THE GREAT ZIK DIDN'T LEARN WELL FROM HISTORY. MY BROTHER IS NOW THE VICE CHANCELLOR OF UNN!
By Ikem Okuhu.

His Excellency, the Rt Hon. Dr Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe, one of the most illustrious sons of Nigeria, was indeed didn't learn well from history . With all the wisdom he deployed to steer our country Nigeria from colonial rule to independence in 1960, Zik did many foolish things and I think my people have made up their minds to tell him so, even as he rests in his grave.

Don’t get me wrong!

If you wish, do!

I really do not care. But I don’t know how else to interpret the caustic, obtuse rhetoric emanating from a lot of my otherwise educated, enlightened and well-travelled brothers and sisters since it was announced that, contrary to wide expectations and wild hopes, a professor of Nsukka extraction was not announced as Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria Nsukka. And there is no other way to sum these interpretation of the outcome of the VC-ship contest than to conclude our people have all along thought Zik was stupid to have abandoned his native Onitsha to site this Great University in Nsukka.

I am an Nsukka man. I left the area for the first time in my early 20s after graduating from the University of Nigeria Nsukka. So from every angle you might look at it, I am strongly connected to this Nigeria’s foremost institution of higher learning. I want the best for my people. I want the best for the University of Nigeria and it was for this reason that I joined forces with former students of the Department of Mass Communication of this University in a bid to build a befitting, world-class structure for the department that formed all of us.
But I cannot do this at the expense of the larger need to foster oneness and remaining sensitive to the larger environment in which we all live and operate.

Expectations was high in the run-up to the VC election process and it all seemed that the magic wand that’d reverse the infrastructure decay and regression in the quality of graduates turnd out from the school can only happen with an Nsukka VC on the saddle. You don’t visit the Social Media without being inundated with conversations around this great hope. It was so bad that many lifted their rhetoric to predictions and then fact. The night before the announcement of the new VC, I saw many posts already celebrating one of the contestants who ended up not even making the top three, with people capturing their hopes as BREAKING NEWS.

What this did was morph what was mere dreams of many people into morbid entitlement mindset, the consequence of which was frustration, hate and unpardonable clannish thinking even by very highly respectable ones, many of whom rose to high positions on the back of merit and broadmindedness of people not from their place of origin.

Zik was stupid. How could he not have seen that the day would come when the people in whose land he sited what was once Africa’s greatest university would one day begin to express hate that someone from his own side of same Igbo land was made a Vice Chancellor at a time the “land owners” had desired same position. Zik never learned from history. Same fate befell him when he elected to contest the parliamentary position in the south west, thinking we were all one Nigeria, only to have the rug pulled from under him by defecting members of his political party, the NCNC. Had he disposed himself to learning from this experience, he probably would have anticipated the current conversation around the VC-ship of UNN and sited the institution in Onitsha or nearly Ogidi, Atani or even Ihiala.

I have read a number of people express their views on this. I have seen their arguments. While the most intelligent of them claim that only a Vice Chancellor from Nsukka can and will reverse the shameful decay in the university, the rest merely want the bragging rights of having their kin as VC.

But let us ask the core question: Is it true that only an Nsukka person will reverse UNN’s totally unacceptable decay? I am not sure the answer is a certain “yes”. And I will draw from a few examples. The best Vice Chancellor this university has had since I began to hear and understand stories around this great institution from my father and an uncle who worked in the university, was Prof Frank Ndili. He initiated most of the projects currently uncompleted in the university. He envisioned the Nnamdi Azikiwe Library, the biggest of such in Africa at the time. Not sure there has been a bigger one. He foresaw the growth of the university and initiated the Franco Hostels project. He initiated many other projects and was set to continue when a group, later known as The Nine Professors began a flurry of petitions and protests that saw the end of his tenure.

Prof Ndili is from Delta State, then Bendel State. He is not from Nsukka.

