₦airaland Forum

In2systemsTech:
There are basically three legitimate ways to become a professor: by climbing the professional ladder in a university; by being appointed to the position from outside academia in recognition of vast and varied industry experience or artistic wizardly in a field; and through a courtesy appointment. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s record does not qualify him for any.
Let’s start with the first. Pantami’s undergraduate degree in computer science from the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, was earned in 2003. That’s less than 20 years ago. When he started his academic career as a Graduate Assistant at ATBU in 2004, the computer science department that awarded him his bachelor’s degree rejected him because his degree was “weak”; he was instead employed in the Information Technology section of the Faculty of Management where he also got his master’s degree in 2010/2011 and got promoted to Assistant Lecturer.
In 2011, he got the Petroleum Trust Fund Development (PTDF) scholarship to study for a PhD at the Department of Management in the Aberdeen Business School of Robert Gordon University, which he earned in August 2014.
Upon his return to ATBU, he was promoted to Lecturer 1—skipping one rank. He requested to be promoted to Senior Lecturer but was denied because he had insufficient publication record to justify his request. He resigned in protest and took up an appointment at the Salafist, male-Muslim-only Islamic University of Madinah as an Assistant Professor of Information Science.
In 2016, he accepted a government appointment as DG of NITDA and has never returned to academia since then.
Now, three criteria are used to promote academics: teaching, research, and service. Pantami’s entire university teaching record is less than 10 years—if you consider that he never taught either at ATBU or at Robert Gordon University (although he lied that he did during his senate confirmation hearing) during his three years of doctoral studies.
His research output is even more underwhelming. Although he brags about having “over 160 publications,” his actual scholarly output is really thin for someone who wants to be a professor. When I checked SCOPUS, the well-regarded database of top-level, peer-reviewed academic journals, using his legal name, that is, Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantami is the name of his neighborhood in Gombe town, which he doesn’t legally bear), only three articles and one citation came up.
Of the three articles, he is the single author of one (which is actually only a 2-page country report) and a distant co-author in two. All three articles were published between 2018 and 2019 while he’s in government.
But SCOPUS can be unjustifiably exclusionary, so I looked him up on Google Scholar, a more expansive and laissez faire database of scholarly articles and books. He has exactly 10 articles and 39 citations there. Of the 10 articles, he is the first or sole author of 5 and a “tag-me-along” co-author of 5.
Sadly, at least 5 of his 10 articles are in dubious, pay-to-play, predatory journals that would destroy the academic career of any scholar in a serious country. Most of the articles were accepted and published in the same month that they were submitted! Since peer review typically takes months, the articles were clearly not peer-reviewed.
Evidence of a lack of peer review is evident in the fact that several of the articles are riddled with avoidable proofreading and grammatical errors. Plus, many of them, such as one that was basically an unimaginative 7-page rehash of publicly available facts about NAFDAC, are flat-out scholarly scams that a serious undergraduate won’t even be caught committing.
He published only two scholarly articles—in 2013 (from his PhD thesis) and in 2015—before he came to government, which explains why ATBU refused to promote him to senior lectureship. By 2014 when he wanted to be a Senior Lecturer, he had only one notable publication.
There is no serious university in the world that can legitimately promote a former Lecturer I (at ATBU) or an Assistant Professor (at the Islamic University of Madinah) overnight to the position of professor with only 10 substandard publications in predatory journals and 39 citations. The minimum number of publications required to be promoted to professorship in most Nigerian universities is 15. A professor should ideally have at least 100 citations.
Plus, Pantami didn’t spend up to a year as Lecturer I. Nigerian academics are required to spend at least 3 years in a rank. Three years as a Lecturer I, 3 years as a Senior Lecturer, and 3 years as a Reader would give you 9 years. That means he needs to spend at least 9 years in the university after his ministerial appointment— and publish a few more articles— to be qualified for promotion to professor. In Saudi Arabia, it would require at least 8 more years.
(Of course, if he was actually employed by FUTO that “promoted” him, his unmerited professorship wouldn’t have attracted any notice since there are several such examples of perversions of traditions all over Nigerian universities. It’s the absurdity of being promoted to a professor at and by a university he was never affiliated with while he’s a serving minister that made the fraud stick out like a sore thumb.)
Also note that Pantami’s PhD is in management, a social science discipline, not in computer science or cybersecurity. So, it’s doubly fraudulent that he has been “promoted” to the professorship of a discipline he didn’t study or publish in extensively.
His doctoral dissertation, titled “A theoretical and empirical investigation of the barriers to the adoption of state-of-the-art information systems by Nigerian indigenous oil companies,” which is freely available on the Internet, is basically a survey of employees of Nigerian oil companies on their perceptions of IT policies in their places of employment. It’s a social scientific study that any political science, sociology, or economics graduate can conduct.
Now that I have established that he can’t legitimately be a professor anywhere in the world on the basis of his scholarship and pedagogy, can he be appointed a professor on the strength of his industry experience? No! The only other job Pantami has ever done outside of government and his less than 10 years of university teaching is being the Imam of ATBU. He has never invented any cybersecurity patent and has never worked in a cybersecurity company.
The only discipline that can validly appoint him as a professor of practice is Islamic Studies. Say what you may about him, he is one of northern Nigeria’s most prodigious and consequential Islamic exegetes. His oeuvre in Islamic exegesis is unquestionably worthy of a professorial appointment in Islamic jurisprudence. That’s the path of least resistance he should have taken since he desperately desires to be addressed as a professor.
In defense of Pantami’s professorial fraud, one Professor Tukur Sa’ad hashed over a litany of people who became professors without terminal degrees and without prior teaching experience, as if I didn’t already make that point and called it an example of what we call a “professor of practice” in American academe.
In my December 20, 2015 column titled “A Comparison of Everyday University Vocabularies in Nigeria, America, and Britain (II),” I gave an even more dramatic example than Sa’ad’s in the late Maya Angelou who was a lifetime endowed professor of American literature at Wake Forest University but who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree.
Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and a host of other literary icons didn’t have—and didn’t need to have—a PhD to become professors. Apart from the fact that they didn’t climb the professorial mountain from the top (they started from lectureship), their path-breaking and prodigiously creative outputs are equivalent to—and in some cases exceed—a PhD.
In North American universities, it's called "Research and Creative Activity" for a reason. Wole Soyinka, Achebe, JP Clark, etc. had vast and varied oeuvres in "creative activity" before they became professors. Plus, during their time, the possession of a PhD was not a requirement to move through the academic hierarchy.
Pantami does not come even remotely close to their record in the field FUTO awarded him a fraudulent professorship. In any case, Soyinka, Achebe, etc. taught at the universities where they were professors. Pantami is a serving minister.
How about a courtesy professorship? Pantami isn’t qualified for that, either. A courtesy professorship is a professorial appointment given to distinguished professors at other universities who need not be at the universities that appointed them.
It’s called an “honorary professor” in some UK universities, an “extraordinary professor” in South African universities, and a “professor-at-large” in others. It’s basically an honor given to people who’re already professors elsewhere, so you can’t become a courtesy professor at another university if you are not already one somewhere else.
Some people said Pantami’s “achievements” as a minister are worthy of a professorial appointment. Haha! OK, so people who imagine themselves to be successful in whatever they do should now apply to FUTO for a Pantamized fraudfessorship to aggrandize their insecure egos?
Look, I’m calling out Pantami’s professorial fraud not in spite of my being a Muslim and his friend but because I’m a Muslim and his friend. My father, who was a Hafiz like him, would disown me if I ignored or gave comfort to fraud.


