Daily Independent Online.
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Thursday, August 12, 2004.
The ‘Obesere Test’ and our Kolera Kolleges
Pardon the writer if the title suggests
to you that some university don has invented a more efficient procedure for
detecting or treating cholera and some university departments have been
designated centres of excellence in cholera research. No. The “Obsere Test” is a method of detecting
the sense of purpose and sincerity with which governments, institutions etc.
set about achieving their organisational mandates. It is named after, Abass
Akani Obesere, the Lagos Fuji music “specialist” in smutty lyrics
who once boasted in a recording that the government was too busy combating
serious problems to pay any heed to his vulgarism.
How are our universities faring judged by the Obesere
Test as the nation strives to roll back decades of abuse of power and assaults
on individual liberties? The Director of the National Theatre, Professor Femi
Osofisan, it was who wrote a short novel in 1977 called Kolera Kollege, a caustic satire of the moral
decadence in the universities. You won’t find a single female
undergraduate in Kolera Kollege trying to “compromise” poor lecturers
with body hugs and micro-skirts. It is rather full of lecturers who try and
promote their careers and the variety of their sex life through the ingenious
use of ethnic affiliations, examination marks, back biting etc. The
universities since then have been hit harder by drain drain, inability to
attract the best graduates into academia, eruptions of militia activities
otherwise known as cultism, the explosion of intakes without a corresponding
increase in the expansion of facilities, the increasing irrelevance of the
curriculum and what remains of research to economic activities and sectors and
socio-political realities etc.
One of the headline-grabbing initiatives to arrest
the decline is the conferment of doctoral awards on politicians whose sources
of incomes might legally qualify as criminal. Some efforts at “cost
recovery” are being implemented. Lately, it was reported that some
universities have decided to impose bans on immodest items of clothing.
Seemingly, there is great merit in such an initiative because moral frailties,
well reflected in a compulsion provocatively to expose “natural
endowments”, besides a lack of material resources, are fundamental to the
crisis of Kolera Kollege.
But this particular moral crusade would be low in the
order of priorities if our university dons wished to score highly in an Obesere
test. It smacks of preying on the weakest while more fundamental “moral
imperfections” are left unattended. What mechanisms are being put in
place to encourage reporting or detecting and punishing the sexual predators
among the lecturers? A few professors have become so “legendary”
for preying (successfully) on the female student population year in year out
that they deserve an associate professorship for this parallel career. Students
often have to devise complex strategies, which induces great psychological
stress, to evade them. They “surrender” in order to get their degrees
when such strategies fail. What is being done to prevent some lecturers from
compressing a semesters’ teaching into two weeks? Is it not true that a
few professorships are earned with “samizdat” publications, i.e
papers reviewed by no more than the “editor” of a roadside printer?
Cases also exist of lecturers lifting whole articles from foreign journals and
submitting them successfully for publication in Nigerian journals. More
rigorous teaching and assessment of students’ ability could leave them
less time to ape Hollywood and Tejuoso (market) fashion. Given the chance, one
wonders what students would demand as “lecturing codes”.
Our university dons should be careful not to descend
to the hypocritical moral universe of Nigeria’s former military rulers.
Obesere was only lucky his lyrics escaped the generals’ “moralising
mission” because the military devoted some attention to many trivial
tasks. As they robbed the national treasury, soldiers flogged and detained
women for violating dress codes they forgot to decree. Latecomer civil servants
were also frog-jumped by army privates in the effort to impose “discipline”.
Female students are known to be raped (let’s hope no lecturer is yet
involved in this) while bathing in some universities in periods when there are
not too many students on the campus. Probably, a prescription of more
protective bathing costume by the Vice Chancellor’s office would also
prove helpful in preventing such attacks. While “immoral” dressing
is not to be championed, the principle of personal rights and responsibilities
ought to be defended much more robustly in our universities and especially in
them. For all their faults, they are still the most important sites for
nurturing tolerant and egalitarian social dispositions in those who are going
to staff our banks, hospitals, political institutions etc. Students are adults
before the law and this fact should reflect more in their relations with their
lecturers and universities. There seems to be far too much of a
“master-servant” culture in our universities. Dress codes
(including the prohibition of the Muslim female attire) and the banning of
alcohol retail in some universities encourage a culture of subterfuge and
“nannying” rather than one of individual rights and
responsibilities and mutual tolerance. The police and courts should be
encouraged to deal with Ivory Tower crimes; disciplinary committees (which many
say are rigged in favour of professorial scions) suggest they are teenage
pranks rather than horrendous felonies committed by adults. If the universities
cannot tackle the most serious moral outrages, for instance by making sure
rapists, sexual predators and cultists are exposed and expelled from the
system, they should avoid giving the impression that they are victimising the
most vulnerable victims- the female students.
As a matter of principle, this writer believes female
students should enjoy the right publicly to present their bodies as they wish
and the full protection of those bodies by the law against all manners of
illegal and non-consensual enjoyment. Lecturers should also be rigorously
prohibited from acquiring unfair “pre-emptive” access to the said
bodies, even in circumstances where a “body” consents, through the
use of marks. Let the adult female population of our universities decide
themselves if they want to be perceived primarily and merely as a
“body” in one of Obesere’s hits.
Abimbola Agboluaje
Centre of International Studies,
Cambridge
