Our Legislators: Selling their conscience and birthright for a pot of porridge?

By Pius Adesanmi

A Yoruba proverb, “ai tete m’ole, ole m’oloko”, warns against tardiness in apprehending a thief. Delay could prove costly.

A smart thief could turn around and accuse the owner of the property of theft and even claim reparation! Several newspaper reports last week indicated that the University of Kansas is currently enmeshed in an untidy “ai tete m’ole” drama which pitches the said American institution against two aides of President Goodluck Jonathan and the Nigerian establishment.

This unfolding drama throws up themes ranging from the asymmetries of power relations between the rich countries of the global north and the impoverished countries of the global south; the intermesh between ethics, morality, and knowledge production and how such considerations should calibrate (see notably the reflections of Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Amina Mama, Wale Adebanwi, and Moses Ochonu) questions of responsibility to Africa on the part of Africanists located in the West; the marriage between Western academia and a cold, soul-less, market-fundamentalist capitalism which corporatizes knowledge production and increasingly makes a good number of Universities in North America salivate over what I call intellectual blood diamonds in Africa; and, lastly, the role of the unwary and naïve African(ist) intellectual, eager to please his or her Western employers by selling Africa for thirty pieces of silver.

Here is an outline of the story as reported widely in the media. Professor Aminu Gusau, who heads the Africana Leadership Institute at the University of Kansas, and his American employers see an opportunity to make a quick buck or two from the irredeemably corrupt Nigerian establishment.

They designed some yeye project called the Executive/Legislative training programme and enlisted two aides of President Goodluck Jonathan, Senator Mohammed Abba-Aji and the controversy-prone Honourable Cairo Ojougboh to help recruit at least twenty Nigerian lawmakers at a course registration fee of $4,000 per participant. The University of Kansas was going to pocket a cool $80,000 if things worked according to plan.

Pius adesanmi

Luckily for the oppressed Nigerian people and their treasury, the errant University of Kansas did not reckon with the unreliability of the Abuja looting establishment they entered into an agreement with. Abba-Aji and Ojougoh remitted an advance payment of $20,000 (we are not told why) to the University of Kansas and simply went to sleep.

The so-called programme went ahead in January 2010 with only two Nigerians present. The University of Kansas is insisting that the balance of $60,000 must be paid and has now gone ahead to petition the relevant Nigerian authorities.

This story would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Here is a super highway of greed, avarice, and corruption stretching from Kansas to Abuja. First, I am not sorry for what happened to this greedy American University that was so blinded by the lure of intellectual blood diamonds in Africa that she entered into such an unbelievably shoddy and foolish arrangement.

It is just simply mind-boggling that a paltry $80,000 could make an American institution of some repute take the low route of designing a fast foodish, on-the-job leadership training programme for twenty randomly selected lawmakers from Africa’s most corrupt political establishment! Worse, they went ahead to recruit two presidential aides to help them enlist twenty members of the National Assembly for the programme! The National Assembly? Hellooooo!

The University of Kansas has violated every rule in the book of collegial ethics and the American Council on Education ought to take an interest in this case and make some heads roll.

Rather than crawl shamefully into a hole and wish this scandal away, the University of Kansas has even had the temerity to play “ai tete mole” by asking for the balance of $60,000 for work not done.

The Symbol, Kansas University

There is really nothing western institutions don’t think they can get away with when dealing with Africa. This is stuff they would not try at home. Kansas University owes the Nigerian people $20,000 and an apology for their incompetent and failed attempt at 419.

How could a University enter into an agreement with two individuals and accept a down payment of $20,000 from them without even bothering to check if it was within the remit of those two fellows to commit the Nigerian state to such an agreement?

And just who the heck are Senator Abba-Aji and Honourable Ojougoh to commit Nigeria to this sort of thing in the first place? Can the University of Kansas randomly select two congressional presidential aides in America, buy them Budweiser and hamburgers, and have them commit Congress to some useless leadership programme in Kansas?

This is a classic case of we-can-lower-the standards-and-bend-the-rules-when-dealing-with-these-African-monkeys. Did Kansas University even bother to find out how these two characters came by the $20,000 dollars they paid?

In the nature of things in Abuja, that is money stolen from the Nigerian people.

And just what public good was the University of Kansas hoping to deliver to the Nigerian people by having only twenty randomly selected lawmakers attend this programme?

University of Kansa

Where was Kansas University when Harvard University attempted a similar unscrupulous scheme to steal oil money from Nigeria by colluding with Nigeria’s notoriously corrupt state governors and their useless governors’ forum to arrange a so-called Harvard leadership training programme for the governors?

Nigerians in the Diaspora gave Harvard a bloody nose and the American giant had to cut her losses, tuck her tail between her legs, and scram!

This Kansas scandal – and the Harvard disaster before it – should be a wakeup call for the Africanist establishment in North America. We should begin to ask very serious questions about the philosophical bases of our business.

What does it mean to write Africa within institutional frameworks that are not allergic to the idea of profiting from intellectual blood diamonds in Africa as Kansas and Harvard have so shamefully demonstrated by attempting to get their own share of the proceeds of corruption in Nigeria?

