By Obi Nwakanma I was at the University of Nigeria in February to give the keynote to a conference jointly organized by Nsukka’s Institute of African Studies and the Harris Center of the University of Chicago. I remember the gaunt listlessness of the campus, because I arrived there the very day the ASUU strike began. But there was something else beneath the palimpsest of dust that covered the campus of Nsukka. It was decay that felt like a settled crust on the campus of Nigeria’s premier university. I felt an out of body experience because I am a product of the Nigerian universities of the 1980s. The University of Jos of the 1980s, for instance, still had its Country-Club atmosphere in those years. It was what you might call a “party school.” But serious business went on there. The students were competitively selected for admissions; it was a very diverse group of students, including the presence of international students. Its faculty was equally diverse and international. Conduct and activities on campus was still cultured and mannered. University faculty still had their dignity, and carried themselves with dignified purpose. The most reputable among them had the high regard of their peers locally and internationally. They were apparently still doing path-breaking work in various areas of research and teaching. Student mentorship was significant. For instance, I retained the regular intellectual counsel and care of the then Dr. Abu Abarry (who later moved to Temple University in Pennsylvania), who was my faculty advisor in the English department. University faculty and staff lived in dignified silence inside the cloister, totally shielded, both my emolument and by creature comfort inside those cloisters. It was a real Ivory Tower situation. That was why I was struck by the changes -physical and intellectual – that had happened at Nsukka. It might as well have been because everything had been stepped down by the strike, but there was something of a deadly insularity; a loss of vision and quality, and much of that stood out to me. This decay – this need to regenerate the Nigerian universities has been at the very core of the ASUU fight. It is the fight for the survival of the mission of Nigeria’s public universities, among which is to educate a very competent national work force; conduct strategic research for national development, provide the basis of national renewal, and be the foreground for the building of the republic as an egalitarian society. The mission of the Nigerian university as articulated by its nationalist visionaries is contained in that motto developed by Dr. Azikiwe for the University of Nigeria, which formally opened its gates to its first set of students on October 8, 1960, exactly one week following the formal end of colonial rule in Nigeria: “to restore the dignity of man.” In its current state, neither Nsukka, nor any other Nigerian university in their current states, can “restore the dignity of man.” How can the graduates of these institutions help to restore the dignity of man whenyou send young men and women to live and be educated under conditions worse than the worst ghettos anywhere in the world. The best way to measure the situation of the young Nigerian undergraduate is to enter the toilets and bathrooms in student residential halls. There is no prisoner of war camp that has any worse facility than Nigerian university students, nor do prisoners of war under the harshest conditions endure such conditions. It is terrible. Then you have to wonder what those in charge of student residential life do for these campuses. You wonder what facility managers employedby these universities do, both in terms of proper design, upgrade, and aesthetic renewal of these university campuses as required from time to time. How can a Nigerian university graduate, who has not learnt the habits of proper dining; who has not enjoyed the benefits of cultured life as once modeled by universities; who has never enjoyed the benefits of elegant sororities and fraternities; who has never done charity work for the sake of charity simply because it is no longer an ethos of the university; who has been consumed in an environmentof despair, religious fundamentalism, bigotry and fear rather than a secular and enlightened pursuit of knowledge; who are increasingly taught by second rate faculty because the universities can now hardly attract nor even afford to recruit or retain cutting edge, world class scholars and researchers from across the world help advance the dignity of man? The soul of the public university is gone. This has been, as I understand it, the basis of the fight of the University staff Union, ASUU since the early 1990s when this began to be a hot issue. The underfunding of the Nigerian universities and the misgovernance of these universities constitute not only an existential problem for Nigeria, but to all intents and purposes, a national security issue, because, one, no nation lets its most advanced thinkers slide into the ghetto and become free agents. Not in a world currently driven by knowledge. Besides the simple logical fact that the devil builds a workshop for the idle hand, without the well-designed workshop called the Nigerian public university,the knowledge economy cannot happen or develop in Nigeria, nor would Nigeria be able to compete in the current world if its National University system is not repositioned. Two, the universities of nations are connected to their National Security and Defence infrastructure: whether it is defence from biological and viral threats; military threats, or even the threats of nature itself, the universities are the frontline research and analysis centers of nations. The products, through natural collaboration between National Research Centers and University research networks and capabilities provide strategic solutions to aid the productive genius and mission of sovereign nations. The nation’s universities are the keepers of its national scientific and strategic secrets. It is only Nigeria that allows its strategic human resources to be very easily harvested by other nations, and fails to

