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Issues in the Restoration of
Barewa
College, Zaria
By Adagbo Onoja Mon Dec 5,2011
Some members of Barewa College class of
1962-1966, among them Gen Alwali Kazir, (extreme left), Isa Ozi
Salami in blue striped Kaftan & Gov Sule Lamido of Jigawa at
Barewa Old Boys AGM last Saturday
At one
of the many Green
Gardens in Abuja
where lumpens, rascals and radicals congregate for reflective
night time rendezvous, there is an informed
Barewa
College ‘chauvinist’.
Once, he confronted me, asking where Governor Sule Lamido could
be located at that moment. That was when speculations ran riot
in this country about who became Vice-President to Goodluck
Jonathan and Lamido, widely speculated, had made himself
unreachable somewhere in his village outside MTN’s radius. I
‘lied’ to him that I had not seen the governor myself for days.
Then he said, tell Sule, (that is how he calls the governor) to
come out and advance to be recognized for the Vice-Presidency.
Lamido, a Barewa product, he said, should do so because,
according to him,
Nigeria
is in crisis on account of power slipping into the hands of
people who went to ‘bush’ schools. That was a veiled reference
to the post Shagari era when Barewa
College
products who had monopolized power were edged out till Umaru
Yar’Adua restored Barewa to power in 2007.
Of
course, the statement provoked the intellectual commotion that
only our in-group can sustain as combatants of different radical
sects demolished the yabbis that those who did not go to a
finishing school like Barewa are not imbued with Kinging.
But it was only a Sociologically elevated yabbis, his own
provocative differentiation of power holders in terms of those
who went to elite schools and those who did not.
The
elite schools he had in mind would include schools such as
Edo College, Benin (I am not sure if this is the same school
the Portuguese are said to have established at the palace of the
Oba of Benin and to which is connected the ability of the Benin
Empire to sustain diplomatic relations with Portugal in the 17th
Century); Government College, Umuahia, (which was the giant or
regional beehive even though Hope Waddell Institute in Calabar
where Zik went existed before it. It is the school writers like
Chinua Achebe, Ken Saro Wiwa and Elechi Amadi, (the author of
the wonderful novel, The Concubine) attended;
Government College, Ibadan (where people like Bola Ige and
Wole Soyinka attended and were brewed, directly or indirectly,
under the likes of elder Emmanuel Alayande who was the principal
at some point); Kings’ College, Lagos, (the power of whose
liberal education manifested as a contradiction in that the
quality of education there demystified the whiteman in the eyes
of the students, firing their nationalism as to form the
Nigerian Youth Movement which became the fulcrum of the Zikist
Movement which anchored the anti-colonial fire) and the last,
but not the least, Barewa College, Zaria.
These
were the early elitist schools, many of them deliberately
planned or influenced by the British or their missionaries along
the idea of producing a nation building elite recruited through
special training in public education. Needless saying that most
of these early elitist schools have been overtaken or superseded
by new centres of academic and leadership grooming in the
country, especially private schools notwithstanding their being
run by hired principals of British, American, Israeli, Turkish
and other nationals.
But
most of such new centres are not public schools in the British
sense of acquainting children of the aristocracy with one
another as potential inheritors of power and managers of its
privileges. But the French, the Germans, the Japanese, the
Russians and just about every other modern nation hung their
social transformation even though many did not model theirs on
the British aristocratic model. USSR, as a socialist country, could
not have accepted that but that is not to say there was no
elitism. But because the British colonized
Nigeria, they made the
educational arrangement to reflect the British tendency. That is
how we came to have the first generation of elite schools listed
above.
The
matter would have ended there if Barewa College
did not go on to acquire a mystique beyond the status of just
another secondary school. With several Nigerian heads of state
being products of the school and coming to power in succession
to each other, there was bound to be the mystique. There was
General Yakubu Gowon for nine years, followed by General Murtala
Mohammed and then Shagari. Then Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. The bulk of
the permanent secretaries who provided the technocratic power
for the radically nationalist Third National Development Plan
were from Barewa College.
