Inspired by the vision of a great Nigeria, Prof Anya Okoh Anya dissects the country’s problems and proffers solutions in an encounter with Ikechukwu Amaechi
On December 11, 2013, the National Universities Commission (NUC) honoured 17 professors with the Nigerian Universities Distinguished Professors Awards (NUDPA) at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja. Professor Anya Okoh Anya was one of the awardees.
In a gathering that included such intellectual powerhouses as Prof Martin Chike Aghaji, who was honoured for being the first Nigerian to successfully replace the Aortic Valve with a Mechanical Heart Valve in 1987, Prof Dagogo Fubara, who got accolade for the development of Space Geodesy and its application worldwide and usage in tracking space car for USA Naval Weapons (1970 – 1975), Emeritus Prof Festus Ade-Ajayi, who was recognised for the best recorded scholarly work on the history of West Africa (1971), Prof Bolanle Awe (Arts), Prof Mark Okoro Chijioke (Engineering), Prof Umaru Gomwalk (Basic Medical Sciences), Prof Akinlawon Mabogunje (Social Sciences), among others, Anya, who was applauded for the improvement of human health through discoveries in biology and ecology of helminth parasites (1973), was asked to make a speech on behalf of others.
In his humility he protested that he couldn’t be bestowed with such honour in an occasion where the likes of Mabogunje and Ade-Ajayi, members of the academic pantheon, a generation before his, were physically present. But his choice was neither mere coincidence nor a matter of good luck.
Of all the distinguished professors in that hallowed gathering, Anya was the only one whose “boys” were also honoured. Prof ABC Nwosu, former Minister of Health who was praised for his exploits in the Biological Sciences and late Prof Celestine Onwuliri, who was given the award posthumously, were all members of the research team that Anya set up while they were at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. In fact, Onwuliri was his first PhD student.
And such was the transcendental influence of Anya, a chartered biologist, Fellow and past Vice President of the Nigerian Academy of Science, Fellow of the Institute of Biology of the United Kingdom, Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London, Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and former President, Union of African Biologists, that his “boys” still speak of him with nostalgia.
Anya, himself, remembers. Told about Prof ABC Nwosu’s story few years ago at the birthday of Prof Maurice Iwu, former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), of how they used to meet in his office in Nsukka, he smiled. “But we met more in my house and that was where they learnt how to drink good wine.”
Of course, he likes good wine, in fact, loves good life without necessarily being bohemian. He is avant-garde, no doubt, and one of the sharpest minds Nigeria has ever produced. In 1964, whilst still a student in Britain, Anya established for the first time that the nematode cuticle is a modified collagen. That became one of his most outstanding discoveries.
In 1973 at his laboratory in Nsukka, he expanded the scope of that discovery by, again, identifying for the first time in a nematode the presence of neurotransmitter molecules.
As a result of his astonishing scientific discoveries, Prof Anya became “the only African scientist to be honoured with an invitation to review this field of specialisation in the prestigious volume Advances in Parasitology,” noted his citation at the conferment of the Nigerian National Merit Award.
“His research for many years has relentlessly tackled the problems of parasitism and parasites in the tropical environment of Nigeria. Through personal and group researches, Professor Anya sought to establish vital benchmarks in parasite biology and control, parasite ecology and epidemiology and parasite physiology and biochemistry,” the citation further read.
Born on January 3, 1937, in Abiriba, Abia State, Anya was educated at Hope Waddell Training Institute, Calabar; University College, Ibadan; and the University of Cambridge (St. Johns College), England, where he obtained the Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Perhaps, Prof Anya’s greatest asset as a scholar is the fact that despite his awe-inspiring accomplishments in the field of natural science, he is also at home in the fields of economics and social science.
In fact, unless he tells you, it is difficult to believe that he is not an economist. He is also a political scientist without being a partisan politician.
His knowledge of Nigeria, its politics, failures and triumphs, is encyclopaedic.
He agrees that Nigeria is once again at the crossroads and traces part of the problem to the civil war. “We have come a long way but we do not seem to have learnt any of the lessons we are supposed to have learnt, given our history. We fought a war but the war did not involve the whole of Nigeria. Whether it was in Kaduna or Lagos, they still had their weekend parties as if nothing was happening. The war took place in the Eastern enclave and one of the consequences of going through that kind of experience is that when you have gone through war, you will understand that war is human being at his worst and nobody who had gone through a war will want it but because it was not a national experience, the lessons to be learnt from it has not guided our politics and has not guided our leaders. And that is why we are replaying in 2014, the politics of 1964 to 1966.”
Yet, he believes that in spite of the many difficulties, the country “has actually made a lot of progress.”
But he rues. “Even the progress we have made, we do not appreciate it because what led to the progress was as if it was accidental. It was not planned for.”
How?
He explains. “Nobody in Nigeria’s history post-war has set out with a definite intention of building a nation.”
“The tragedy of Nigeria,” he insists, “Is the fact that the war happened. But the war didn’t happen in a vacuum, it happened because attitudes that were not consistent with building a nation were very much in evidence.”
The East, he says “fought a war it needs not to have fought if we managed the politics and the governance system better than we did.” For him the problems of the 1960s had nothing to do with the East because the region neither had problems with the North nor the West.
So, how did the region become the cannon fodder? He sees the pogrom as the tipping point. “If there had been no pogrom, perhaps, there would have been no war because the pogrom now pushed the easterners, and when I say easterners, I am not only talking about the Igbo, Ibibios were killed, Efiks were killed, Edo people were killed and that now got us into a position where there were demands for reprisal and we couldn’t manage it.”
But the fact that “wherever you go, you will certainly see Nigerians holding their own everywhere,” for him is progress.
“The mistake we have made,” he, however admits, “is that we have allowed our best to migrate to other places. The mistake we have made is that within the country itself, we have not allowed our best to be themselves and part of it is the cultural and structural relationship between the various peoples.”
But Anya’s patriotism is unrivalled. Despite the huge difficulties, his hope for Nigeria’s success is unwavering. “I have a lot of hopes for Nigeria,” he says but decries the over dependence on foreign help in solving our internal problems. He cites the abduction of secondary school girls in Borno State by Boko Haram terrorists and the country’s impotence as an example of how not to be a great country.
“We must have a leadership that thinks through our problems. That seems to be lacking.” But he quickly adds that what he said was not an indictment on the Jonathan government. “It is not a statement on the government as at now but a statement on all of us as the leadership. We don’t seem to have enough confidence in ourselves and we don’t seem to have a scale of priorities that puts Nigeria first and ability to do things for Nigeria.”
But he is confident that leadership will emerge sooner than later. “It is already there. You see flashes of it here and there. As I say often, as I mov
