Soludo: Professors Sans Commonsense

By Steve Osuji

Nigerian professors are giving a bad name to the academia. We grew up to revere people who wear the tag 'professor' as very special kinds.

And as we went through the university, the power and aura of professors on our campuses didn't wane. Indeed, we cherished being under their tutelage.

I encountered a few in my journey through those rarefied corridors of learning. Who would forget in a hurry, Professors Alfred Opubor, Ebun Clark, Alaba Ogunsanwo, Onuora Nwuneli, among others, in the University of Lagos of the 1980s and early 90s. 

But today in Nigeria, everything seems upside down; including the university system and the professors therein.

If a professor is not being goaled for sexually harassing his students - in a most idiotic tango - he's being jailed for helping a rogue politician rig election. 

One cannot understand how our university system crashed so low to the point that professors, even vice chancellors, are co-opted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), into a tacky and highly malleable electoral system. 

Soludo And The Challenge Of Managing Expectations

 By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

“She said he made love to her like an intellectual. In the political jargon of those days, the word ‘intellectual’ was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people.” – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, p. 6 (1978)

*Soludo

Months before assuming office, Governor-Elect of Anambra State, Chukwuma Charles Soludo, has done a world of service to perceptions of south-east Nigeria and traditional ideas of politics in the region.