Prof Ndili’s exit opened the gates for the decadence. Prof Chimere Ikoku sat through his tenure like he did not know what was going on. Prof Oleka Udelala was accused of corruption and had running battles with the Student Union Government until he left. Prof Umaru Gomwalk, a Sole Administrator that was brought in 1995 spent his days infusing military style management into the university system and although he did not stay long, lecturers quickly acquired this trait and had behaved much the same way every since.
Since Gomwalk, a man who rebuilt the Akanu Ibiam Stadium only for it to collapse not long after, the whole lot of the Vice Chancellors in UNN have been worse than vandals, stripping the institution of all its most valuable assets which are honour, dignity and academic excellence. UNN became a diary cow to be milked by any person who finds himself in charge. From departments, through faculties to the VC’s office’ from refectories to porters and spanning all levels of support non-academic staff, the rot was pandemic and it became clear that a University VC is a political position where billions could be made at the expense of propriety and good conscience.

This last Vice Chancellor spent his five years in a hail of allegations of corruption and abandonment of due process. Rumours were rife about the employment racket in the institution where people were said to have “purchased” jobs for as much as N1.5 million many of our people did not complain against this terribly flawed process, perhaps because, as I later learned, more than 47 percent of beneficiaries were from Nsukka.

If, as many believe, this outgoing Vice Chancellor was poor in performance, have we conducted any audit to determine how many of our Nsukka sons and daughters were complicit?

The second example, I beg all readers, will be drawn from outside the UNN environment even as it is quite relevant. During the 2011 Presidential elections, a lot of people had expected the then candidate of the PDP, President Goodluck Jonathan to take very personal, the job of lifting his Niger Delta region in the areas of infrastructure and general sense of connection to the Nigerian nation. But Jonathan, from Bayelsa State, won the elections and could not do anything either in his home state or in the wider South South region apart from a big hotel his wife erected in Yenagoa, the state capital. The politically vexed East-West road was never touched and the Nigeria Delta University he sited in Otuoke made records as the only university where the number or those in the non0academic staff outnumbered the total student population.

It is worrying that we are not strategic in any of our conversations around political issues. I have seen a number of “saints” of Nsukka origin make veiled and open reference to the Enugu State Governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi as responsible for the failure of Nsukka to produce the UNN VC. These saints with all their halos of wretched anointing failed to see how difficult it was going to be for anybody to perform the magic of driving the interest of Nsukka people when at the onset of the VC-ship contest, more than 60 Nsukka professors threw their hats, hoods and gowns in the ring, each desiring the position.

I think we need to be a lot more strategic. We also need to guard our utterances. The bile spewed from my Nsukka brothers against our brothers from Anambra and other parts of Igbo land since this loss is frightening. I am not sure any one f them is aware that the Vice Chancellor of Federal University of Agriculture, Umudike, is an Nsukka man. Prof Edoga is from Eha Afifi (Eha Imuhu). I am wondering what would have been the reaction of my people if Umudike people had protested his selection on the basis of where he came from and the fact that no Umudike son or daughter had been VC of the university in their town before.

The energy people have dissipated in moaning and mourning a loss they could never have determined its potential, had it gone the other way, would have been channeled towards engaging the eventual winner constructively on how to arrest the regression that UNN has been made to undergo over the past two decades or so. The new Vice Chancellor, a man who came to Nsukka as a young boy and who rose to the position from a very lowly position in the non-academic section of UNN should be as much an Nsukka person as any other. People should think of how best to make him work for the good of the university instead of compelling him, through parochial, sectional rhetoric, to realize how distant he has always been from a people in whose land he transformed from an ordinary lab hand to an extraordinary egghead..

This is still possible.

And let me also say this here: if in the next five years, 60 of Nsukka professors line up for just one Vice Chancellorship position in UNN, an outsider will most likely still take it.
House cleaning is important. But more important is the love in our hearts for one and all and the strategic thinking in our heads to fashion the “How-Bests” in making something out of difficult circumstances and the tactical deftness in our hands to be seen to not be spinning hate of potentially xenophobic proportions, masking our latent inability to compete.

Am confused

And the point is...??

