tribune: Professor Peter Adeniyi, Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Land Reform, former vice Chancellor of the Federal University of Technology, [Akure [FUTA] and world-acclaimed geographer, who is being honoured as an Emeritus Professor of UNILAG. In this interview with KUNLE ODEREMI, speaks on core issues in the polity. Excerpts:
At the time you retired from service, one thought you were going to totally disengage from the academic environment, but now you are being made an Emeritus Professor....
It is impossible for me to retire from academics.
Why?
There is no place I love so much than the university environment. Even when I was in government, I wrote to them that I was leaving, that I had had enough because I lost my freedom and there is too much lying in the country. In the university, you will always want to say the truth no matter whose ox is gored. But elsewhere, you are most often afraid to speak the truth because of the assumption that someone could frame you up. No, I’m not the type, in seeking after knowledge, we know that we know very little. In the university, we seek knowledge because University people are dreamers, the good ones dream about what exits and question it, why? Why do they exist the way they are? Some are dreaming about what does not exist at all. Then, there is no executive eye service whereby you cannot talk to your immediate boss as in the civil service. A deputy director cannot tell his immediate boss, why don’t we do this thing this way? So by establishment, universities are different; by operations, universities are different.
When we were growing up, even to my secondary school level, there was no electricity, but we were made to understand that if you don’t want to suffer, you must work hard. We used to rehearse, ise ni ogun ise, mura si ise ore mi… and toju iwa re ore mi. That is, there was a high standard of value. The youth wanted the opportunity to go to school and you would want to put in your best. But those things are gone now. Of course, the structure they put on ground, universities for example had relative autonomy. Council took final decisions about what to do and what not to do.
Senate was in charge of admission and examination and they were the ones awarding all degrees. But these days, what do we see? There is a body in spite of the fact that we have our law; the law establishing the university says how students could be admitted, but there is another law that says they took UMTE.
You then question the issue or rationale and you are no longer the one that actually admits but you are the one that grants degrees. It doesn’t work that why. Globally, the practice is that those people who admit students that would graduate them. You can have another body that serves as a clearing house, that was how JAMB started. Whereby if you apply, you will indicate the three universities and as soon you are admitted in one, then you don’t block the chance of others.
Now, it has become a money-making place such that it is very difficult to ask JAMB to do its bit and but then we have waited too late. You expand your primary and secondary education. You folded up HSC, you introduced a new system, that would produce mass people that would go to the university but at the same time, you put a peg on the number of universities you should have. The communities would have forgotten now that until 1979, there was no state university in the country. Until 1999, that is, 20 years when we were unable to take in more than 20 per cent of applicants, who were qualified to be offered admission into university, there were just two private universities.
What was the overall effect?
Along the line, we have not developed the capacity, the human resources needed to man these universities. So, currently, we have over 100 universities but the capacities within those universities now are not up to 50 per cent of what they should have in terms of qualified human resources to do the teaching and carry out research. There was a time we talked about brain drain. What is draining? It is what is good, it his about people looking for them because they were good. So, if you couldn’t get a job here, somebody was waiting for you in Europe, America, or Saudi Arabia. And Now you produce something that is not even useful at home. So who else will want to take somebody who is not useful? That is the effect of long neglect of what we ought to have done a long time ago. Now, it is not different from what you see anywhere because if you put a building in Nigeria, everybody will be happy that it is a magnificent one. Five, 10, or more years, you will never see any hand on it. Look at the Lagos-Ibadan road for example, by the time you made it two lanes, you had based on perhaps on population and traffic. So, that 20 years down the line, you still retained the two lanes and think the road would not go bad with increasing population and commercial activities and you begin to ask yourself if we are not human beings. What were we waiting for? So, it is the same thing with the university.
Of course, I do not want to blame the press because we have talked about it as many times as possible that people should go in and see what is happening in the universities. At times, you don’t have to blame the (university) authorities because any country without knowledge-workers will never grow. I do not know any company in the private sector that can place N10million, N20 million or N30 million on a single research. I doubt.
Again, I don’t know whether any government in Nigeria is spending money at least N1billion on research the result of which may take 10 years before they can enjoy it. You see such things in some other countries planning ahead and spending money on research. But what obtains here in Nigeria? When you go out and tell people you want to carry out a research, the discouraging question they will ask you is, who will see the research paper you would want to publish in international journal? What appears important to most of our leaders are structures and you begin to wonder, what the research behind what he is doing is.
What do we do towards addressing these key issues?
First, we must stop lying and deceiving ourselves. We must stop manipulating ourselves. In the first place, we don’t have a shared vision of what we want Nigeria to be. What we clamour for and tend to pursue are narrow and myopic interests; what I want my region or I want for myself and that’s all. It doesn’t even matter to many whether the environment is conducive for you to grow so that you can achieve your narrow and selfish interest.