Why establish African(a) studies programmes, institutes, and centres, only for such institutional divisions to be goaded from above into a perspectivization of Africa as an open sesame to unlimited capitalist gorging? When it comes to Africa, do the humanities humanize (apologies to Mathurin Dondo)? What praxes of resistance are open to Africanists working within such institutional schemes and vulnerabilities?

This brings me to Professor Aminu Gusau and his role in this tragedy.

As far as I know, he has not denied his role as reported by the newspapers.

He it was, who even petioned the EFCC on behalf of the University of Kansas.

We must therefore dispense with the possibility of ignorance as alibi.

I do not know of any educated Nigerian who could claim ignorance of the fact that the ritual of Nigerian elected officials – governors, senators, reps – travelling en masse to foreign countries to attend these so-called capacity building or training workshops and seminars is ensconced within a broad atmospherics of corruption.

State Houses of Assembly and the National Assembly are especially guilty of these mass safaris to other lands for estacode-induced on-the-job training.

At the drop of a hat, an entire state’s legislature could declare that they have all registered for some foolish leadership training course in Afghanistan or Azerbaijan.

They vote billions for it and everybody flies out to banks in London or Dubai.

code of conduct

Where the concerned Nigerian office holders do indeed travel to the announced destination, the organizers of such jamboree seminars would be lucky to get them to attend the opening ceremony before they hit the shopping malls with accompanying girlfriends and concubines.

Sometime last year, all twenty-six members of the Ondo state House of Assembly suddenly decided they were going to the United States to attend what the lawless lawmakers called “a two-week seminar on lawmaking”! The United States Embassy in Nigeria rendered a great humanitarian service to the Ondo state treasury by denying twenty-two of them visas.

I wrote to celebrate humanitarian gesture of the Americans in my weekly column for NEXT but my joy was cut short when a staff of the Ondo state legislature emailed to notify me that the twenty-two legislators simply headed out to Dubai for two weeks after being denied entry by the Americans! I was left regretting that they didn’t make it to America after all! Dubai being a much more expensive destination, they would have had to steal more money from the people of Ondo state for the trip!

But we are even lucky with the state Houses of Assembly. At least they travel to far-flung places and that is good for one’s psyche in our circumstances. The National Assembly often adds insult to injury.

You could hear that the harebrained members of some obscure Senate or House committee have decided to go to Accra or Cotonou for some useless retreat or training seminar.

Senator Iyabo Obasanjo and her committee were on their way to Accra for a committee retreat before the bubble burst on her and claimed Professor Adinke Grange as collateral damage.

There is just no end to the humiliation that these rulers can foist on the Nigerian people. Very soon, we shall be told that some senate committee has gone to Ouagadougou to attend a seminar on parliamentary democracy.

It is against this backdrop that Professor Gusau’s actions are so befuddling.

Knowing what we know about these things and how the National Assembly is perceived – for good reason – by the Nigerian people, why would a Nigerian member of the faculty in an American university be part of a project to bring twenty members of the National Assembly to America for a lawmaking seminar?

If Professor Gusau was so keen on giving back to Nigeria, shouldn’t he rather have sought funding from American agencies to enable him to take his Kansas experts to Nigeria and organize that refresher course for the twenty lawmakers on the ground at no cost to the Nigerian tax payer?

One major responsibility of being an African (ist) scholar domiciled in the Euro-American academy is the non-negligible privilege we enjoy in terms of being able to help our respective host institutions come to an understanding of how to do business and who to do business with in Africa.

For Nigerian scholars in Euro-America, our country’s desperate and embarrassing situation makes this a quasi-religious/spiritual obligation.

In 2009, Dimeji Bankole, a corrupt PDP establishmentarian and Speaker of the Federal House of Representatives, was given a platform at the prestigious Osgoode Hall law school, York University, to deliver a lecture on good governance in Africa!

I condemned this in an op-ed at the time, stating that it was tragic to invite a PDP “stakeholder” to come and perorate on good governance.

Bankole of course returned home from Canada to preach gunboat democracy in Ekiti. I later found out that his invitation had been facilitated by some Nigerian faculty in that Canadian University.

And these Nigerians just happen never to have heard of names like Femi Falana, Ayo Obe, Sam Amadi, and Yinka Odumakin as credible Nigerians they could have suggested to their employer to be invited for the lecture. It had to be Dimeji Bankole!

Wherever you are, you owe it to the Nigerian people to help your employers blacklist certain characters and institutions in Abuja and the state capitals.

My school has a very healthy Africanist community.

We have the only full-fledged Institute of African Studies in Canada.

As a member of the Africanist faculty, I am constantly sensitizing my colleagues to the names of Nigerian officials who are bad news. I update the list all the time, supported with relevant newspaper clips.

I don’t want to wake up one day to the embarrassment that some Department or Program in my school has invited David Mark, Ibrahim Babangida, or Tony Anenih for a public lecture on good governance in Nigeria; I don’t want to wake up to the embarrassment that our Institute of African Studies has invited an entire state’s legislature or half the Senate to come and attend a 419 leadership training program in Ottawa just because we are going to make money from it. God forbid bad thing!.

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