The problem of Igbo is Igbo ZIK sited a university in nsuka n not Onitsha now makes him spupid. what if he had sited it in IMO or ebonyi he would have been term mad. Una get problem cos if u guys hate yourselves this way, then I pity other tribes that have dealing with u guys

From mbaise indeginouse bishop bruhaha to nsuka indigenous vc which way my people?

kelib:
The problem of Igbo is Igbo ZIK sited a university in nsuka n not Onitsha now makes him spupid. what if he had sited it in IMO or ebonyi he would have been term mad. Una get problem cos if u guys hate yourselves this way, then I pity other tribes that have dealing with u guys

Very ignorant comment as usual.When the Obas in the other ethnic group were busy throwing jabs at one another,nobody talked about them hating themselves.Now people are airing their God given right to their opinions,it has become they hate themselves.Even in families all over the world people quarrel among themselves.When an Igbo man disagrees with his brother,it becomes they hate themselves.You guys should just quit this your complex.People wanting leaders to come from their own ethnic group, state or even clan is not peculiar to any ethnic group.It happens everywhere in Nigeria.It is a reflection of the sorry state of the Nigerian nation.A psyche that we all should expunge.

kelib:
The problem of Igbo is Igbo ZIK sited a university in nsuka n not Onitsha now makes him spupid. what if he had sited it in IMO or ebonyi he would have been term mad. Una get problem cos if u guys hate yourselves this way, then I pity other tribes that have dealing with u guys

Awo was from Ogun, but sited Great Ife in Osun State. His people admired his wisdom.

Op you are one of the reason Nigeria is backward, when I mean backward, very backward.

Dreambeat:
Very ignorant comment as usual.When the Obas in other ethnic group were busy throwing jabs at one another,nobody talked about them hating themselves.Now people are airing their God given right to their opinions,it has become they hate themselves.Even in families all over the world people quarrel among themselves.When an Igbo man disagrees with his brother,it becomes they hate themselves.You guys should just quit this your complex.People wanting leaders to come from their own ethnic group, state or even clan is not peculiar to any ethnic group.It happens everywhere in Nigeria.It is a reflection of the sorry state of the Nigerian nation.A psyche that we all should expunge.

Most we continue to live in denial. We are our worst enemy in igbo land. We are busy castigating the north and the West while leaving our problems in igbo land not solved. See your defence. You don't want anybody to tell you about the igbo problems. You have gone to refer to obas and Yorubas as usual. It is your type in our dear nation igbo that becomes sad when your brother ie elevated above you. Your blood brother for that .

Dreambeat:
Very ignorant comment as usual.When the Obas in other ethnic group were busy throwing jabs at one another,nobody talked about them hating themselves.Now people are airing their God given right to their opinions,it has become they hate themselves.Even in families all over the world people quarrel among themselves.When an Igbo man disagrees with his brother,it becomes they hate themselves.You guys should just quit this your complex.People wanting leaders to come from their own ethnic group, state or even clan is not peculiar to any ethnic group.It happens everywhere in Nigeria.It is a reflection of the sorry state of the Nigerian nation.A psyche that we all should expunge.

Gosh! Best comment... Copied asap

Hatred within is more dangerous than hatred against another. You have made yourselves more vulnerable to the outside enemies. The house is divided and the centre cannot hold.

tinsel:
[s]
Most we continue to live in denial. We are our worst enemy in igbo land. We are busy castigating the north and the West while leaving our problems in igbo land not solved. See your defence. You don't want anybody to tell you about the igbo problems. You have gone to refer to obas and Yorubas as usual. It is your type in our dear nation igbo that becomes sad when your brother ie elevated above you. Your blood brother for that .

[/s]
We Yoruba should channel and focus more on Ife and Modakeke bickering, to the extent of not marrying each other uptill today.
What of Yoruba Christians Vs yoruba Muslims ?..Ofcourse Prof Akintola of MURIC will tell you more about his plan on turning Yoruba Christian to political outcast which some of us Christian Yoruba's are going to fire back when the chips are down. Our silence is not an act of cowardice.

Or is it about Oba Akiolu who is a Yoruba Muslim that snubbed Oni ife simple because he doesn't want to have any thing to do with a Christian Monarch like Oni?
I don't even want to go deep to discuss the issue of Ijebu because that one is an abomination.. It's not even pleasant for people to hear.
Before we start castigating others, we Yoruba should unite ourselves first.. Our house is on fire ..We have no moral right whatsoever to discuss about unity or disunity of people that are better than us

so you are advocating an indigene becomes the VC....must it be so....if other indigene in the various federal schools across the country starts advocating for this rubbish, how would we look like in the country..pls stop this thread.it makes no sense

jesmond3945:
Op you are one of the reason Nigeria is backward, when I mean backward, very backward.