I can give you a couple of examples of how we tend to manipulate ourselves. Anywhere in the world, when you count population, it is recorded for every settlement however small. You will know its population because it is the basis for you to plan for everything: school, public utilities and infrastructure, garbage collection, health facilities. You must know the number of mouths you feed. But in Nigeria, population is aggregated to local government. So you cannot sit down and say what is the population of Epe, Ikorodu, Ikole, it does not exist. And that is why nobody believes us. If the government or any important individual is writing on Nigeria, he will be quoting official or reliable the World Bank, FAO, and UNDP. Is that the way a country should be; that you cannot be quoting credible sources, institutions and agencies at home? Yet we make law that makes it difficult for an individual settlement, local government itself or even state to do a head count. When you don’t have information, you cannot adequately plan; indeed you are completely lost. That’s one.
Two, let me use my own area as a case study. Right from primary school, we were dealing with map reading. Even from the classroom, you could sit down there and know about other places. For those people who read Geography in those days; Geography of Australia; Geography of North America, just name it, there were maps that allowed you to know the special relationship of things. In Nigeria, the British, Canadians and the Shell Petroleum produced the initial maps that we have, one in 50, 000 sheets and we have 1347 of that sheet, covering the whole of Nigeria. we got them up to about 1970. Like any other thing, changes are taking place in the environment, so the maps become obsolete and outdated. But, since that time, no map of Nigeria has been produced. We don’t have a map. You can quote me! We created states, we created local governments, and they don’t have maps. Then, you ask yourself, how do they plan?
What about those maps being sold by road sides?
They are panoramic things. If I do a drawing and say this is Lagos or Abuja, those are general maps. You cannot use them for planning. For example, we asked for a map to show the world, it doesn’t exist. Yet, if you are planning, you must have a unit within which you are to make a plan.
So, we are trying to fix that.
In 1971, the first time I travelled out of Nigeria, I never knew anything about Holland. But the moment you arrive at their airport, you will buy a detailed map showing the routes; rail line, taxi routes. You don’t need anybody to be able to get to where you are going. But in Nigeria, it is a different scenario. We don’t know how many settlements we have now; we don’t know how we are using our land resources, there is no map to show you how you are using it. There is no map of Ibadan indicating complete residential, commercial or telling you the number of structures in a particular area.
When you lack those things, you then begin to wonder how you can plan where the next health facility should be located. So, in terms of information, we are nil. There is a statistical book recording the primary and secondary schools in Nigeria. We stumbled on it and discovered, to our chagrin, that there were two local governments in Ekiti state, where they didn’t have secondary schools, one was Efon-Alaye and the book is voluminous and published by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics. So, how would they use this to plan now when contrary to the book, the local councils have secondary schools? And I can tell you without mincing words that there are so many states having no knowledge of how many primary schools—public, private—number of pupils in their domain. We are just planning in the dark. What the International Labour organization [ILO] told us as far back as 1982 told us that planning in Nigeria is like walking in the bush in the night without torchlight.
A lot of people will be surprised about most of these things you have said about the country as Nigeria will be 100 years next year as a federation…..
Why should people be surprised? It is the truth. We are growing without development. You could become big and still remain unhealthy. That is precisely what is happening to the country. The fact that we have thousands of students here does not mean we are going to produce thousands of quality human resource. So, that is growing without development. Okay, what does it translate to?
Even with the number of universities we have, have you seen the impact directly around the universities’ area apart from commercial activities? So, we are just growing without development. You are talking about 100 years. What about from 1969 when we got political independence; that is more than 50 years ago? What has happened? Where is Michelin? Where is Dunlop? Where is the glory of such cash crops like cocoa, groundnut as major foreign revenue earner? Where is the textile industry? Where is our airline, Nigeria Airways? Where is our railway? Were the not running? What are we doing about? They have oil in Lagos; they have in Ogun; they have in Ondo, which also has bitumen. Ekiti has gold; Osun has gold; Zamfara has oil; they have other minerals but we make laws that do not allow us to exploit and benefit from these resources, rather we said it should be the centre.
At the same time, you said you want employment. Where will it come from? You have resources that you cannot manage. Is it not when you are able to harness, tap and manage the resources that you can give employment to people? Take the case of power generation. Lagos State wanted to go into power generation; the authorities insisted that it must be on the ground that the state connect to the national grid. We now describe most Nigerians as local government chairmen. Why? It is because each individual produces his electricity, drills his borehole, just name it. The only thing that is remaining is the one you cannot produce is the road, though you regularly cater for its maintenance in most localities these days. Whether it is bad or not you manage it.