Many of the heads of the Army and its top commanders were also
from Barewa
College. This is not to talk of
chief justices of the Federation or heads of the spy agencies.
Naturally, the question came to be: how come?
Because
of the preponderance of elements of Hausa-Fulani/Muslim identity
in all these, the temptation was to resort to the semantic
shorthand of Hausa-Fulani oligarchy. But the Barewa College
the British planned was, fundamentally, a regional elite
recruitment and grooming centre. Subsequently, the Northern
ruling class that emerged therefrom was, in the words of
Professor John Paden, a cohort, a distinctly regional faction of
the Nigerian ruling class, its distinction lying in the class
contiguity they shared over and above their ethno-religious
differences which were, of course, there. This was the basis of
their power. They were the product of a psychological cum
cultural attachment to something, whatever it was they were told
in the school. And whatever it was they were told in the school
was such that if you met one of them in
Lagos on an issue and then went on to meet another
one separately in Maiduguri, their view on the issue in question
was bound to be the same.
So, the
compactness of the Northern establishment at that time was laid
in its educational basement. Barewa was the marker but in the
North, the Middle schools were actually political and leadership
finishing schools. First, it was Katsina, then
Ilorin, Maiduguri, Adamawa, Katsina
Ala, Bida, Zaria and so on. The students came from mixed
grounds in metropolitan terms. You had students from
Maiduguri
going to the one in
Ilorin, students from Adamawa going to
Katsina and a lot of criss-crossing. That is the Northern
extraction of the Nigerian ruling elite which, by its political
coherence and the numerical strength of the region has sort of
been in the vanguard. But it is a co-opting class especially in
the context of deflating the secession from 1967 to the end of
the civil war. But few months from the end of the civil war,
many of them like Joseph Tarka, Abubakar Zukogi, Aminu Kano and
many others were eased out of power for one reason or the other.
This contrasts with the situation whereby Ojukwu was shooting
his opponents in the East during the war. Of all the 1966
coupists who were caught up on the Biafran side, only Ademoyega
got away alive. That was one difference in ruling class politics
of the Northern and Southern fractions. It is the co-opting
approach of the Northern fraction that, at a point, made it
difficult to make a valid distinction between the Northern and
the Nigerian establishment because the Northern was not
exclusively Northern. Zik, Awo, Akintola, Ikoku, Asika were not
Northerners in ethnic terms but it was Ikoku, for instance, who
gave the greatest fire to Gowon’s war diplomacy. He was the one
who went to Europe to expose the French. In the same way, Awo could
have created problems if he were not a foundation stone of the
Gowon cabinet.
When I
asked Alhaji Shehu Kai-Kai, a national officer of Barewa Old
Boys Association, (BOBA) whether there was any particular
indoctrination they went through as students of Barewa, he said
there was nothing like that beyond the ideology of (1) Live and
let live, (2) accept it when you are wrong and (3) you will be
appreciated when you are good. Then he told me the story of what
he told Katsina State Radio during the burial of General Hassan
Usman Katsina, the First Military Governor of the North.
According to Alhaji Shehu, Katsina State Radio asked him if
there would still be people like Hassan Usman Katsina as far as
the North was concerned and he said no. His reason is that the
grounds for breeding the likes of Usman Katsina are no more
there. For him, these were a school like Barewa College,
institutions like the Nigerian army of their own time and the
Northern civil service. In the Northern Civil service, he said,
when one was posted from Benue to Kano
or Adamawa to Ilorin or Sokoto to Kabba, it meant no
difference. It was the same North. But now, the situation in the
North has changed. Now, he said, it is possible for a young
person born in Dala Local Government Council of Kano State, for
example, to move from his nursery to primary to secondary to
university and PhD without knowing Fagge or Sabon-Gari within
the same Kano metropolis, not to talk of him or her having been
to Adamawa, Benue or Ilorin provinces of old.
