A.B.U: the value of vision

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurance of the improbable”. H.L. Mencken

There are many legends surrounding the establishment of Ahmadu Bello University Zaria which would have been retold in the last few weeks, as one of the largest universities in Africa celebrates its 50 years of existence. Some will be founded in fact, others would have arisen from the kinds of reconstructions made with positive strands to give the person of Ahmadu Bello, Sardaunan Sokoto the type of myth which has made him almost super human. Two of such legends which touch on his visionary leadership stand out for me. One claims that at the planning stage of the University, the Premier was informed that his goal of rapidly bridging the education gap between the North and South, and accelerating the development of high quality manpower for the North will take many years to achieve, even after the University is set up and running. “Why”, he asked. He was told that for many years of its early life, the University will have to admit and graduate people from the South, because there just won’t be enough qualified Northerners to take up all the places available at undergraduate levels. “Don’t worry”, the Sardauna said, “admit and train them. One day, the institution will train majority from the North”. Today, the University is the largest institution which produces critical manpower for northerners; and it has the largest mix of Nigerians in its students, faculty and support services. It is, in fact, the most Northern and most Nigerian university at the same time.

Another legend has it that after the decision was taken to establish the main campus of the university at Samaru, Zaria, the Sardauna visited, and was asked by the physical planners how much land should be acquired for it. Turning east from where he stood, with his back to Zaria, directed that the University should have the land from where he stood all the way to Funtua, now in Katsina State (a distance of about 45 kilometers). The British team involved in the planning did a quick estimate, and advised that will be too much land for a university, and too much land will pose management problems for it in future. Don’t worry, he was reported to have said. It is better to have too much land for a university that should focus on agriculture, than have it beg for land to expand in future. In the end, the planners ignored his vision without letting him know, and pegged the institution’s main campus boundries before Shika. A.B.U. is today a virtual community, and one of the few economic lifelines of the ancient city of Zaria, the city that has the misfortune of not being a state capital and living in the shadows of Kaduna.

The many legends which surround the origins of A.B.U and the visions of the Sardauna, like all legends, have not been fair to history. Too much emphasis has been placed on the role of the Sardauna, whereas the institution owes its origin to many people, including largely sympathetic, committed and hardworking British colonial officers, administrators and academics who worried about the dangers of the widening gaps in higher levels and spread of western-style education between the North and South. The Sardauna’s “northernization policy”, which sought to shield northern public institutions from massive influx of qualified personnel from the south, stood the risk of being self-defeating. It could create crippling vacuums, encourage mediocrity when northerners were allowed into positions they did not deserve, and in the longer run, it will be difficult to sustain even in a federal arrangement which had allowed huge autonomy for regions.

The solution laid in rapid development of human capital, but not all of it needed to be degree-holders. This is the second area where some dissersive was done to the real impact of the institution. The most lasting legacy in the first three decades of A.B.U was in its capacity to produce high quality, middle-level, technical and administrative (all sub-degree) personnel which played vital roles in public institutions, including the civil service and the economy.

Many people, including ministers, administrators and academics shared and played vital roles in pursuing the vision of establishing a world-class university in Zaria. When it became clear that the goal of rapid expansion of numbers of northerners in degree-level programmes in A.B.U as well as other universities was frustratingly slow, (and this was going to continue to impact negatively on a North which had earlier, under the leadership of northerners, been made to pay the huge price of being dismembered to secure a center-dominated federal system in which its political pre-eminence was severely diminished), the military agreed with a few academics and public servants to introduce a radical solution to the problem. Why not introduce a home-grown solution, in which A.B.U grooms its own entrants into its degree courses, direct from mostly northern secondary schools? The Higher School Certificates Examinations (HSC) were proving killing field for most of the north’s best and brightest, and producing too few for the places available in A.B.U. Introduce a programme that exposes fresh secondary school leavers who would otherwise find it difficult to survive the lottery of the H.S.C to its equivalent in quality, and absorb them directly into degree courses, they suggested. Four years after his death, the vision of the Premier and his team was given a major boost by northerners in Lagos, Kaduna and Zaria who shared it.

 It required courage and vision to even contemplate such audacity in a sector long dominated by southern academia and politicians. But it was embarked upon, and predictably, was roundly condemned by all other Nigerian universities. No university in the south will admit the product of the School of Basic Studies(S.B.S), or School for Preliminary Studies at Abdullahi Bayero Collage, Kano and even in A.B.U, products of H.S.C treated the SBS students with such overt contempt that many of the young men and women who attended the school walked around the campus on tip-toes. The School of Basic Studies had revolutionalized both the numbers and the quality of the degree-level output of A.B.U, and its impact is almost as profound as the vision which informed the establishment of the university in the first place.

Fifty years since the A.B.U was established, with northern regional funds by a regional leadership, the North today has around thirty (30) universities. Yet, even making allowances for massive demographic changes, the North today has more poverty and youth unemployment in comparative terms. The quality of higher education in our universities is an embarrassment to the concept of higher education, and a major liability for a region and a nation desperate to find solutions to its endemic poverty. For every university graduate the north has, it is quite probable that 10 children are roaming its streets as beggars or without skills, education or future as productive adults. State governments establish universities as mere status symbols. Most states in the north cannot fill their quotas in existing universities, but they establish state universities that are so badly funded and run that they have to produce graduates with even lower qualities. State governors starve polytechnics of funds, so they fail to produce critical middle-level, technical manpower. They barely fund teacher education, so they have thousands of teachers who are hardly better than the students they teach. They hardly fund secondary-level education beyond paying teachers’ salaries, and they pocket local governments’ resources, so primary education deteriorates by the day. Some statistics claim that only 10 out of every 100 graduates from the North finds employment in the first 3 years after graduation.

There ought to be key lessons in the history of the A.B.U. The most outstanding should be that a visionary leadership and a committed bureaucracy can transform societies. There should also be lessons in the pivotal position of high quality, state – subsidized education particularly for the north. Above all, there ought to be some reflection over the quality of leadership of the North today. The North has no future without massive investment in its human capital. Now children of its elite study overseas, and return to live in chaotic and threatening environment with uneducated children of the poor. Northern elite, particularly those who have benefited from high-quality, state-funded education will be shamed by the state of physical condition of the A.B.U. But they are spared that embarrassment because they do not visit it. They do not even visit the state universities they establish as status symbols, except when they inspect contracts awarded to political cronies. Funds they could deploy to sustain the high standards of universities such as A.B.U, and expand opportunities for young men and women from their states are diverted to prestige projects. The vision of northern leaders 50 years ago has been taken over by its very opposite: short-sighted opportunism. A.B.U today stands as testimony to the value of good leaders, and the damage of poor leadership.