What I am saying in effect is that the over-centralization of power has killed Nigeria. I don’t know why we over-centralise things. How can you stay in Abuja to discover potholes somewhere in Lagos and still believe that there is nobody who is good enough in that environment to fix the road?
Look at the case of security. We used to have local police. I don’t know anybody who will be able to deal with crime more than the people within a particular locality because he knows the nooks and crannies of the area. We now have distorted values and glorify in the trend. There is no single law that Nigerians would not want to break because there is no enforcement.
They said we are so corrupt in this country. They said somebody stole N230 billion. It is not even the quantum of what he has stolen is the issue. The issue is that the word stealing, whether it is one kobo or 20 kobo, should he not be punished for that? Should it be about confiscating his houses and other properties and some money? I’m not a judge but I simply know that we are operating outside the global practices and at the same time, we are asking of the world. They will never give it us. All these things are running us down completely to the point that even ability to say you are a Nigerian everywhere in spite of the fact that you as an individual may have may have integrity, but what about your country. They see us as who are these people; why are they working against themselves on a daily basis? Why is stealing being glorified. Our courts will say you have no case and another court next door will say you have a case to answer. And we don’t feel ashamed.
We are trapped in our own imagination of what is good is gone, whereas churches and mosques are expanding rapily? Then you begin to wonder if there is a correlation between crime and the worship centres? Or what is the implication of having more of those centres and rising crime waves?
What about the role of leaders in the whole problem?
If you have a good leader, he is bound to motivate others. But the kind of leadership we have in Nigeria are the type that will want everybody to be at the bottom and that they have forgotten that when a tree is too big, it will kill the undergrowth. That is the kind of leaders and we like positions to the point that we ethnicise positions, unionise positions, we tribalise positions, even when you don’t have anybody who is competent, people will write petitions. It has got the university, where people will be saying the university is in our land/community. Our sons and daughters have not become the VC. These need for change; there is no reason for a Vice Chancellor to come from the same institution as the university is a global institution. A VC can come from India, Japan, us, anywhere and that’s what you find in Britain, Canada, etc. but here, he must be a Yoruba man or Igbo man or an Igbo msn had been there, it must be an Hausa man. What concerns an Igboman, Yoruba or Hausa in matters of that nature?
On the other hand, the followers now see that when you want to follow righteously, you will die in penury. So, they are imitating the leaders by indulging in all manner of fraudulent practices too. Look at what some individuals are stealing today. Do you know what N1 million can do to a village; how it can transform it? You will sink a good borehole in a village and the residents will never forget you for the kind gesture. But what do you see happening? We have very few leaders in Nigeria; the followers have become disillusioned. There is fundamental basis for mistrust. We do not show evidence of love at all. You don’t have to be an angel to be a leader. All you need to do is to recognise the goodness of others that you can use to complement your own efforts. Our leaders always want to be the policy makers, the implementers. Can you find Nigerian leaders walking freely on Nigerian streets as leaders from other nations do in their country? If any, there are indeed very few. This is a country you punish people for being righteous. Our problem is not with the structure but the elements you put down. I would have prayed they don’t give us money from oil and ask us to look inwards and mange what we have.
What are the key issues concerning land reform in Nigeria?
Well, I can say that since 1978, some states have not issued up to 10,000 Certificate of Occupancy [C-of-O]. The method is sporadic. The process is cumbersome; the cost is too high and because the people don’t know the value of land very well, they refuse to say they want to survey. It is only in this country that it takes, in some cases, months to one year even more than a year to get a C-of-O for your land.
Some have up to 74 steps and the system is embedded with fraud, just because there are too many processes. Sometimes, you make a payment and the officials tell you there is no receipt for it. If you do not cooperate, you will never get it.
Recently, the World Bank carried out an assessment of 183 countries in terms of the difficulties in registering Titles. Nigeria was ranked 180, Ghana 36 and so many other African countries were within the range of 30s and 40s. Therefore, you can see that what the Nigerian government had done in the past in terms of designating certain areas as grazing areas, and so on are being encroached upon and there is no way of monitoring because we don’t have the map; we don’t have the map, we don’t have cadastral map, we don’ even have the large scale map on which those things can be claimed. So, that is most of those who bought land would have run into difficulties of buying it once because families will rise later to say what you have bought is their own. I am a typical example.
http://tribune.com.ng/news2013/index.php/en/component/k2/item/4779-nigeria-has-no-map-%E2%80%93professor-adeniyi The scale of crap wrong with Nigeria is unfathomable, anybody who claims to know half of our problems is a fool, "here's looking at every last one of our past presidents as non of them bothered with discovery". Jonathan's committees are now the bare minimum before anybody can begin fixing this country. The amount of things they have uncovered is staggering and I have to confess myself a fan of GEJ despite his flaws, no previous president really ever did anything for Nigeria. 1 Like |
