The crisis of confidence in leadership in Nigeria is at once infectious and contagious, cutting across multiple for a of human endeavor.
This crisis of leadership often expresses itself in a crisis of governance among the led, and a lack of commitment and accountability on the part of those who lead. The cost of this crisis is as incalculable as it is disastrous.
By their nature and mission, universities which occupy the highest point in the pyramid of tertiary education in Nigeria are venues for leadership not just for those who are leaders already, but crucially, for those who are want to learn leadership, and necessarily, for those on whom the vagaries of time and chance will impose leadership tomorrow.
This inculcation of leadership in universities isn’t just a product of education, but of experience, with both coming together powerfully to mold leaders.
The necessary role of universities as a forge for leaders and leadership demands that those who lead universities are above board if genuine leaders are to be bred there and not leeches. This makes the role of the vice chancellor in the universities a sensitive one which must at every point survive withering scrutiny.
Nigeria has more than two hundred universities all under the direct supervision of the National Universities Commission and indirect supervision of the Ministry of Education. By the rulebook which is often a statute in the case of a public university, and a charter in the case of a private university, each university is led by a vice chancellor and at least two deputies.
Within a university setting and system, the position of the vice chancellor is an all-important one. Nigeria’s crisis of accountability in leadership means that more than ever, vice chancellors are doing as they please, with little to deter them in terms of checks and balances.
If this all-important office is critical to providing leadership in the university as well as directing the formation of future leaders, those who aspire to ascend to it must be beyond suspicion.
Recently, attempts to fill the office of the vice chancellor in the great Nnamdi Azikiwe University,Awka, had descended into a fiasco. With the eminently qualified Professor Carol Arinze Umobi, who served in acting capacity, shunted aside by parochial interests, her replacement, Bernard Odoh, walked into a firestorm of controversy.
After his confirmation by the school’s senate, the Ministry of Education disowned him before the Federal University Gusau where he allegedly became a professor followed suit. He has now been sacked by President Tinubu with the university’s governing council dissolved.
The office of the vice chancellor in a university is a semi-sacred one, and as much as possible, it should be divested of the diversionary and damaging distractions of politics.
Men and women of questionable character, people who have no compunction about cutting corners or taking shortcuts must never be allowed near the administration of any university in Nigeria. As centers of formation for both learning and character, it is doubly important that all those involved are above board. This may be asking too much in a country where every finger appears stained by the oil of corruption, but it must be the overriding consideration.
Education is dangerous. It creates the ability to question why the world is, how it came to be and whether it should be this way. Those who impart it must be especially free from vice.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
Ikewilly9@gmail.com