  By Sonala Olumhense The 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly opens in New York in three weeks, with the general debate scheduled for September 20-26. This means that the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd) could sign out with a report card on his eight years in office. It is unclear how many world leaders will travel to New York; only a few days ago, the World Health Organisation announced that one million persons worldwide have so far died of COVID in 2022. Given how much more we now know about the disease, it is unlikely that Mr Buhari will be dissuaded from saying his goodbyes. He enjoyed a lot of attention in 2015 when, at the 70th Assembly, the world thought he had come to make a difference to Africa’s largest economy. That was the year that the Organisation’s 193 Member States agreed on the 2030 Agenda. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) globally interconnected ambitions of peace and security, social and economic development, human rights, and environmental sustainability were a great source of hope and pride. In his speech, Buhari appeared to scoff at the plan, saying it was loaded with “lofty aspirations [and]…heroic assumptions!” But he did identify the core objectives of poverty eradication and reducing inequalities as being significant, proposing the addition of an extra item to the Secretary-General’s six “essential elements.” That element was PEACE, and Buhari addressed the challenge of Boko Haram, which had been at the centre of his electoral success as he bragged about his military background. “We intend to tackle inequalities arising from massive unemployment and previous government policies favouring a few people to the detriment of the many,” he declared. “We intend to emphasise quality technological education for development and lay the foundation for comprehensive care of the aged, the disadvantaged and the infirm. But for now terrorism is the immediate problem.” Announcing Nigeria’s cooperation with its neighbours in its efforts against the militants, Buhari said, “We have driven them away from many of their strongholds, killed or captured many of their operatives or commanders and freed several hundreds of hostages.” That was exceedingly premature. With each passing day under Buhari, it has grown so insecure that towns and villages are now virtually shut down and shut away from each other, and Boko Haram has become just one player in the insecurity industry. Businesses are fleeing or shutting down. Citizens who can afford it are getting out. If you are not travelling by air within the country, you must mobilise and pay for police protection. In the Buhari Years, only the corruption industry appears to have been more successful. But in that 2015 address, he had said something about his government’s “unwavering commitment to fight corruption and illicit financial flows,” urging the international community to “urgently redouble efforts towards strengthening the mechanisms for dismantling safe havens for proceeds of corruption and ensuring the return of stolen funds and assets to their countries of origin.” The international community indeed has, and the Buhari government has been a major beneficiary, routinely receiving large tranches of recovered funds, most of it stolen by his good friend and former Nigeria leader, General Sani Abacha. Only last week, we learned that the United States would return another tranche of $23m to Nigeria from the same source. But returned funds have somehow not appeared in Nigeria’s development statistics in the past 20 years, and Buhari himself has refused to understand that combating corruption opaquely is the same thing as being corrupt. Domestically, he refuses to publicly disclose what assets his government has recovered and sold, or to whom. He has serially refused to obey court orders to account for recovered funds, and foreign governments, having learned not to trust his “corruption-fighting” propaganda, now write agreements with Nigeria specifying the projects the funds must be used for. One BBC infographic captures the $3.65bn recovered but unaccounted for in the last 24 years. That explains the words of Mary Beth, the US Ambassador to Nigeria, last Tuesday. “This repatriation brings to a total amount of funds repatriated in this case by the US to more than $334.7 million[to be]…used to continue the construction of three key infrastructural projects located in strategic economic zones of the country: The 2nd Niger Bridge, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and the Abuja-Kano Road.” The problem is that despite the intervention of other governments, the World Bank and responsible civil society, impunity soldiers on ahead of the best of intentions. Those three projects, for instance, have consumed a lot of funds for the better part of two decades principally because there is no transparency in their implementation. In 2020, soon after Nigeria received $308m from the US and Jersey, the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority, which is handling their funding, announced that they would be completed by the second quarter of this year. In effect, projects that should have been completed are now receiving funds from the future. Only last month, Babatunde Fashola, the Minister of Works and Housing, announced that at least two of them will be completed by “the last month of this year.” We govern with hope, not planning. As for the Abuja-Kano Road, that one appears set to continue to receive gifts from Abacha for another three years. In case you have forgotten, it was supposed to have been funded from the 2017 and 2018 budgets, and completed in 2020. Last year, following intrigue and manipulation, the government announced that implementation would now be in 2023. I have argued that it will not be completed at all by Buhari, citing Lars Richter, the Managing Director of the construction firm. In November 2020, he categorically said, “The new deadline is now 2025.” Again, this is a picture of how, in the Buhari era, Nigeria has become an abysmal case in which poverty has overrun hope and there is nowhere to run. This is why, in his eighth and final appearance at the General Assembly, Buhari can bring a dense entourage for