You leave the topic which am not sure u read to direct unnecessary verbal assault on me.

Same thing we just saying.

tinsel:

Most we continue to live in denial. We are our worst enemy in igbo land. We are busy castigating the north and the West while leaving our problems in igbo land not solved. See your defence. You don't want anybody to tell you about the igbo problems. You have gone to refer to obas and Yorubas as usual. It is your type in our dear nation igbo that becomes sad when your brother ie elevated above you. Your blood brother for that .

First and foremost,I know your type, claiming who you are not.It's all glaring from all your previous posts, hence no need joining issues with you.Secondly, read my post again, then return back to comment.

valentineuwakwe:
so you are advocating an indigene becomes the VC....must it be so....if other indigene in the various federal schools across the country starts advocating for this rubbish, how would we look like in the country..pls stop this thread.it makes no sense

Take time to read the post before you react.

Most people are just quick to comment without understanding the post.

Dreambeat:
First and foremost,I know your type, claiming who you are not.It's all glaring from all your previous posts, hence no need joining issues with you.Secondly, read my post again, then return back to comment.

Enyi, igbo nkem ka nke gi.

kelib:
The problem of Igbo is Igbo ZIK sited a university in nsuka n not Onitsha now makes him spupid. what if he had sited it in IMO or ebonyi he would have been term mad. Una get problem cos if u guys hate yourselves this way, then I pity other tribes that have dealing with u guys

The OP is an impostor bent on causing confusion among Ndigbo. Take note of his username and expose him whenever you see his comments or thread. He's sponsored to do what he does. Always pay attention to divisive comments from usernames claiming Igbo. Majority are agents of the hausa/fulanis. K'anyi muru anya ka azu!

[s]

Osagyefo98:
THE GREAT ZIK WAS STUPID. MY BROTHER IS NOW THE VICE CHANCELLOR OF UNN!
By Ikem Okuhu.

His Excellency, the Rt Hon. Dr Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe, one of the most illustrious sons of Nigeria, was indeed a very stupid man. With all the wisdom he deployed to steer our country Nigeria from colonial rule to independence in 1960, Zik did many foolish things and I think my people have made up their minds to tell him so, even as he rests in his grave.

Don’t get me wrong!

If you wish, do!

I really do not care. But I don’t know how else to interpret the caustic, obtuse rhetoric emanating from a lot of my otherwise educated, enlightened and well-travelled brothers and sisters since it was announced that, contrary to wide expectations and wild hopes, a professor of Nsukka extraction was not announced as Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria Nsukka. And there is no other way to sum these interpretation of the outcome of the VC-ship contest than to conclude our people have all along thought Zik was stupid to have abandoned his native Onitsha to site this Great University in Nsukka.

I am an Nsukka man. I left the area for the first time in my early 20s after graduating from the University of Nigeria Nsukka. So from every angle you might look at it, I am strongly connected to this Nigeria’s foremost institution of higher learning. I want the best for my people. I want the best for the University of Nigeria and it was for this reason that I joined forces with former students of the Department of Mass Communication of this University in a bid to build a befitting, world-class structure for the department that formed all of us.
But I cannot do this at the expense of the larger need to foster oneness and remaining sensitive to the larger environment in which we all live and operate.

Expectations was high in the run-up to the VC election process and it all seemed that the magic wand that’d reverse the infrastructure decay and regression in the quality of graduates turnd out from the school can only happen with an Nsukka VC on the saddle. You don’t visit the Social Media without being inundated with conversations around this great hope. It was so bad that many lifted their rhetoric to predictions and then fact. The night before the announcement of the new VC, I saw many posts already celebrating one of the contestants who ended up not even making the top three, with people capturing their hopes as BREAKING NEWS.

What this did was morph what was mere dreams of many people into morbid entitlement mindset, the consequence of which was frustration, hate and unpardonable clannish thinking even by very highly respectable ones, many of whom rose to high positions on the back of merit and broadmindedness of people not from their place of origin.