farooqkperogi

https://web.facebook.com/farooqkperogi

seguntijan:
Kperogi is a great writer and crusader for a just system to be established in Nigeria, but he is a bit out of touch with the new Nigeria. He may read all and listen to all that is passing around but he cannot unravel the riddle in the Nigerian academia. The systematic erosion of the system started long before he joined the academia and it has been going on ever since. He wants NUC to sanction Owerri for making Pantami a Professor. May be his knowledge of our university laws and the various statutes is limited. so also his understanding of the level of autonomy universities have vis a vis NUC. A University can decide to appoint an individual to a position either through promotion or straight appointment based on the criteria they set up indipendent of NUC. We that spent our working lives in in the First generation universities cannot comprehend the happenings in the new universities. Most of our Senior lecturers with little prospects of becoming Professors have migrated to newer universities and became Professors. NUC does not create professorial Chairs or determine the mode of appointment of a Professor. If I were to cite cases that would surprise Kperogi, I would write a book. Yet the cases are legally right. One may disagree with the criteria for such appointments or promotions but cannot challenge their legality. It may erode the status of professors who had to obtain their promotion through the British system where you had only one Professor and Head of Department, others had to wait until he retired or died or until a new chair is created, but what obtains now is legal and cannot be challenged by NUC or Ministry of Education until a Bill giving them the powers are passed by the National Assembly and is accented by the President. Kperogi should be familiar with the US system having been there and may be still teaching there. In many disciplines, especially the technology or professional areas such as Architecture, Engineering, Medicine, Fine Arts etc. an individual who has made tremendous contribution to the discipline by his practical work may be offered and invited to occupy a chair without ever teaching in a university. Harvard Graduate School of Design is known to practice, unless it has been discontinued. But as of 1990 I witnessed it. Great Architects from Japan, Latin America and Europe, whose command of English left a lot to be desired were invited to occupy profesdorial chairs. Their mastery of the practical skills in their areas was in no doubt. Let those who obtain professorship by writing papers and publishing in peer reviewed journals, get their professorship by writing about these practical men and their works, but they remain men of creativity and skills. Even in Nigeria I was a witness to one such incidents in University of Lagos, whose system of assessment for Professorship involved the hosting the assessors to do the work insitu. Architect Godwin of Godwin and Hopwood fame decided to retire from practice and impart knowledge to young Nigerians. Unilag offered him Senior Lecturership. He declined and instead that he applied for a professorial position. Take itbor leave it. I was invited among others to do the work insitu and interact with the candidate during the process. You see, I respect professors from Lagos more than most other Universities because of this format in their assessment. You will read all what he claimed to have published while you stayed in the University Guesthouse. During the interaction session you will know whether he actually wrote these papers or was it communal effort where academics do the so called group research and publications, when in fact is one talented individual who did the work and understood what went on and was willing to help colleagues come along by putting their names on the paper? You will also assess the quality of the journal, was it really a referred journal or was it like let say "Samaru Journal of Architecture" vol. 1 no 1. where group of academics cutting accross many universities in the country in a particular discipline will float a journal and pressure the University to accept it as a refreed journal through intimidation by ASUU? Let me go back to Arc. Godwin's case. Some of the assessors took a stand similar to that of Kperogi on how Professors were made. But with my Harvard experience of 1990 when I went on Sabbatical I cited cases and names of practicing architects with no University teaching experience occupying a Chair. I also cited the case of my Hungarian colleague who was recruited at ABU as a LECTURER I, but who had been a star architect in Hungary winning a lot of national and international competitions just looking for an outlet from the suffocation by the then Communist system of his country, by taking a contract in ABU Department of Architecture. From Zaria he applied for a professorship when it was advertised in Alabama State University and got appointed, by 1990 we linked up in USA he was already the Dean of Architecture in Auburn for some years and was about to move to Pennsylvania State University as the Dean of the Architecture School, a more prestigious school. His mastery of English still left a lot to be desired for a Dean in a highly rated school of architecture. His publications in architectural theory consisted of numerous miniature sketches with annotations. A very novel and unique way of transmitting ideas in the academia. Kperogi can check it up if he is interested. His name was Peter Mygar. With my superior argument backed up by facts the other assessors holding similar arguments to Kperogi gave up. So Lagos was lucky to get a Professor with practical skills and knowledge. I am not saying that Pantami can fit into the examples that I gave, but that Kperogi should be flexible in assessing an issue, as an intellectual when faced with a situation. Unfortunately, the journalist in him usually takes over when he hears or sees things. He wants to be the one with the "breaking news" and the Front page story. I rest my case.

