Lagos — Like national honours administered by the Federal Government, the award of honorary doctorates by Nigerian universities has scandalously been devalued in recent years. It is all part of the ongoing national anomie. The great Pius Okigbo, Nigeria's most rigorous economic thinker, was the first person to call attention to the mess which honorary doctorates had become.

In a lecture at the University of Lagos in 1992, entitled "Crisis In the Temple", Okigbo demonstrated with arresting statistics that Nigerian higher institutions, far from being centres of refined values, elegant conduct and profound thought, had become mammon worshippers and purveyors of nasty ideas. He ruefully observed that most recipients of these honorific certificates are no longer men and women of great learning, nor people with a wonderful reputation for selfless service, but people of raw wealth and political power whose life stories are anything but elegant. Okigbo's conclusion was strident: the univ ersity is traditionally believed to be free of the much of the catastrophic malaise which pervades the larger society, but when the same supposedly hallowed place becomes the source of polluted values and conduct, then, there is a calamitous crisis in the temple.

Nigerian institutions of higher learning were too set in their ways to make use of Okigbo's counsel. Not satisfied with awarding an honorary doctorate to Maryam Babangida for no more profound reason than the fact that her husband was Nigeria's dictator, they proceeded to bestow a similar degree on another graceless character, Mariam Abacha, no sooner than her husband became Nigeria's malevolent and illiterate dictator. It mattered little to the higher institutions that the husbands of the awardees took an uncompromisingly combative position against education and knowledge. By way of contrast, we recall that in the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher's contractionary economic policy was adversely affecting scholarship in the United Kingdom, her alma mater, Oxford University, declined to give her an honorary doctorate which it traditionally awards its graduates who become prime ministers.

In Nigeria, as Okigbo once noted, we have a system where educated men capitulate to the superior wisdom of ignoramuses. Hence, under Abacha, his henchmen like Jerry Useni and Dan Etete, among other illiterates, were routinely decorated with doctoral degrees by Nigerian universities. The ascendancy of the Olusegun Obasanjo regime in 1999 seems to have worsened matters. Characters grossly incapable of sustaining discussions in an engaging manner for 10 minutes on any enlightened subject have frequently been honoured with doctorates. The situation is not different with state governors. We truly live in a society where everything is calibrated in pecuniary terms. What are honorific certificates from Nigerian universities really worth today?

With all this in mind, the news that Governor Sam Egwu of Ebonyi State is among those to be decorated with honorary doctorates on February 18, 2006, by the University of Nigeria produced in one a feeling of ambivalence. The enthusiasm to acknowledge the event as a recognition of hard work and integrity in public office is immediately tampered by the awareness that the same honour has been bestowed on inelegant characters. Still, we affirm that Egwu is deserving of the honour. In the South-East, for example, where an awful generation of politicians has emerged, Egwu and his counterpart in Anambra State, Chris Ngige, are making a conspicuous difference at a time others are engaged in crude propaganda and primitive accumulation.

The University of Nigeria says it is rewarding him for exceptional contributions in education and agriculture. Egwu's professional life has revolved around these two areas. Until he was appointed the commissioner for education, he was an associate professor of agronomy. All his degrees, including two from the UNN where he was secretary of the students union, were in agric science.

By 1999 when he assumed office, Ebonyi was the only state in the South-East officially classified as educationally disadvantaged. The state had more than its fair share of hawkers in Lagos, Abuja, Onitsha , Enugu, etc, and other people performing other not-so-wonderful tasks. He responded to the situation by introducing free and compulsory education, in recognition of the fact that most of the drawers of water and hewers of wood left school on account of indigence. The result was magical. Hundreds of thousands of school children enrolled. Not only were classrooms built and thousands of teachers employed to grapple with the new challenge, libraries, workshops and laboratories were constructed and equipped. Both exercise books and textbooks were freely made available, and teachers given various incentives.

Not someone to play to the gallery, Egwu sought to find out how Nnamdi Azikiwe, Samuel Akintola and Ahmadu Bello were able to build tertiary institutions in the 1960s whose products commanded respect worldwide when they were faced with the problem of manpower shortage and human capital development in a newly independent nation. He set up a college of education and a state-owned university. The university, young as it may be, is today respected. Egwu personally recruited well-established academics from older universities, including winners of Nigeria's highest honour for intellectual accomplishment, to help develop it. The university teaching hospital, for instance, is the best staffed state-owned research hospital in the country. It has produced fine doctors, but, more importantly, a lot of doctors from all over Nigeria are studying there right now to qualify as consultants in paediatrics, surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynaecology, etc, a status many older fede ral universities have yet to attain.

Considering that the quality of instruction and research in Nigerian universities has in recent times come under criticism, different arrangements have been worked out for collaboration between the Ebonyi State University and higher institutions in America and the United Kingdom. And a lot of Ebonyi indigenes have benefited from the state government's scholarship programme which enabled them to travel abroad for an international education; and a number have won prizes for outstanding records.

Egwu's scorecard in agric development is no less impressive. Ebonyi is arguably the most agrarian of all the states in the southern part of Nigeria. The famous Abakaliki rice and Abakaliki yam are from there. But the method of farming has been traditional, which means subsistence farming and use of crude implements like hoes and machetes and the absence of new and improved varieties of seedlings, etc. Consequently, Egwu has been modernizing the agric sector. The Chinese, the world's greatest producer of rice, are working in the state. Abakaliki rice is now de-stoned, for example, meaning that it is free of stones. The state-owned six million dollar Nkaliki Poultry Farm is the biggest in West Africa, producing 9,000 broilers weekly, 4.2 million broilers annually and 1.5 million fertilised eggs yearly which are today in high demand, and as a result has attracted the attention of the international community. Farmers from Niger Republic, among other countries, will be visitin g it in March to see what they could learn from it. The state's 248 million naira fertilizer blending plant which produces 45 metric tones of fertiliser per hour is an example that a government-owned business in Nigeria can run well. Also worthy of note is the cassava development programme which was begun long before present nationwide euphoria over the tremendous potential of the root crop as a foreign exchange earner.

If only public officers like Sam Egwu with a visible record of actual performance and a substantial stock of values like trust, integrity and a passion for the common good could be honoured by universities from time to time, the present crisis in values threatening to wreck Nigerian society irredeemably could be arrested. Egwu is radically different from most of the pack which ostensibly defines the contemporary Nigerian pantheon. The honour given to most other public officers by our supposed citadels of learning and character amounts to canonization of iniquity.

Adinuba is head of Discovery Public Affairs Consulting.