Lagos — The Nigerian university system has finally hit the bottom of a long ditch where its pieces seem to be held together only by the monster described as cults.

Governments have been known to patronise them; vice-chancellors are mired in their ways; lecturers are threatened to award marks to students according to their dictates; female students, long harassed by rapists and despoilers of male cults have resorted to organising their own cults and the ensuing violence has reached such endemic proportions as to turn what the country has for higher institutions into veritable cultlands.

The most dastardly of the violence visited upon any campus by cult members took place recently at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife. So far no fewer than eight students have died of gunshots, axe-cuts and other heinously inflicted wounds. The cult-members are believed to have been hired from even outside the university to help disrupt the vibrant student-unionism that had found a home in that university. The members of the students union executive were shot on their beds or roused to face axes and bullets before the student leaders could mobilise their primary constituency to resist. The mayhem, too gory to be believed, has more than shocked a nation that seemed enured to shock.

Of course, as should have been expected, the students have already organised themselves into vigilance groups to flush out those who participated in the murderous assault on the university as well as confront the cult practices head-on. This understandably has brought the students unionists into confrontation with the police and the university authorities who have been virtually on the same side in the last three decades of assault on students unionism. The claim by the students that they have no faith in the university authorities and cannot trust the police happens to be based on collusion between law enforcement agents and university authorities in the past. Worse, as the students insist, the university authorities and security forces have been particularly lenient towards, if not cosy, with cult members, while resorting to all sorts of stratagems to destroy students unionism. The truth of the matter is that, both in terms of the need to respond to the immediate matter of the murders at Ife and responding in general to the overall threat of cults to university life and the system of higher education, the security forces and the university authorities are not part of the solution but a bulky part of the problem.

To any intending solver of the problem, both at the level of individual institutions and across the nation, it is important to confront the historical fact that cultism reared its head, beyond the mere recreational forms, in our various universities as part of a concerted effort by tyrannical military regimes to destroy students unionism. Whereas student activism was part of a grassroots training in democracy for future leaders, their questioning zeal and frequent exposure of undemocratic governance both in the university and outside posed enormous threat to dictatorship. Students asked for the freedom to run their unions without undue intervention from the authorities; they have fought against the purblind policy of increasing fees without regard to procedure and the national economic circumstance. As has happened in the University of Ibadan where the vice-chancellor is using Nigeria's premier university as a testing ground in how to mismanage a great institution, the students have risked six months of closure rather than let themselves be used as guinea pigs by a derailed university administration. Perhaps, the activism most feared by the authorities have been students' responses to mismanagement in national politics and government.

Vice-chancellors, and university administrators who feel they owe their meal tickets and power to patrons in government have generally preferred to connive with dictatorship against academic excellence. They have helped to press universities into cowering places where students and their lecturers act as stooges of those power. Where the imposition of corruption on students unions did not work to destroy them, agents provocateurs were wheedled into students' populations to provide excuses for security interventions. The proved imperishability of students' unions, in spite of bans of students' unions and closures of universities gave dirty jobbers in government and their lackeys in office in university administrations leeways to the use of cults. Before the use of cults, religious groups were used until religion proved too volatile. The use of cults was particularly helpful because they were easy to organise into military formations under a determinate commands that can be hired out. Many students' unions across Nigeria have been attacked, if not destroyed by such paramilitary cults.

The case of Obafemi Awolowo University, an institution in which the students union was too strong to let the cults thrive opens up one ugly dimension: the fact that cult members can be brought in from outside one institution to cause mayhem in another. Even cult-members, who are technically, no longer students of any university simply find themselves in business as hired mercenaries for the purpose of destroying the unions. Vice-chancellors in trouble with their students have been known to hire such cult members or religious fanatics to destroy communal peace in universities. In the specific case of OAU, the students are alleging that the vice-chancellor was involved. True or not, what is important is that a pattern exists in most Nigerian universities for the authorities to look away when cults go on the rampage and to smart when unions make legitimate demands.

The charge that OAU authorities refused to admit union leaders rusticated for demonstrating during the June 12 crisis is, in this connection, to be set against the alleged recall of cult-members whom the unions caught with their guns and other weapons of assault.

The fact, indeed, has to be faced that the rampage of cult-members across Nigerian universities is the result of a damnable humouring of criminality by university authorities and the military and police authorities. The picture of the cult-members as riders of fast cars and jeeps of sundry vintage not to mention the sophisticated guns they wield and use must tell the pedigree of those who sponsor and humour them.

No question about it: there are jobs for the police from which they have abdicated for too long in the service of dictatorship. Let them apprehend the criminals. Beyond this is the need to sanitise the university system. Federal overlordship and the political intervention in personnel policy around the choice of vice-chancellors need to be revisited to lay down the norm that those who are selected to head universities are supposed to serve the universities. To see the imposition of a yes-yes attitude upon students' unions, or the destruction of a democratic culture among students, as the norm is to truly toy with the future of this country. It is not just enough to suspend one or two vice-chancellors. There is need to rethink the Nigerian university system. Let the thinking begin with a proper commission of enquiry free, for instance, of the red-tapism and sadistic agenda that the current Universities Commission has supervised in the face of all the mayhem and anarchy in the Nigerian university system.

Publication Date: July 29, 1999