In2systemsTech:
There are basically three legitimate ways to become a professor: by climbing the professional ladder in a university; by being appointed to the position from outside academia in recognition of vast and varied industry experience or artistic wizardly in a field; and through a courtesy appointment. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s record does not qualify him for any.
Let’s start with the first. Pantami’s undergraduate degree in computer science from the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, was earned in 2003. That’s less than 20 years ago. When he started his academic career as a Graduate Assistant at ATBU in 2004, the computer science department that awarded him his bachelor’s degree rejected him because his degree was “weak”; he was instead employed in the Information Technology section of the Faculty of Management where he also got his master’s degree in 2010/2011 and got promoted to Assistant Lecturer.
In 2011, he got the Petroleum Trust Fund Development (PTDF) scholarship to study for a PhD at the Department of Management in the Aberdeen Business School of Robert Gordon University, which he earned in August 2014.
Upon his return to ATBU, he was promoted to Lecturer 1—skipping one rank. He requested to be promoted to Senior Lecturer but was denied because he had insufficient publication record to justify his request. He resigned in protest and took up an appointment at the Salafist, male-Muslim-only Islamic University of Madinah as an Assistant Professor of Information Science.
In 2016, he accepted a government appointment as DG of NITDA and has never returned to academia since then.
Now, three criteria are used to promote academics: teaching, research, and service. Pantami’s entire university teaching record is less than 10 years—if you consider that he never taught either at ATBU or at Robert Gordon University (although he lied that he did during his senate confirmation hearing) during his three years of doctoral studies.
His research output is even more underwhelming. Although he brags about having “over 160 publications,” his actual scholarly output is really thin for someone who wants to be a professor. When I checked SCOPUS, the well-regarded database of top-level, peer-reviewed academic journals, using his legal name, that is, Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantami is the name of his neighborhood in Gombe town, which he doesn’t legally bear), only three articles and one citation came up.
Of the three articles, he is the single author of one (which is actually only a 2-page country report) and a distant co-author in two. All three articles were published between 2018 and 2019 while he’s in government.
But SCOPUS can be unjustifiably exclusionary, so I looked him up on Google Scholar, a more expansive and laissez faire database of scholarly articles and books. He has exactly 10 articles and 39 citations there. Of the 10 articles, he is the first or sole author of 5 and a “tag-me-along” co-author of 5.
Sadly, at least 5 of his 10 articles are in dubious, pay-to-play, predatory journals that would destroy the academic career of any scholar in a serious country. Most of the articles were accepted and published in the same month that they were submitted! Since peer review typically takes months, the articles were clearly not peer-reviewed.
Evidence of a lack of peer review is evident in the fact that several of the articles are riddled with avoidable proofreading and grammatical errors. Plus, many of them, such as one that was basically an unimaginative 7-page rehash of publicly available facts about NAFDAC, are flat-out scholarly scams that a serious undergraduate won’t even be caught committing.
He published only two scholarly articles—in 2013 (from his PhD thesis) and in 2015—before he came to government, which explains why ATBU refused to promote him to senior lectureship. By 2014 when he wanted to be a Senior Lecturer, he had only one notable publication.
There is no serious university in the world that can legitimately promote a former Lecturer I (at ATBU) or an Assistant Professor (at the Islamic University of Madinah) overnight to the position of professor with only 10 substandard publications in predatory journals and 39 citations. The minimum number of publications required to be promoted to professorship in most Nigerian universities is 15. A professor should ideally have at least 100 citations.
Plus, Pantami didn’t spend up to a year as Lecturer I. Nigerian academics are required to spend at least 3 years in a rank. Three years as a Lecturer I, 3 years as a Senior Lecturer, and 3 years as a Reader would give you 9 years. That means he needs to spend at least 9 years in the university after his ministerial appointment— and publish a few more articles— to be qualified for promotion to professor. In Saudi Arabia, it would require at least 8 more years.
(Of course, if he was actually employed by FUTO that “promoted” him, his unmerited professorship wouldn’t have attracted any notice since there are several such examples of perversions of traditions all over Nigerian universities. It’s the absurdity of being promoted to a professor at and by a university he was never affiliated with while he’s a serving minister that made the fraud stick out like a sore thumb.)
Also note that Pantami’s PhD is in management, a social science discipline, not in computer science or cybersecurity. So, it’s doubly fraudulent that he has been “promoted” to the professorship of a discipline he didn’t study or publish in extensively.
His doctoral dissertation, titled “A theoretical and empirical investigation of the barriers to the adoption of state-of-the-art information systems by Nigerian indigenous oil companies,” which is freely available on the Internet, is basically a survey of employees of Nigerian oil companies on their perceptions of IT policies in their places of employment. It’s a social scientific study that any political science, sociology, or economics graduate can conduct.
Now that I have established that he can’t legitimately be a professor anywhere in the world on the basis of his scholarship and pedagogy, can he be appointed a professor on the strength of his industry experience? No! The only other job Pantami has ever done outside of government and his less than 10 years of university teaching is being the Imam of ATBU. He has never invented any cybersecurity patent and has never worked in a cybersecurity company.
The only discipline that can validly appoint him as a professor of practice is Islamic Studies. Say what you may about him, he is one of northern Nigeria’s most prodigious and consequential Islamic exegetes. His oeuvre in Islamic exegesis is unquestionably worthy of a professorial appointment in Islamic jurisprudence. That’s the path of least resistance he should have taken since he desperately desires to be addressed as a professor.
In defense of Pantami’s professorial fraud, one Professor Tukur Sa’ad hashed over a litany of people who became professors without terminal degrees and without prior teaching experience, as if I didn’t already make that point and called it an example of what we call a “professor of practice” in American academe.
In my December 20, 2015 column titled “A Comparison of Everyday University Vocabularies in Nigeria, America, and Britain (II),” I gave an even more dramatic example than Sa’ad’s in the late Maya Angelou who was a lifetime endowed professor of American literature at Wake Forest University but who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree.
Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and a host of other literary icons didn’t have—and didn’t need to have—a PhD to become professors. Apart from the fact that they didn’t climb the professorial mountain from the top (they started from lectureship), their path-breaking and prodigiously creative outputs are equivalent to—and in some cases exceed—a PhD.
In North American universities, it's called "Research and Creative Activity" for a reason. Wole Soyinka, Achebe, JP Clark, etc. had vast and varied oeuvres in "creative activity" before they became professors. Plus, during their time, the possession of a PhD was not a requirement to move through the academic hierarchy.
Pantami does not come even remotely close to their record in the field FUTO awarded him a fraudulent professorship. In any case, Soyinka, Achebe, etc. taught at the universities where they were professors. Pantami is a serving minister.
How about a courtesy professorship? Pantami isn’t qualified for that, either. A courtesy professorship is a professorial appointment given to distinguished professors at other universities who need not be at the universities that appointed them.
It’s called an “honorary professor” in some UK universities, an “extraordinary professor” in South African universities, and a “professor-at-large” in others. It’s basically an honor given to people who’re already professors elsewhere, so you can’t become a courtesy professor at another university if you are not already one somewhere else.
Some people said Pantami’s “achievements” as a minister are worthy of a professorial appointment. Haha! OK, so people who imagine themselves to be successful in whatever they do should now apply to FUTO for a Pantamized fraudfessorship to aggrandize their insecure egos?
Look, I’m calling out Pantami’s professorial fraud not in spite of my being a Muslim and his friend but because I’m a Muslim and his friend. My father, who was a Hafiz like him, would disown me if I ignored or gave comfort to fraud.