Zik was stupid. How could he not have seen that the day would come when the people in whose land he sited what was once Africa’s greatest university would one day begin to express hate that someone from his own side of same Igbo land was made a Vice Chancellor at a time the “land owners” had desired same position. Zik never learned from history. Same fate befell him when he elected to contest the parliamentary position in the south west, thinking we were all one Nigeria, only to have the rug pulled from under him by defecting members of his political party, the NCNC. Had he disposed himself to learning from this experience, he probably would have anticipated the current conversation around the VC-ship of UNN and sited the institution in Onitsha or nearly Ogidi, Atani or even Ihiala.

I have read a number of people express their views on this. I have seen their arguments. While the most intelligent of them claim that only a Vice Chancellor from Nsukka can and will reverse the shameful decay in the university, the rest merely want the bragging rights of having their kin as VC.

But let us ask the core question: Is it true that only an Nsukka person will reverse UNN’s totally unacceptable decay? I am not sure the answer is a certain “yes”. And I will draw from a few examples. The best Vice Chancellor this university has had since I began to hear and understand stories around this great institution from my father and an uncle who worked in the university, was Prof Frank Ndili. He initiated most of the projects currently uncompleted in the university. He envisioned the Nnamdi Azikiwe Library, the biggest of such in Africa at the time. Not sure there has been a bigger one. He foresaw the growth of the university and initiated the Franco Hostels project. He initiated many other projects and was set to continue when a group, later known as The Nine Professors began a flurry of petitions and protests that saw the end of his tenure.

Prof Ndili is from Delta State, then Bendel State. He is not from Nsukka.

Prof Ndili’s exit opened the gates for the decadence. Prof Chimere Ikoku sat through his tenure like he did not know what was going on. Prof Oleka Udelala was accused of corruption and had running battles with the Student Union Government until he left. Prof Umaru Gomwalk, a Sole Administrator that was brought in 1995 spent his days infusing military style management into the university system and although he did not stay long, lecturers quickly acquired this trait and had behaved much the same way every since.
Since Gomwalk, a man who rebuilt the Akanu Ibiam Stadium only for it to collapse not long after, the whole lot of the Vice Chancellors in UNN have been worse than vandals, stripping the institution of all its most valuable assets which are honour, dignity and academic excellence. UNN became a diary cow to be milked by any person who finds himself in charge. From departments, through faculties to the VC’s office’ from refectories to porters and spanning all levels of support non-academic staff, the rot was pandemic and it became clear that a University VC is a political position where billions could be made at the expense of propriety and good conscience.

This last Vice Chancellor spent his five years in a hail of allegations of corruption and abandonment of due process. Rumours were rife about the employment racket in the institution where people were said to have “purchased” jobs for as much as N1.5 million many of our people did not complain against this terribly flawed process, perhaps because, as I later learned, more than 47 percent of beneficiaries were from Nsukka.

If, as many believe, this outgoing Vice Chancellor was poor in performance, have we conducted any audit to determine how many of our Nsukka sons and daughters were complicit?

The second example, I beg all readers, will be drawn from outside the UNN environment even as it is quite relevant. During the 2011 Presidential elections, a lot of people had expected the then candidate of the PDP, President Goodluck Jonathan to take very personal, the job of lifting his Niger Delta region in the areas of infrastructure and general sense of connection to the Nigerian nation. But Jonathan, from Bayelsa State, won the elections and could not do anything either in his home state or in the wider South South region apart from a big hotel his wife erected in Yenagoa, the state capital. The politically vexed East-West road was never touched and the Nigeria Delta University he sited in Otuoke made records as the only university where the number or those in the non0academic staff outnumbered the total student population.

It is worrying that we are not strategic in any of our conversations around political issues. I have seen a number of “saints” of Nsukka origin make veiled and open reference to the Enugu State Governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi as responsible for the failure of Nsukka to produce the UNN VC. These saints with all their halos of wretched anointing failed to see how difficult it was going to be for anybody to perform the magic of driving the interest of Nsukka people when at the onset of the VC-ship contest, more than 60 Nsukka professors threw their hats, hoods and gowns in the ring, each desiring the position.

