ponder the metamorphosis from the charitable organisations envisaged at their inception to the diabolical gangs and cults that they have become, I hope that such members will at minimum consider these speculations as an invitation to further self-scrutiny.
Cults and the idea of the university: on learning and character: Indulge me for one more minute as I turn to a key idea of the topic.
Since what we know today of the confraternities-turned-cults is antithetical to learning and character, we need to remind ourselves, as well as present and future undergraduates, of the idea of a university, its ultimate purpose.
I hold that this is true, by and large, even if the one and only purpose of entering a university - as is so often the case - is to obtain a meal ticket, a certificate that guarantees a better job and higher salary.
And I can think of no better authority to turn to here than Cardinal John Newman, an Anglican turned Catholic who became a towering figure in the history of the modern university.
With the blessing of the Pope, he founded and was rector for five years of the Catholic University of Ireland (the present University College of Dublin).
Though a "man of God," he insisted on the separation of the church from the university: the latter, he insisted, was not the place for making moral beings; that office, he rightly asserted, belonged to the church and priests and not to the non-seminary classroom and the professor.
Knowledge, which he saw as its own end, was the ultimate justification of a university. According to Newman, education "makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman."
How many of our prosperity pastors, owners of a good number of the new universities that are the rage today, one of which insists on virginity tests for its female students (mercifully, it appears all right for boys not to be virgins!), would accept this proposition?
Liberal education
As Newman argued, "To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression, is an object as intelligible (for here we are inquiring, not what the object of a liberal education is worth, nor what use the Church makes of it, but what it is in itself)... as the cultivation of virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it."
Given our subject, I would underline the opening phrase about opening and refining the mind to enable it master and have power over its faculties.
In plain words, the age-old goal of knowledge for self-mastery (though one cannot wholly master one's self it is nonetheless a worthy goal) or personal discipline, which in turn prepares the individual for a life of dignity and service to the common good.
University education, in particular, of the liberal kind, Newman insisted, "brings the mind into form." For him, the function of a university properly called, or, in his words, "taken in its bare idea," is "intellectual culture." Not, it bears reiterating, a "culture of violence," for a university "educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it," the knowledge that it imparts being an "indispensable condition of expanding the mind."
Newman offered these and many other profound insights into the nature and purpose of the university in a series of lectures he gave as founding rector of the Catholic University of Ireland; they were subsequently published in a book entitled The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated in Nine Discourses Delivered better known by the shorter title, The Idea of a University.
I commend it to our heads of state and governors (elected and unelected), and our private proprietors (especially the daddy overseers, bishops, archbishops, men-of-God) - honourary intellectuals, all, as visitors or the final authority of our universities. Newman's ideas will help clear some of the thick cobwebs that clog their thinking and prevent a healthy understanding of university education.
Enabling environment
Perhaps then we would return to the urgent business of expanding the minds of our young men and women; of creating an enabling environment that would promote learning and character.
Given this, and all the foregoing, I shall not bother with the tedious and perfunctory exercise of proposing a "way forward." That way, at any rate clear directions to it, are implicit, I believe, in all that I have said.
And if not, definitely in the reams of paper full of such proposals that abound in our archives. Let us then look to any sense I may have made this afternoon, and to the solutions that brighter minds than mine have proffered and will surely proffer again, voluntarily or on demand, with the sworn determination of eradicating the culture of violence that has wrecked our universities and restoring them to their old glory as places of learning and character.
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