farooqkperogi

https://web.facebook.com/farooqkperogi

In2systemsTech:
There are basically three legitimate ways to become a professor: by climbing the professional ladder in a university; by being appointed to the position from outside academia in recognition of vast and varied industry experience or artistic wizardly in a field; and through a courtesy appointment. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s record does not qualify him for any.
Let’s start with the first. Pantami’s undergraduate degree in computer science from the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, was earned in 2003. That’s less than 20 years ago. When he started his academic career as a Graduate Assistant at ATBU in 2004, the computer science department that awarded him his bachelor’s degree rejected him because his degree was “weak”; he was instead employed in the Information Technology section of the Faculty of Management where he also got his master’s degree in 2010/2011 and got promoted to Assistant Lecturer.
In 2011, he got the Petroleum Trust Fund Development (PTDF) scholarship to study for a PhD at the Department of Management in the Aberdeen Business School of Robert Gordon University, which he earned in August 2014.
Upon his return to ATBU, he was promoted to Lecturer 1—skipping one rank. He requested to be promoted to Senior Lecturer but was denied because he had insufficient publication record to justify his request. He resigned in protest and took up an appointment at the Salafist, male-Muslim-only Islamic University of Madinah as an Assistant Professor of Information Science.
In 2016, he accepted a government appointment as DG of NITDA and has never returned to academia since then.
Now, three criteria are used to promote academics: teaching, research, and service. Pantami’s entire university teaching record is less than 10 years—if you consider that he never taught either at ATBU or at Robert Gordon University (although he lied that he did during his senate confirmation hearing) during his three years of doctoral studies.
His research output is even more underwhelming. Although he brags about having “over 160 publications,” his actual scholarly output is really thin for someone who wants to be a professor. When I checked SCOPUS, the well-regarded database of top-level, peer-reviewed academic journals, using his legal name, that is, Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantami is the name of his neighborhood in Gombe town, which he doesn’t legally bear), only three articles and one citation came up.
Of the three articles, he is the single author of one (which is actually only a 2-page country report) and a distant co-author in two. All three articles were published between 2018 and 2019 while he’s in government.
But SCOPUS can be unjustifiably exclusionary, so I looked him up on Google Scholar, a more expansive and laissez faire database of scholarly articles and books. He has exactly 10 articles and 39 citations there. Of the 10 articles, he is the first or sole author of 5 and a “tag-me-along” co-author of 5.
Sadly, at least 5 of his 10 articles are in dubious, pay-to-play, predatory journals that would destroy the academic career of any scholar in a serious country. Most of the articles were accepted and published in the same month that they were submitted! Since peer review typically takes months, the articles were clearly not peer-reviewed.
Evidence of a lack of peer review is evident in the fact that several of the articles are riddled with avoidable proofreading and grammatical errors. Plus, many of them, such as one that was basically an unimaginative 7-page rehash of publicly available facts about NAFDAC, are flat-out scholarly scams that a serious undergraduate won’t even be caught committing.
He published only two scholarly articles—in 2013 (from his PhD thesis) and in 2015—before he came to government, which explains why ATBU refused to promote him to senior lectureship. By 2014 when he wanted to be a Senior Lecturer, he had only one notable publication.
There is no serious university in the world that can legitimately promote a former Lecturer I (at ATBU) or an Assistant Professor (at the Islamic University of Madinah) overnight to the position of professor with only 10 substandard publications in predatory journals and 39 citations. The minimum number of publications required to be promoted to professorship in most Nigerian universities is 15. A professor should ideally have at least 100 citations.
Plus, Pantami didn’t spend up to a year as Lecturer I. Nigerian academics are required to spend at least 3 years in a rank. Three years as a Lecturer I, 3 years as a Senior Lecturer, and 3 years as a Reader would give you 9 years. That means he needs to spend at least 9 years in the university after his ministerial appointment— and publish a few more articles— to be qualified for promotion to professor. In Saudi Arabia, it would require at least 8 more years.
(Of course, if he was actually employed by FUTO that “promoted” him, his unmerited professorship wouldn’t have attracted any notice since there are several such examples of perversions of traditions all over Nigerian universities. It’s the absurdity of being promoted to a professor at and by a university he was never affiliated with while he’s a serving minister that made the fraud stick out like a sore thumb.)
Also note that Pantami’s PhD is in management, a social science discipline, not in computer science or cybersecurity. So, it’s doubly fraudulent that he has been “promoted” to the professorship of a discipline he didn’t study or publish in extensively.
His doctoral dissertation, titled “A theoretical and empirical investigation of the barriers to the adoption of state-of-the-art information systems by Nigerian indigenous oil companies,” which is freely available on the Internet, is basically a survey of employees of Nigerian oil companies on their perceptions of IT policies in their places of employment. It’s a social scientific study that any political science, sociology, or economics graduate can conduct.
Now that I have established that he can’t legitimately be a professor anywhere in the world on the basis of his scholarship and pedagogy, can he be appointed a professor on the strength of his industry experience? No! The only other job Pantami has ever done outside of government and his less than 10 years of university teaching is being the Imam of ATBU. He has never invented any cybersecurity patent and has never worked in a cybersecurity company.
The only discipline that can validly appoint him as a professor of practice is Islamic Studies. Say what you may about him, he is one of northern Nigeria’s most prodigious and consequential Islamic exegetes. His oeuvre in Islamic exegesis is unquestionably worthy of a professorial appointment in Islamic jurisprudence. That’s the path of least resistance he should have taken since he desperately desires to be addressed as a professor.
In defense of Pantami’s professorial fraud, one Professor Tukur Sa’ad hashed over a litany of people who became professors without terminal degrees and without prior teaching experience, as if I didn’t already make that point and called it an example of what we call a “professor of practice” in American academe.
In my December 20, 2015 column titled “A Comparison of Everyday University Vocabularies in Nigeria, America, and Britain (II),” I gave an even more dramatic example than Sa’ad’s in the late Maya Angelou who was a lifetime endowed professor of American literature at Wake Forest University but who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree.
Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and a host of other literary icons didn’t have—and didn’t need to have—a PhD to become professors. Apart from the fact that they didn’t climb the professorial mountain from the top (they started from lectureship), their path-breaking and prodigiously creative outputs are equivalent to—and in some cases exceed—a PhD.
In North American universities, it's called "Research and Creative Activity" for a reason. Wole Soyinka, Achebe, JP Clark, etc. had vast and varied oeuvres in "creative activity" before they became professors. Plus, during their time, the possession of a PhD was not a requirement to move through the academic hierarchy.
Pantami does not come even remotely close to their record in the field FUTO awarded him a fraudulent professorship. In any case, Soyinka, Achebe, etc. taught at the universities where they were professors. Pantami is a serving minister.
How about a courtesy professorship? Pantami isn’t qualified for that, either. A courtesy professorship is a professorial appointment given to distinguished professors at other universities who need not be at the universities that appointed them.
It’s called an “honorary professor” in some UK universities, an “extraordinary professor” in South African universities, and a “professor-at-large” in others. It’s basically an honor given to people who’re already professors elsewhere, so you can’t become a courtesy professor at another university if you are not already one somewhere else.
Some people said Pantami’s “achievements” as a minister are worthy of a professorial appointment. Haha! OK, so people who imagine themselves to be successful in whatever they do should now apply to FUTO for a Pantamized fraudfessorship to aggrandize their insecure egos?
Look, I’m calling out Pantami’s professorial fraud not in spite of my being a Muslim and his friend but because I’m a Muslim and his friend. My father, who was a Hafiz like him, would disown me if I ignored or gave comfort to fraud.


farooqkperogi

https://web.facebook.com/farooqkperogi

pfadom:
We can all see why Naija University can hardly progress.

