I was National President of the University of Nigeria Alumni Association from 1989 to 1991 (two terms). By happenstance, Chairmanship of Conference of Alumni Associations of Nigerian Universities (CAANU) was at the time domiciled with the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN). It was my duty to drive the relevance of CAANU in Nigeria’s development trajectory.
It was a sad period of cultism in Nigeria’s higher institutions and General Ibrahim Babangida’s regime was prostrate. CAANU wrote a memorandum to assist government address the problem under my sign. This CAANU pedestal qualified me to be nominated to Commission on Review of Higher Education in Nigeria later.
CAANU, under my charge, was certain about the blurring of vision of governance under several self-imposed pressures of paternalism, policy somersaults and corruption.
I discovered that our research institutions and universities were replete with designs and prototypes that could lift drudgery off the backs of our farming folk and had to stage the first ever Town and Gown Concourse for the purpose of moving corporate bodies into commercialising prototypes in universities and research institutes in the country and thus ignite productivity of machines and equipment to aid processing and packaging of farm produce of all types.
Twenty-four years on, Nigeria has not been able to help the peasant farmer who has fed leadership in their lopsided megacities. Manufacturing, until recently, with Jonathan’s intervention, had been atrophied out of existence.
I had earlier discovered that UNN, my alma mater, had developed and actually fabricated many prototypes of machines and equipment for the farming majority. Faculty of Engineering had built corn cob threshers, cassava graters, mills of all types, harvesting concentric sickles, rice milling machines, palm nut separators, palm nut crackers and even egusi seed dehuskers and grinders.
Projects Development Agency (PRODA), contrived, post Biafra by renowned Professor Gordian Ezekwe, had built so many pertinent machines for grounding Nigeria’s industrialism. ‘Victors’ of Nigeria-Biafra War thought it amounted to restoring rebels into quick progress to give fuel to that effort at home-grown industrialism and snuffed its light out by utter neglect. It amply indicated that there was no love and social responsibility for the components of the Nigerian state among other ills in the hearts of military leaders.
The machines and farm equipment from UNN were hauled at huge expense to the National Theatre, Iganmu, Lagos, in 1990 to stimulate industrial concerns to contemplate investments that are cognate to our majority. Only UNN put up appearance at the event with aplomb. Other universities did not regard the event with the measure of seriousness it deserved. Ahmadu Bello University Alumni Association, Ondo State University Alumni Association, University of Ife Alumni Association, and University of Ibadan Alumni Association were key participants but were not organised enough to bring prototypes up for exhibition.
Corporate industrial concerns in Lagos did not commit much energy to the Town and Gown Concourse. A few businesses, where we had willing allies, lent support and provided funds to the cause. It needed a lot of energy to persuade those we wanted to replace with our own technology to rise in support of our venture. After all, Nigerian minions of foreign owners could not be found to undermine their employers.
The Exhibition Project at Town and Gown Concourse 1990 was doomed to failure from the very start. Our governments did not even look the way of our broad goals. But the high contracting parties, CAANU, National Universities Commission (NUC) and National Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA) were contented with the intellectual concourse held at the Federal Palace Hotel preceding the event.
The university system undertook to pay more attention to inventions and research findings in future. That undertaking went up in grey smoke immediately after and since. Now we have unemployment conundrum that has midwifed dissention of humungous proportions just under one generation after.
The exhibition at the National Theatre was conceived as part of public service objective for establishing universities. Through the decade before the events, Nigeria had drifted off the main course of universities’ main objectives of teaching, research and public service, as people in power concentrated on importing all importables and in consequence exacerbated our employment dilemma resulting in debilitating spate of social unrest among the youth. It has since developed into revolts against the state exemplified by the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) and Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND). Now, Boko Haram has hit the country like a hydra-headed plague.
Just in case posterity rises to blame everyone in our generation of docility, this small essay absolves my active generation of blame. I do not, however, plead that we could not have done more than we did.