By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi I was surprised by the number of people who took issue with my description of Ma...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
I was surprised by the number of people who took issue with
my description of Malam Adamu Adamu’s appointment as “well-deserved” in my
December 5, 2015 article titled “Adamu
Adamu, Please Bring Back Nigeria’s Teachers Colleges.”
While several people, including people I really respect,
privately wrote to challenge me to justify calling the appointment of an “accountant-turned-columnist”
as education minister well-deserved, others assumed, without evidence, that I
was being lavish with my praise because I was personally known to the minister.
I was frankly taken aback by all this because I didn’t think describing an
appointment as “well-deserved” was of any consequence.
But after a little digging, I realized that many university
teachers, particularly one Professor Akin Oyebode, publicly resented the
appointment of Adamu Adamu as education minister because he isn’t a career
academic. I also read many excellent rebuttals to this objection. So,
apparently, I am a latecomer to this conversation.
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| Minister of Education Adamu Adamu in a handshake with President Buhari |
Let me start by saying I am not personally known to Adamu
Adamu. Although we both write (in his case “wrote”) for the Daily Trust, I have never met him in my
life. I have never communicated with him, and hadn’t even seen a photo of him
until he became a minister. The closest I have come to knowing him personally
was that my late wife, Zainab Musa Kperogi, who knew Adamu Adamu in Kaduna in
the 1990s, once told me he never looked at a woman twice; she said he always
lowered his gaze each time he saw her—or any other woman. I don’t know why that
description of him has stuck in my head. Maybe it’s because of my familiarity
with the Quranic verse that instructs men (and women) to “lower their gaze and
guard their modesty.”
When I spoke with people who know him personally, they
confirmed what my late wife said and added that he is essentially a fiercely ascetic
and self-effacing man who isn’t as assertive and aggressive in real life as he
is in his writings.
But I didn’t call his appointment “well-deserved” because of
any vicarious personal familiarity with him. I did so only because of my
familiarity with his writing and pedigree. First, it is inaccurate to call him
an “accountant-turned-columnist.” It is true that he got a bachelor’s degree in
accounting from Ahmadu Bello University and was an accountant with the old
Bauchi State government for a few years. But most of his professional life has
been in journalism, not just columnism. And he didn’t just study accountancy;
he also has a master’s degree in journalism from the Columbia University
Graduate School of Journalism in New York, one of the oldest and most
prestigious journalism schools in the world, which administers the famous Pulitzer
Prizes, journalism’s most esteemed professional awards.
He was Deputy Editor of New
Nigerian and author of the wildly popular “Definition in Humour” column in
the New Nigerian on Sunday in the
1980s. He was also one of the founding editors of Citizen, the first serious modern news magazine in northern
Nigeria, and of Sentinel, a
beautiful, well-edited weekly news magazine that was financed by the late
General Shehu Musa Yar’adua. This is all common knowledge to older educated
northern Nigerians. But I’ve discovered that most southerners and younger
northerners have been influenced by the narrative that Adamu Adamu is merely an
accountant who accidentally became a columnist; they miss the infix between his
accountancy and his colunmism: journalism.
Deep immersion in journalism and columnism is just one facet
of the man. He is also a polyglot. He has native or near native proficiency in
Fulfulde, Hausa, English, Arabic, and Persian. It takes a lot of passion in
learning to acquire proficiency in these many languages. If you say Fulfulde and
Hausa are native to him, and English was learned effortlessly since it’s the
language of instruction at all levels of education in Nigeria, you still can’t
help but admire the commitment that went into learning Arabic and Persian.
Most importantly, Adamu Adamu has written more about
education—and with greater depth and clarity— than any previous minister of
education Nigeria ever had, except, of course, the inimitable Professor
Babatunde Aliyu Fafunwa. As Mahmud Jega pointed out in his November
15, 2015 column, Adamu Adamu has a vast and varied oeuvre spanning decades
on a variety of subject-matters, particularly education, that people can always
“dig up” to “see if there is a match” between the ideals he espoused and his
actions. “When … ASUU goes on its next strike to demand that Nigeria devotes 30%
of its budget to education, the union will call the Minister of Education as
witness because he wrote an article in 2013 strongly advocating that,” Jega
wrote.
If a person who studied in three continents, including at an
Ivy League university, studied and practiced two different professions, went
out of his way to learn and acquire near-native proficiency in two additional
international languages, and wrote hundreds of passionate and informed articles
on education over a period of more than four decades isn’t “well-qualified” to
be minister of education, I don’t know who is.
You don’t need to have a Ph.D, or have the title of “professor”
prefixed to your name, to supervise the ministry of education. I relate with
(Nigerian) PhDs and professors every single day of my life, and I can attest
that most Nigerian academics, including me, can’t hold a candle to Adamu Adamu
when it comes to issues concerning education. This isn’t empty bluster. Anyone
in doubt can search for his articles on Google and make their judgment
independently.
Now, does this mean Adamu Adamu will dwarf other ministers
of education that preceded him? I frankly don’t know. I am not vouching for him
because I know there is something about being in government in Nigeria that
just drains people’s brains and constricts their commonsense. Otherwise
clearheaded people go into government and become total, irredeemable jerks. I
don’t know if Adamu Adamu will be that. I hope not.
I just like the idea
of an informed, knowledgeable “outsider” being put in charge of a ministry as rotten
but as consequential as education.
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