seguntijan:
Kperogi is a great writer and crusader for a just system to be established in Nigeria, but he is a bit out of touch with the new Nigeria. He may read all and listen to all that is passing around but he cannot unravel the riddle in the Nigerian academia. The systematic erosion of the system started long before he joined the academia and it has been going on ever since. He wants NUC to sanction Owerri for making Pantami a Professor. May be his knowledge of our university laws and the various statutes is limited. so also his understanding of the level of autonomy universities have vis a vis NUC. A University can decide to appoint an individual to a position either through promotion or straight appointment based on the criteria they set up indipendent of NUC. We that spent our working lives in in the First generation universities cannot comprehend the happenings in the new universities. Most of our Senior lecturers with little prospects of becoming Professors have migrated to newer universities and became Professors. NUC does not create professorial Chairs or determine the mode of appointment of a Professor. If I were to cite cases that would surprise Kperogi, I would write a book. Yet the cases are legally right. One may disagree with the criteria for such appointments or promotions but cannot challenge their legality. It may erode the status of professors who had to obtain their promotion through the British system where you had only one Professor and Head of Department, others had to wait until he retired or died or until a new chair is created, but what obtains now is legal and cannot be challenged by NUC or Ministry of Education until a Bill giving them the powers are passed by the National Assembly and is accented by the President. Kperogi should be familiar with the US system having been there and may be still teaching there. In many disciplines, especially the technology or professional areas such as Architecture, Engineering, Medicine, Fine Arts etc. an individual who has made tremendous contribution to the discipline by his practical work may be offered and invited to occupy a chair without ever teaching in a university. Harvard Graduate School of Design is known to practice, unless it has been discontinued. But as of 1990 I witnessed it. Great Architects from Japan, Latin America and Europe, whose command of English left a lot to be desired were invited to occupy profesdorial chairs. Their mastery of the practical skills in their areas was in no doubt. Let those who obtain professorship by writing papers and publishing in peer reviewed journals, get their professorship by writing about these practical men and their works, but they remain men of creativity and skills. Even in Nigeria I was a witness to one such incidents in University of Lagos, whose system of assessment for Professorship involved the hosting the assessors to do the work insitu. Architect Godwin of Godwin and Hopwood fame decided to retire from practice and impart knowledge to young Nigerians. Unilag offered him Senior Lecturership. He declined and instead that he applied for a professorial position. Take itbor leave it. I was invited among others to do the work insitu and interact with the candidate during the process. You see, I respect professors from Lagos more than most other Universities because of this format in their assessment. You will read all what he claimed to have published while you stayed in the University Guesthouse. During the interaction session you will know whether he actually wrote these papers or was it communal effort where academics do the so called group research and publications, when in fact is one talented individual who did the work and understood what went on and was willing to help colleagues come along by putting their names on the paper? You will also assess the quality of the journal, was it really a referred journal or was it like let say "Samaru Journal of Architecture" vol. 1 no 1. where group of academics cutting accross many universities in the country in a particular discipline will float a journal and pressure the University to accept it as a refreed journal through intimidation by ASUU? Let me go back to Arc. Godwin's case. Some of the assessors took a stand similar to that of Kperogi on how Professors were made. But with my Harvard experience of 1990 when I went on Sabbatical I cited cases and names of practicing architects with no University teaching experience occupying a Chair. I also cited the case of my Hungarian colleague who was recruited at ABU as a LECTURER I, but who had been a star architect in Hungary winning a lot of national and international competitions just looking for an outlet from the suffocation by the then Communist system of his country, by taking a contract in ABU Department of Architecture. From Zaria he applied for a professorship when it was advertised in Alabama State University and got appointed, by 1990 we linked up in USA he was already the Dean of Architecture in Auburn for some years and was about to move to Pennsylvania State University as the Dean of the Architecture School, a more prestigious school. His mastery of English still left a lot to be desired for a Dean in a highly rated school of architecture. His publications in architectural theory consisted of numerous miniature sketches with annotations. A very novel and unique way of transmitting ideas in the academia. Kperogi can check it up if he is interested. His name was Peter Mygar. With my superior argument backed up by facts the other assessors holding similar arguments to Kperogi gave up. So Lagos was lucky to get a Professor with practical skills and knowledge. I am not saying that Pantami can fit into the examples that I gave, but that Kperogi should be flexible in assessing an issue, as an intellectual when faced with a situation. Unfortunately, the journalist in him usually takes over when he hears or sees things. He wants to be the one with the "breaking news" and the Front page story. I rest my case.

saferoom:
Anyone who thinks Nigeria can break in the next 100 years is just deceiving himself. Because most times the person who shows you love is someone from another tribe than your own tribe.
Yoruba and Igbo people in FUTO gave professorship to Fulani man. Professor Kperogi who is same tribe with Patami is strongly against it.

Pantami is from a minority tribe in Gombe State while Kperogi is from a minority in Niger
or Kwara State, the only thing connecting them is their religion; Islam!

In my personal opinion, Patami should have been given the Professorship by the university he was teaching before becoming a Minister not a place he has never taught

In2systemsTech:
There are basically three legitimate ways to become a professor: by climbing the professional ladder in a university; by being appointed to the position from outside academia in recognition of vast and varied industry experience or artistic wizardly in a field; and through a courtesy appointment. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s record does not qualify him for any.
Let’s start with the first. Pantami’s undergraduate degree in computer science from the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, was earned in 2003. That’s less than 20 years ago. When he started his academic career as a Graduate Assistant at ATBU in 2004, the computer science department that awarded him his bachelor’s degree rejected him because his degree was “weak”; he was instead employed in the Information Technology section of the Faculty of Management where he also got his master’s degree in 2010/2011 and got promoted to Assistant Lecturer.
In 2011, he got the Petroleum Trust Fund Development (PTDF) scholarship to study for a PhD at the Department of Management in the Aberdeen Business School of Robert Gordon University, which he earned in August 2014.
Upon his return to ATBU, he was promoted to Lecturer 1—skipping one rank. He requested to be promoted to Senior Lecturer but was denied because he had insufficient publication record to justify his request. He resigned in protest and took up an appointment at the Salafist, male-Muslim-only Islamic University of Madinah as an Assistant Professor of Information Science.