The
class contiguity of the Northern elite has been such that even
now that the Nigerian decay has assumed conflicts of genocidal
intent in the North, it is still doubtful if the remnant of the
Northern ruling class will not unite and alienate any cultural
or whatever group engaging in protracted, costly trouble making
in the region. Anybody who doubts this should look at the role
of General Gowon and even General Danjuma. Gowon is a staunch
Northern establishment person. So also is Chief Solomon Lar, who
even as the vicar of the politics of emancipation will certainly
not go as far as revolting against the mythical North (as
different from the lived North) if it is going to be too costly.
But the
times are really testy for the region, indicating a serious
crisis of stress and breakdown. Though a ruling elite crisis, it
is being propagated at the level of the masses as ethnic and
religious and those gulfs are widening by the day while no new
inspiring collective with any new message has emerged. Since
nature abhors a vacuum, the North is now steaming in an all
consuming void. Peace conferences are being held here and there
but at which the home truths are not as forthcoming as the
homily and platitude.
BOBA National President, Dr Umaru Muttalab addressing
the 2011 AGM Saturday in Kaduna
Once
again, we need Alhaji Shehu Kai-Kai. He told me as we went
through an abrupt ‘inspection’ of Barewa College last Saturday
before the AGM commenced that he read in a UN document that 77%
of the population under the age of 16 in the North East and
North West have no iota of formal education. It is not so much
that the situation is any different in the other regions of
Nigeria
in any qualitative sense. As political head of the Media Unit of
the Government House, Dutse in the past 4 years plus, I have
seen graduates in Mass Communications from some of our best
schools, for example, who do not know what an intro means in
news writing. I have seen graduates in strong disciplines like
Philosophy, History or Sociology who cannot write any grade of
essay. In a way, this is not peculiar to
Nigeria
if what Professor Mutere found about some journalists in
East Africa. They have never heard about the
concepts of Afro-centricity or multi-culturalism and yet, they
are the ones to report issues and events through the African
lenses or to tell the African story. Still, there is a Nigerian
dimension to the collapse of the knowledge industry across the
world just as there is a Nigerian dimension to corruption - the
brazenness, the speed, the sophistication about it and the
magnitude of money one individual can grab for himself alone
Subsequently, we cannot organise primary and secondary
education, not to talk of university education. Instead of
educating the children so that they can think for themselves and
cope with changes analytically, we are showing them money. When
their counterparts from other parts of the world gather to
negotiate the world, ours will have nothing to contribute there.
Instead, they will disappear from the conference to go and shop,
buying things made by other people.
So, as
frightening as 77% of the population under the age of 16 having
no formal education, it pales into insignificance when compared
to the dangers of half or shallow education that what we call
schools today are dishing out. No less than Sultan Sa’ad
Abubakar 111 said at the 2010 AGM of BOBA that “the school
certificate result of the college was disheartening” and that
this is so because we are paying lip service to education.
General Gowon equally said at the same meeting that during his
time, the pass rate was 80-90%.
When
the pot begins to get rotten or has fallen prey to the weevil,
the calabash has reason to fear. If we cannot take an admirable
school certificate result from
Barewa
College with so many
former heads of state and too many self-contained individuals as
its old boys, then what happens to the other secondary schools
around?
It is
in this sense that the Barewa restoration project is
instructive. And this, BOBA has recognized if we go by its
tribute to those leading it such as the CBN, Alhaji Abdulkadir
Hassan, an old Boy of the college, Governor Lamido of Jigawa
State, First Bank of Nigeria, among others. BOBA used the
example of Lamido to send a creative SOS out viz, “It is
gratifying to report that the Executive Governor of Jigawa State,
Alh Sule Lamido CON, (B 1528) has undertaken to completely
rehabilitate his old compound, Mort House. We wish to commend
His Excellency for this kind gesture and hope that others will
see it fit to help rehabilitate other compounds that are in
serious state of dilapidation”.
It
remains to be seen how far the public spiritedness of one
governor or another can save Barewa
College and, indeed, all such public
schools throughout
Nigeria
instead of a nationalist and instrumentalist state policy on
education. Nigeria,
we hail thee!
Mr.
Onoja is of Government House, Dutse, Jigawa State
Th
This is the document referred to in the Witness
Statement on Oath of Clifford O. Kokogho as
“Exhibit
COK.2”
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