Why The Kaduna Endorsement By 600 Academics Is An Ideological Own Goal -By Aliyu Sulaiman Babasidi

When I read about and saw the video of a conference of northern-based academics and university lecturers, said to be 600 of them, converging in Kaduna to ‘assess and endorse’ President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for a second term in office, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Not until I caught a brief glimpse of a lecturer I knew personally, did I know for sure that they are indeed real lecturers. This is a spectacular own goal, even for a country like Nigeria where own goals do not come with consequences. In a region that is systematically bleeding from the jugular due to asymmetric warfare, poverty, and institutional decay, the sight of the intellectual elite dancing in the corridors of preemptive sycophancy is a bitter pill to swallow.

So many things came to mind. For those of the lecturers that may have travelled by road from Kebbi, Sokoto, Zamfara, and Katsina down to Kaduna, if there are any, the logistics alone defy logic. Did they leave their wills to their families before plying through the treacherous routes from Shagari local government in Kebbi, Tureta in Sokoto, Maru and Tsafe in Zamfara, Funtua in Katsina, Giwa in Kaduna through to Zaria before converging in Kaduna, and still be able to do an endorsement party, as against a security summit, really? The audacity to ride through the valley of the shadow of death, escaping bandits and kidnappers by the whiskers, only to sit in a well-ventilated hall in Kaduna to pass a vote of confidence on the very architecture that has failed to secure their classrooms, is mind-boggling. One would have thought that a gathering of 600 doctoral and professorial minds from the most impacted region in the country would result in a thoroughly researched, bulletproof policy blueprint to rescue the agrarian economy of the North from criminal sieges. Instead, we got a political circus.

Are university lecturers now the latest intakes into the long list of political sycophants? Professor Abdullahi Ibrahim Musa, the Vice Chancellor of Kaduna State University [KASU], who led the 600 distinguished lecturers, has himself, a striking union of lecturers from his university, ironically. The internal academic landscape he presides over is fractured by grievances, yet he found the time and the alignment to lead a political choir. Having buckets of hitherto independent-minded and respected pressure groups fall into the bucket of ‘yes, sir’ minions has our unique democracy morphing into a variant of modern Feudalism, where everybody’s conscience has been seemingly bought by the center. Before now, Nigeria’s problems and the lack of a unified opposition have been hinged on ethno-religious sentiments and biases. Today, it has mutated into a commodity market where the intellectual class, which ought to be the last line of defense for structural truth, willingly lines up for valuation.

Be that as it may, though, how can prospective returning officers in the forthcoming elections be seen and thought to be partisan at this point in the cycle? Surely, there is a glaring, unpardonable conflict of interest here. Professor Attahiru Jega, the then Chairman of INEC in 2015, revealed his reasons for using vice-chancellors and senior lecturers as returning officers as helping to ‘restore public trust and safeguard electoral integrity’. The rationale was simple: the university podium was assumed to be an altar of objectivity. This premature endorsement spearheaded by a sitting vice-chancellor surely does not in any way help maintain that integrity, does it? The election empire hinges the success of its primary function entirely on the public’s perception of its credibility. When the very individuals who will hold the collation sheets in 2027 are already wearing the campaign jerseys of the incumbent in 2026, the moral foundation of the upcoming electoral process is pre-emptively compromised.

The tragedy of the African post-colony has always been the ease with which its intelligentsia capitulates to power. While every lecturer has the constitutional right to engage in partisan politics, and the endorsement by the 600 lecturers follows a pattern of endorsement waves that is typical of this time in the campaign season, this leaves terrible optics for a group that is expected to be neutral and a model on how pressure groups should act. The Tinubu government, even to its numerous apologists, has so many areas of improvement that you can list off the back of your head. These range from the punishing macro-economic realities of inflation to the volatile security index of the interior North. The lecturers should honestly stick to their role of applying pressure to the government when they derail from the ‘right track’, not endorse them as sycophants and organizations bankrolled by and created by politicians would. Or are they? If the university cannot hold power accountable, who will?

We have (somewhat) lost religious leaders to the politicians. We have also lost traditional leaders to them (somewhat). Somebody needs to pinch me because I never thought that academics would be tricked into openly endorsing the status-quo, despite its glaring imperfections, and in spite of the expectations of political neutrality on their part (the lecturers), being the ultimate umpires that they are. When the light of the academy goes out, the darkness of feudal complacency becomes absolute, I so suggest.