In 2016, he accepted a government appointment as DG of NITDA and has never returned to academia since then.
Now, three criteria are used to promote academics: teaching, research, and service. Pantami’s entire university teaching record is less than 10 years—if you consider that he never taught either at ATBU or at Robert Gordon University (although he lied that he did during his senate confirmation hearing) during his three years of doctoral studies.
His research output is even more underwhelming. Although he brags about having “over 160 publications,” his actual scholarly output is really thin for someone who wants to be a professor. When I checked SCOPUS, the well-regarded database of top-level, peer-reviewed academic journals, using his legal name, that is, Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantami is the name of his neighborhood in Gombe town, which he doesn’t legally bear), only three articles and one citation came up.
Of the three articles, he is the single author of one (which is actually only a 2-page country report) and a distant co-author in two. All three articles were published between 2018 and 2019 while he’s in government.
But SCOPUS can be unjustifiably exclusionary, so I looked him up on Google Scholar, a more expansive and laissez faire database of scholarly articles and books. He has exactly 10 articles and 39 citations there. Of the 10 articles, he is the first or sole author of 5 and a “tag-me-along” co-author of 5.
Sadly, at least 5 of his 10 articles are in dubious, pay-to-play, predatory journals that would destroy the academic career of any scholar in a serious country. Most of the articles were accepted and published in the same month that they were submitted! Since peer review typically takes months, the articles were clearly not peer-reviewed.
Evidence of a lack of peer review is evident in the fact that several of the articles are riddled with avoidable proofreading and grammatical errors. Plus, many of them, such as one that was basically an unimaginative 7-page rehash of publicly available facts about NAFDAC, are flat-out scholarly scams that a serious undergraduate won’t even be caught committing.
He published only two scholarly articles—in 2013 (from his PhD thesis) and in 2015—before he came to government, which explains why ATBU refused to promote him to senior lectureship. By 2014 when he wanted to be a Senior Lecturer, he had only one notable publication.
There is no serious university in the world that can legitimately promote a former Lecturer I (at ATBU) or an Assistant Professor (at the Islamic University of Madinah) overnight to the position of professor with only 10 substandard publications in predatory journals and 39 citations. The minimum number of publications required to be promoted to professorship in most Nigerian universities is 15. A professor should ideally have at least 100 citations.
Plus, Pantami didn’t spend up to a year as Lecturer I. Nigerian academics are required to spend at least 3 years in a rank. Three years as a Lecturer I, 3 years as a Senior Lecturer, and 3 years as a Reader would give you 9 years. That means he needs to spend at least 9 years in the university after his ministerial appointment— and publish a few more articles— to be qualified for promotion to professor. In Saudi Arabia, it would require at least 8 more years.
(Of course, if he was actually employed by FUTO that “promoted” him, his unmerited professorship wouldn’t have attracted any notice since there are several such examples of perversions of traditions all over Nigerian universities. It’s the absurdity of being promoted to a professor at and by a university he was never affiliated with while he’s a serving minister that made the fraud stick out like a sore thumb.)
Also note that Pantami’s PhD is in management, a social science discipline, not in computer science or cybersecurity. So, it’s doubly fraudulent that he has been “promoted” to the professorship of a discipline he didn’t study or publish in extensively.
His doctoral dissertation, titled “A theoretical and empirical investigation of the barriers to the adoption of state-of-the-art information systems by Nigerian indigenous oil companies,” which is freely available on the Internet, is basically a survey of employees of Nigerian oil companies on their perceptions of IT policies in their places of employment. It’s a social scientific study that any political science, sociology, or economics graduate can conduct.
Now that I have established that he can’t legitimately be a professor anywhere in the world on the basis of his scholarship and pedagogy, can he be appointed a professor on the strength of his industry experience? No! The only other job Pantami has ever done outside of government and his less than 10 years of university teaching is being the Imam of ATBU. He has never invented any cybersecurity patent and has never worked in a cybersecurity company.
The only discipline that can validly appoint him as a professor of practice is Islamic Studies. Say what you may about him, he is one of northern Nigeria’s most prodigious and consequential Islamic exegetes. His oeuvre in Islamic exegesis is unquestionably worthy of a professorial appointment in Islamic jurisprudence. That’s the path of least resistance he should have taken since he desperately desires to be addressed as a professor.
In defense of Pantami’s professorial fraud, one Professor Tukur Sa’ad hashed over a litany of people who became professors without terminal degrees and without prior teaching experience, as if I didn’t already make that point and called it an example of what we call a “professor of practice” in American academe.
In my December 20, 2015 column titled “A Comparison of Everyday University Vocabularies in Nigeria, America, and Britain (II),” I gave an even more dramatic example than Sa’ad’s in the late Maya Angelou who was a lifetime endowed professor of American literature at Wake Forest University but who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree.
Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and a host of other literary icons didn’t have—and didn’t need to have—a PhD to become professors. Apart from the fact that they didn’t climb the professorial mountain from the top (they started from lectureship), their path-breaking and prodigiously creative outputs are equivalent to—and in some cases exceed—a PhD.
In North American universities, it's called "Research and Creative Activity" for a reason. Wole Soyinka, Achebe, JP Clark, etc. had vast and varied oeuvres in "creative activity" before they became professors. Plus, during their time, the possession of a PhD was not a requirement to move through the academic hierarchy.
Pantami does not come even remotely close to their record in the field FUTO awarded him a fraudulent professorship. In any case, Soyinka, Achebe, etc. taught at the universities where they were professors. Pantami is a serving minister.
How about a courtesy professorship? Pantami isn’t qualified for that, either. A courtesy professorship is a professorial appointment given to distinguished professors at other universities who need not be at the universities that appointed them.
It’s called an “honorary professor” in some UK universities, an “extraordinary professor” in South African universities, and a “professor-at-large” in others. It’s basically an honor given to people who’re already professors elsewhere, so you can’t become a courtesy professor at another university if you are not already one somewhere else.
Some people said Pantami’s “achievements” as a minister are worthy of a professorial appointment. Haha! OK, so people who imagine themselves to be successful in whatever they do should now apply to FUTO for a Pantamized fraudfessorship to aggrandize their insecure egos?
Look, I’m calling out Pantami’s professorial fraud not in spite of my being a Muslim and his friend but because I’m a Muslim and his friend. My father, who was a Hafiz like him, would disown me if I ignored or gave comfort to fraud.


