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I initially resisted responding to Professor Toyin Falola’s trending essay titled “IS THE DIASPORA NOW ABOUT RUBBISHING THOSE AT HOME?” which he wrote partlyin response to the guest column I invited Professor Moses Ochonu to write for three reasons.
One, the article was so atypically self-aggrandizing that I thought the Professor Falola I’ve known since 2004 couldn’t possibly be its author. Falola, like all greats, has a reputation for self-effacement and for disarmingly self-deprecating humility.
But the article wasn’t just gratuitously self-conceited (particularly for someone who is already sitting pretty at the mountaintop of enormous scholarly accomplishments and has no need to toot his own horn), it was also an invidiously below-the-belt symbolic violence against unnamed targets Falola perceives as less privileged than he is, which ironically vitiates his charge of superciliousness against diasporan critics of ASUU’s enablement of mediocrity in the Niger
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There is an interesting discussion ongoing about the state of higher education in Nigeria. At the core of that debate at the moment is the question of what should be the role of Nigerian academic diaspora. Should they be critics, builders or both? How should many of them manage the huge, undeniable difference between their experiences at home and what they see abroad?
To be frank, the issues bedevilling the academia in Nigeria are so many. Some of them have to do with workplace culture, which definitely needs to get better. But we can tie that as well to the institutional challenges, which if addressed, can improve work ethic. But our universities lack very solid structures, and this is not a deficiency you can place wholly at the doorstep of Nigerian academics. To a large extent, most of our universities are now Nigeria in microcosm. All the ills you see in the larger society stare you right in the face across our campuses. The infrastructural deficits need not be re