I think we need to be a lot more strategic. We also need to guard our utterances. The bile spewed from my Nsukka brothers against our brothers from Anambra and other parts of Igbo land since this loss is frightening. I am not sure any one f them is aware that the Vice Chancellor of Federal University of Agriculture, Umudike, is an Nsukka man. Prof Edoga is from Eha Afifi (Eha Imuhu). I am wondering what would have been the reaction of my people if Umudike people had protested his selection on the basis of where he came from and the fact that no Umudike son or daughter had been VC of the university in their town before.

The energy people have dissipated in moaning and mourning a loss they could never have determined its potential, had it gone the other way, would have been channeled towards engaging the eventual winner constructively on how to arrest the regression that UNN has been made to undergo over the past two decades or so. The new Vice Chancellor, a man who came to Nsukka as a young boy and who rose to the position from a very lowly position in the non-academic section of UNN should be as much an Nsukka person as any other. People should think of how best to make him work for the good of the university instead of compelling him, through parochial, sectional rhetoric, to realize how distant he has always been from a people in whose land he transformed from an ordinary lab hand to an extraordinary egghead..

This is still possible.

And let me also say this here: if in the next five years, 60 of Nsukka professors line up for just one Vice Chancellorship position in UNN, an outsider will most likely still take it.
House cleaning is important. But more important is the love in our hearts for one and all and the strategic thinking in our heads to fashion the “How-Bests” in making something out of difficult circumstances and the tactical deftness in our hands to be seen to not be spinning hate of potentially xenophobic proportions, masking our latent inability to compete.

[/s]

Osagyefo98:



You leave the topic which am not sure u read to direct unnecessary verbal assault on me.

Same thing we just saying.

yes you have a backward mentality. We sacrifice merit at the altar of nepotism. The name of the university is university of nigeria and not university of nsukka. It is owned by nigeria and would be ran by nigerians. If you want an nsukka man go and build university of nsukka and install the eze of nsukka as your vc

jesmond3945:
yes you have a backward mentality. We sacrifice merit at the altar of nepotism. The name of the university is university of nigeria and not university of nsukka. It is owned by nigeria and would be ran by nigerians. If you want an nsukka man go and build university of nsukka and install the eze of nsukka as your vc

No wonder they say if u want to hide something from an African put it on paper.
Did u read the write up at all this boy?


What class are u?

MrExcel:
Most people are just quick to comment without understanding the post.

My brother, we have too many under 17 on nairaland that are always busy running around like a loose dog.

They don't read any post, they just read the headline And rush to comment.

So who is the new VC.

But this your article title...

But why we igbo always talking out of ignorance. What's wrong with us ,although I agreed with the writer of this article zik was a very useless and worst igbo leader ever.

Don't mind this Nsukka people. .they forget UNN Aisha a federal university not Nsukka University. ....they want to turn the school to another thing...

[s]

CyynthiaKiss:
[/s]
We Yoruba should channel and focus more on Ife and Modakeke bickering, to the extent of not marrying each other uptill today.
What of Yoruba Christians Vs yoruba Muslims ?..Ofcourse Prof Akintola of MURIC will tell you more..
Or is it about Oba Akiolu who is a Yoruba Muslim that snubbed Oni ife simple because he doesn't want to have any thing to do with a Christian Monarch like Oni?
Before we start castigating others, we Yoruba should unite ourselves first.. Our house is on fire ..We have no moral right to discuss about unity or disunity of people that are better than us

[/s]This osu hermaphrodite again. Ife and modakeke has been a thing of the past for long. How does personal beefing between two kings relate to being Muslim or Christian. Are you this daft in osuland?

Have you solved the issue between Anambra and ebonyi?

What about the priest issue in mbise that a man from anambra can't lead.

What of community clash that took lifes and properties in enugu.

What about the recent fight between community in ebonyi that resulted in burning of lifes and properties

What about those that used left hand to point to Bianca's Father's house in enugu, telling her to go back and contest in her state.

What about the discrimination of OSU people that forbid freeborn from marrying them.

Why are you living in denial.