farooqkperogi

https://web.facebook.com/farooqkperogi

saferoom:
Anyone who thinks Nigeria can break in the next 100 years is just deceiving himself. Because most times the person who shows you love is someone from another tribe than your own tribe.
Yoruba and Igbo people in FUTO gave professorship to Fulani man. Professor Kperogi who is same tribe with Patami is strongly against it.

In my personal opinion, Patami should have been given the Professorship by the university he was teaching before becoming a Minister not a place he has never taught

saferoom:
Anyone who thinks Nigeria can break in the next 100 years is just deceiving himself. Because most times the person who shows you love is someone from another tribe than your own tribe.
Yoruba and Igbo people in FUTO gave professorship to Fulani man. Professor Kperogi who is same tribe with Patami is strongly against it.


In my personal opinion, Patami should have been given the Professorship by the university he was teaching before becoming a Minister not a place he has never taught

BluForce:
We are recruiting both new and experienced content writers to join our Creative Writing Hub.

In2systemsTech:
There are basically three legitimate ways to become a professor: by climbing the professional ladder in a university; by being appointed to the position from outside academia in recognition of vast and varied industry experience or artistic wizardly in a field; and through a courtesy appointment. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s record does not qualify him for any.
Let’s start with the first. Pantami’s undergraduate degree in computer science from the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, was earned in 2003. That’s less than 20 years ago. When he started his academic career as a Graduate Assistant at ATBU in 2004, the computer science department that awarded him his bachelor’s degree rejected him because his degree was “weak”; he was instead employed in the Information Technology section of the Faculty of Management where he also got his master’s degree in 2010/2011 and got promoted to Assistant Lecturer.
In 2011, he got the Petroleum Trust Fund Development (PTDF) scholarship to study for a PhD at the Department of Management in the Aberdeen Business School of Robert Gordon University, which he earned in August 2014.
Upon his return to ATBU, he was promoted to Lecturer 1—skipping one rank. He requested to be promoted to Senior Lecturer but was denied because he had insufficient publication record to justify his request. He resigned in protest and took up an appointment at the Salafist, male-Muslim-only Islamic University of Madinah as an Assistant Professor of Information Science.
In 2016, he accepted a government appointment as DG of NITDA and has never returned to academia since then.
Now, three criteria are used to promote academics: teaching, research, and service. Pantami’s entire university teaching record is less than 10 years—if you consider that he never taught either at ATBU or at Robert Gordon University (although he lied that he did during his senate confirmation hearing) during his three years of doctoral studies.
His research output is even more underwhelming. Although he brags about having “over 160 publications,” his actual scholarly output is really thin for someone who wants to be a professor. When I checked SCOPUS, the well-regarded database of top-level, peer-reviewed academic journals, using his legal name, that is, Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantami is the name of his neighborhood in Gombe town, which he doesn’t legally bear), only three articles and one citation came up.
Of the three articles, he is the single author of one (which is actually only a 2-page country report) and a distant co-author in two. All three articles were published between 2018 and 2019 while he’s in government.
But SCOPUS can be unjustifiably exclusionary, so I looked him up on Google Scholar, a more expansive and laissez faire database of scholarly articles and books. He has exactly 10 articles and 39 citations there. Of the 10 articles, he is the first or sole author of 5 and a “tag-me-along” co-author of 5.
Sadly, at least 5 of his 10 articles are in dubious, pay-to-play, predatory journals that would destroy the academic career of any scholar in a serious country. Most of the articles were accepted and published in the same month that they were submitted! Since peer review typically takes months, the articles were clearly not peer-reviewed.
Evidence of a lack of peer review is evident in the fact that several of the articles are riddled with avoidable proofreading and grammatical errors. Plus, many of them, such as one that was basically an unimaginative 7-page rehash of publicly available facts about NAFDAC, are flat-out scholarly scams that a serious undergraduate won’t even be caught committing.
He published only two scholarly articles—in 2013 (from his PhD thesis) and in 2015—before he came to government, which explains why ATBU refused to promote him to senior lectureship. By 2014 when he wanted to be a Senior Lecturer, he had only one notable publication.
There is no serious university in the world that can legitimately promote a former Lecturer I (at ATBU) or an Assistant Professor (at the Islamic University of Madinah) overnight to the position of professor with only 10 substandard publications in predatory journals and 39 citations. The minimum number of publications required to be promoted to professorship in most Nigerian universities is 15. A professor should ideally have at least 100 citations.
Plus, Pantami didn’t spend up to a year as Lecturer I. Nigerian academics are required to spend at least 3 years in a rank. Three years as a Lecturer I, 3 years as a Senior Lecturer, and 3 years as a Reader would give you 9 years. That means he needs to spend at least 9 years in the university after his ministerial appointment— and publish a few more articles— to be qualified for promotion to professor. In Saudi Arabia, it would require at least 8 more years.
(Of course, if he was actually employed by FUTO that “promoted” him, his unmerited professorship wouldn’t have attracted any notice since there are several such examples of perversions of traditions all over Nigerian universities. It’s the absurdity of being promoted to a professor at and by a university he was never affiliated with while he’s a serving minister that made the fraud stick out like a sore thumb.)
Also note that Pantami’s PhD is in management, a social science discipline, not in computer science or cybersecurity. So, it’s doubly fraudulent that he has been “promoted” to the professorship of a discipline he didn’t study or publish in extensively.
His doctoral dissertation, titled “A theoretical and empirical investigation of the barriers to the adoption of state-of-the-art information systems by Nigerian indigenous oil companies,” which is freely available on the Internet, is basically a survey of employees of Nigerian oil companies on their perceptions of IT policies in their places of employment. It’s a social scientific study that any political science, sociology, or economics graduate can conduct.
Now that I have established that he can’t legitimately be a professor anywhere in the world on the basis of his scholarship and pedagogy, can he be appointed a professor on the strength of his industry experience? No! The only other job Pantami has ever done outside of government and his less than 10 years of university teaching is being the Imam of ATBU. He has never invented any cybersecurity patent and has never worked in a cybersecurity company.
The only discipline that can validly appoint him as a professor of practice is Islamic Studies. Say what you may about him, he is one of northern Nigeria’s most prodigious and consequential Islamic exegetes. His oeuvre in Islamic exegesis is unquestionably worthy of a professorial appointment in Islamic jurisprudence. That’s the path of least resistance he should have taken since he desperately desires to be addressed as a professor.
In defense of Pantami’s professorial fraud, one Professor Tukur Sa’ad hashed over a litany of people who became professors without terminal degrees and without prior teaching experience, as if I didn’t already make that point and called it an example of what we call a “professor of practice” in American academe.
In my December 20, 2015 column titled “A Comparison of Everyday University Vocabularies in Nigeria, America, and Britain (II),” I gave an even more dramatic example than Sa’ad’s in the late Maya Angelou who was a lifetime endowed professor of American literature at Wake Forest University but who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree.
Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and a host of other literary icons didn’t have—and didn’t need to have—a PhD to become professors. Apart from the fact that they didn’t climb the professorial mountain from the top (they started from lectureship), their path-breaking and prodigiously creative outputs are equivalent to—and in some cases exceed—a PhD.
In North American universities, it's called "Research and Creative Activity" for a reason. Wole Soyinka, Achebe, JP Clark, etc. had vast and varied oeuvres in "creative activity" before they became professors. Plus, during their time, the possession of a PhD was not a requirement to move through the academic hierarchy.
Pantami does not come even remotely close to their record in the field FUTO awarded him a fraudulent professorship. In any case, Soyinka, Achebe, etc. taught at the universities where they were professors. Pantami is a serving minister.
How about a courtesy professorship? Pantami isn’t qualified for that, either. A courtesy professorship is a professorial appointment given to distinguished professors at other universities who need not be at the universities that appointed them.
It’s called an “honorary professor” in some UK universities, an “extraordinary professor” in South African universities, and a “professor-at-large” in others. It’s basically an honor given to people who’re already professors elsewhere, so you can’t become a courtesy professor at another university if you are not already one somewhere else.
Some people said Pantami’s “achievements” as a minister are worthy of a professorial appointment. Haha! OK, so people who imagine themselves to be successful in whatever they do should now apply to FUTO for a Pantamized fraudfessorship to aggrandize their insecure egos?
Look, I’m calling out Pantami’s professorial fraud not in spite of my being a Muslim and his friend but because I’m a Muslim and his friend. My father, who was a Hafiz like him, would disown me if I ignored or gave comfort to fraud.


farooqkperogi

https://web.facebook.com/farooqkperogi

Coronabirus:
It is shameful how u accepted the shit written by Kperogi & others without any conscience. Pantami is first class graduate. A university lecturer under study leave is entitled for promotion during the course of his leave because study leave is equally a research so the acclaimed argument is invalid. After finishing his PhD, he was supposed to come back to ATBU due to "bond" but Madina university sent a request begging for his services which later granted by ATBU. Serious international Universities attend PhD students project presentation and hire them by entitcing them with good handsome offer, that was how they saw him.
The claim that some research portal only has few of his publication is baseless and sound like a laziness for them to have failed to fetch his journal publications. Pantami has 15 National and International Journal publications which are worthy enough to make any reader a Professor. Go and check the number of his Journal publications on research gate and you will know that he is above most of Professors from the dept u graduated, go and check. If u are not Science and Technology based then forget it.
Go and see the profile of Wole Soyinka when he became Professor and all ur professors at the time they became one and compare it with Pantami's.

I'm a university lecturer with knowledge of how things work not bear parlour analysis!

bestman09:

Very shameful. Ass licking by a federal university. Because of money!

BTW, why didn't he apply to Gombe state university or Bayero university, kano?

bestman09:

Very shameful. Ass licking by a federal university. Because of money!

BTW, why didn't he apply to Gombe state university or Bayero university, kano?

fergie0o1:
•Says: He applied for the post, passed assessments
•He gave Isa Ali Ibrahim as his name
•ASUU begins probe



Nigerian Tribune

lalasticlala mynd44

In2systemsTech:
There are basically three legitimate ways to become a professor: by climbing the professional ladder in a university; by being appointed to the position from outside academia in recognition of vast and varied industry experience or artistic wizardly in a field; and through a courtesy appointment. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s record does not qualify him for any.
Let’s start with the first. Pantami’s undergraduate degree in computer science from the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, was earned in 2003. That’s less than 20 years ago. When he started his academic career as a Graduate Assistant at ATBU in 2004, the computer science department that awarded him his bachelor’s degree rejected him because his degree was “weak”; he was instead employed in the Information Technology section of the Faculty of Management where he also got his master’s degree in 2010/2011 and got promoted to Assistant Lecturer.
In 2011, he got the Petroleum Trust Fund Development (PTDF) scholarship to study for a PhD at the Department of Management in the Aberdeen Business School of Robert Gordon University, which he earned in August 2014.
Upon his return to ATBU, he was promoted to Lecturer 1—skipping one rank. He requested to be promoted to Senior Lecturer but was denied because he had insufficient publication record to justify his request. He resigned in protest and took up an appointment at the Salafist, male-Muslim-only Islamic University of Madinah as an Assistant Professor of Information Science.
In 2016, he accepted a government appointment as DG of NITDA and has never returned to academia since then.
Now, three criteria are used to promote academics: teaching, research, and service. Pantami’s entire university teaching record is less than 10 years—if you consider that he never taught either at ATBU or at Robert Gordon University (although he lied that he did during his senate confirmation hearing) during his three years of doctoral studies.
His research output is even more underwhelming. Although he brags about having “over 160 publications,” his actual scholarly output is really thin for someone who wants to be a professor. When I checked SCOPUS, the well-regarded database of top-level, peer-reviewed academic journals, using his legal name, that is, Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantami is the name of his neighborhood in Gombe town, which he doesn’t legally bear), only three articles and one citation came up.
Of the three articles, he is the single author of one (which is actually only a 2-page country report) and a distant co-author in two. All three articles were published between 2018 and 2019 while he’s in government.
But SCOPUS can be unjustifiably exclusionary, so I looked him up on Google Scholar, a more expansive and laissez faire database of scholarly articles and books. He has exactly 10 articles and 39 citations there. Of the 10 articles, he is the first or sole author of 5 and a “tag-me-along” co-author of 5.
Sadly, at least 5 of his 10 articles are in dubious, pay-to-play, predatory journals that would destroy the academic career of any scholar in a serious country. Most of the articles were accepted and published in the same month that they were submitted! Since peer review typically takes months, the articles were clearly not peer-reviewed.
Evidence of a lack of peer review is evident in the fact that several of the articles are riddled with avoidable proofreading and grammatical errors. Plus, many of them, such as one that was basically an unimaginative 7-page rehash of publicly available facts about NAFDAC, are flat-out scholarly scams that a serious undergraduate won’t even be caught committing.
He published only two scholarly articles—in 2013 (from his PhD thesis) and in 2015—before he came to government, which explains why ATBU refused to promote him to senior lectureship. By 2014 when he wanted to be a Senior Lecturer, he had only one notable publication.
There is no serious university in the world that can legitimately promote a former Lecturer I (at ATBU) or an Assistant Professor (at the Islamic University of Madinah) overnight to the position of professor with only 10 substandard publications in predatory journals and 39 citations. The minimum number of publications required to be promoted to professorship in most Nigerian universities is 15. A professor should ideally have at least 100 citations.
Plus, Pantami didn’t spend up to a year as Lecturer I. Nigerian academics are required to spend at least 3 years in a rank. Three years as a Lecturer I, 3 years as a Senior Lecturer, and 3 years as a Reader would give you 9 years. That means he needs to spend at least 9 years in the university after his ministerial appointment— and publish a few more articles— to be qualified for promotion to professor. In Saudi Arabia, it would require at least 8 more years.
(Of course, if he was actually employed by FUTO that “promoted” him, his unmerited professorship wouldn’t have attracted any notice since there are several such examples of perversions of traditions all over Nigerian universities. It’s the absurdity of being promoted to a professor at and by a university he was never affiliated with while he’s a serving minister that made the fraud stick out like a sore thumb.)
Also note that Pantami’s PhD is in management, a social science discipline, not in computer science or cybersecurity. So, it’s doubly fraudulent that he has been “promoted” to the professorship of a discipline he didn’t study or publish in extensively.
His doctoral dissertation, titled “A theoretical and empirical investigation of the barriers to the adoption of state-of-the-art information systems by Nigerian indigenous oil companies,” which is freely available on the Internet, is basically a survey of employees of Nigerian oil companies on their perceptions of IT policies in their places of employment. It’s a social scientific study that any political science, sociology, or economics graduate can conduct.
Now that I have established that he can’t legitimately be a professor anywhere in the world on the basis of his scholarship and pedagogy, can he be appointed a professor on the strength of his industry experience? No! The only other job Pantami has ever done outside of government and his less than 10 years of university teaching is being the Imam of ATBU. He has never invented any cybersecurity patent and has never worked in a cybersecurity company.
The only discipline that can validly appoint him as a professor of practice is Islamic Studies. Say what you may about him, he is one of northern Nigeria’s most prodigious and consequential Islamic exegetes. His oeuvre in Islamic exegesis is unquestionably worthy of a professorial appointment in Islamic jurisprudence. That’s the path of least resistance he should have taken since he desperately desires to be addressed as a professor.
In defense of Pantami’s professorial fraud, one Professor Tukur Sa’ad hashed over a litany of people who became professors without terminal degrees and without prior teaching experience, as if I didn’t already make that point and called it an example of what we call a “professor of practice” in American academe.
In my December 20, 2015 column titled “A Comparison of Everyday University Vocabularies in Nigeria, America, and Britain (II),” I gave an even more dramatic example than Sa’ad’s in the late Maya Angelou who was a lifetime endowed professor of American literature at Wake Forest University but who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree.
Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and a host of other literary icons didn’t have—and didn’t need to have—a PhD to become professors. Apart from the fact that they didn’t climb the professorial mountain from the top (they started from lectureship), their path-breaking and prodigiously creative outputs are equivalent to—and in some cases exceed—a PhD.
In North American universities, it's called "Research and Creative Activity" for a reason. Wole Soyinka, Achebe, JP Clark, etc. had vast and varied oeuvres in "creative activity" before they became professors. Plus, during their time, the possession of a PhD was not a requirement to move through the academic hierarchy.
Pantami does not come even remotely close to their record in the field FUTO awarded him a fraudulent professorship. In any case, Soyinka, Achebe, etc. taught at the universities where they were professors. Pantami is a serving minister.
How about a courtesy professorship? Pantami isn’t qualified for that, either. A courtesy professorship is a professorial appointment given to distinguished professors at other universities who need not be at the universities that appointed them.
It’s called an “honorary professor” in some UK universities, an “extraordinary professor” in South African universities, and a “professor-at-large” in others. It’s basically an honor given to people who’re already professors elsewhere, so you can’t become a courtesy professor at another university if you are not already one somewhere else.
Some people said Pantami’s “achievements” as a minister are worthy of a professorial appointment. Haha! OK, so people who imagine themselves to be successful in whatever they do should now apply to FUTO for a Pantamized fraudfessorship to aggrandize their insecure egos?
Look, I’m calling out Pantami’s professorial fraud not in spite of my being a Muslim and his friend but because I’m a Muslim and his friend. My father, who was a Hafiz like him, would disown me if I ignored or gave comfort to fraud.


farooqkperogi

https://web.facebook.com/farooqkperogi

CSTRR:
At least at the elite level where it matters.

As long as hausas are at the top of the political food chain, Igbo elites will serve them.
They will serve anybody really.

As long as you have money and opportunity to offer.

saferoom:
Anyone who thinks Nigeria can break in the next 100 years is just deceiving himself. Because most times the person who shows you love is someone from another tribe than your own tribe.
Yoruba and Igbo people in FUTO gave professorship to Fulani man. Professor Kperogi who is same tribe with Patami is strongly against it.


In my personal opinion, Patami should have been given the Professorship by the university he was teaching before becoming a Minister not a place he has never taught

zoedew:
He is on a mission! You can take that to the bank! He will fail though, In Jesus Name!! If Islam and its adherents won’t live and let live The Most High God will incapacitate them in Jesus Name!!! Best to live and let live rather than planning evil schemes to subjugate others with a view to Islamising them. Islam is an either or proposition. Islam takes no prisoners. Unlike Christianity it does not give room for other belief systems. It does not tolerate an adherent choosing to no longer be a Muslim- death is pronounced! It is not designed to coexist with other belief systems. Unfortunately the West is too far gone in its disregard for God it can’t see the unfolding scenario put in place by Islam. I sincerely pray and hope it won’t be too late for the Western society. Belgium might become Belgistan in the fashion of Afghanistan et al.

Ammishaddai:
The academia in Nigeria under the sway of corruption. Such a shame