Niyi Osundare will always win the applause of The Galactic Federation. This is because he tries as best as he can in his utterances and actions which his tongue, lips and nib illustrate every now and then to win loud applause of Supreme Masters of Glorious Deeds. He is always ready to follow the laws of virtue, truth, justice and integrity – like this gleaner, glimpser and stirrer.

What our artist utters about our universities and country are utterances of rapturous raptures at the excellence of his poetic truth which cannot but stir our feelings in a manner that will sing him praises from The Galactic Federation. I will hopefully dwell on this very convincingly when I will be ending this discourse; or when I will be carving “Die, ASUU, die, to save our universities.”

The goodness and beauty of our universities today are seemingly being contaminated by the gripping “Damnable venality and cruel exploitation” which he has “denounced” “on so many occasions, much to the chagrin of (their) practitioners,” to quote him again. How can his poetic words and world of knowledge and ideas help to redeem our universities at a time when our social-cum-political system has deteriorated and has become meaningless in relation to our current university education? What is to be done? This question deserves to be asked ceaselessly.

Without more ado, the stirrer would like to remark that Niyi Osudnare is a bewailer as well. HIs train of thought or of his utterances reflects his unsatisfactoriness with our meaningless university education today. This remark may be harsh or severe. But because our universities today are seemingly losing their academic freedom and autonomy to a federal government that has no value for scholarship or learning in the real sense of the term, we have no concrete or settled and satisfactorily satisfactory arrangement of university education today. Let’s have Niyi Osundare’s direct voice in this respect.

I am going to quote aspects of the interview he granted PrimStar News, in which he attacked the central government that is bullying our universities into accepting what it has called “Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS)” that is different from “Benchmark Minimum Academic Standards (BMAS)” which our universities in various ways ran with their respective bearings of autonomy: “There are lapses in the CCMAS that need to be addressed. For example, there is something called entrepreneurial literature. What does it mean? It does not make any sense.”

“Furthermore, he bewailed the philosophy-less philosophy that compels first year university students to be taught creative writing – compulsorily – without necessary grounding in elementary ‘creative writing.’ You cannot begin to teach creative writing to 120 students who have just left secondary school. At the University of Ibadan (UI), Professor Isidore Okpewho and I structured it carefully – English 216 as preliminary creative writing, English 350 intermediate and English 445 (as) advanced creative writing. That’s how it should be done.”

Niyi Osundare’s valid queries call to question the progressiveless progress of our university education today. They also raise questions that border on social, economic, financial and political issues and concerns. Our patriotic bewailer deserves to be quoted again:

“All these ideas of teaching whatever the National Universities Commission (NUC) asks you to teach – what happens to the universities autonomy? What about intellectual autonomy? The universities we attended [in Nigeria, Britain, Canada, USA, etc] set out their curricula and could defend them anywhere. Now [our] universities have become sorry servants of federal bureaucracy. It shouldn’t work that way.”

Niyi Osundare’s assessment is not wrong. But he would certainly have been far more correct than he is apparently if he had stated bluntly and undiplomatically that the federal bureaucratic mentality with respect to its treatment of our universities today has jeopardised the course and cause of our university education greatly; for those, for example, who are promoting the abhorrent CCMAS are nothing but hired contractors whose effrontery has embarrassed thoroughly, to say it mildly, the reputation of our worthy scholars and professors who always want to be associated with technical efficiency in their theory of university education that should ultimately help us – no matter the bewailings already alluded to – to live better morally and otherwise as fellow Nigerians not bereft of humanity and its goodness, kindness and beauty. (By the way, how much was paid to the bureaucratic contractors hired to produce CCMAS?) Who are they? And who are they not?

Let it not be misunderstood here that the gleaner and glimpser is misreading or misinterpreting the prominent thingness of our efficient scholar-poet’s thinking about our universities. Let the stirrer stirs his readers’ thoughts by quoting handsomely our influential subject one more time:
“… my calling is teaching, the most patriotic of all professions. I am an aspirer to enlightened and enlightening criticism, one of the most constructive planks in the practice of nation building. The damage the AGIP (Any Government in Power) ilk has done to Nigerian public conscience and propagation of corruption is incalculable. The hustling for government jobs is one of the killers of academic freedom and professional pride in the Nigerian university system. It has cost our academics their self-respect. When a university professor falls on his knees before a barely literate but unaccountably powerful governor in a hapless lobby for government appointment, how can this desperate supplicant go back to the Ivory Tower and wax eloquent on lofty ideals such as university autonomy and academic freedom?

This quotation came from the interview our sovereign of integrity granted Gbenro Adesina of the already cited PrimeStar that appeared on September 15, 2025. The stirrer is calling this thing, this thought, this thinking, a block of great hardness. It is an usual stone of an unusual granite.

It is really, really hard, not shapeless. It is well coloured and shiningly and shinily shiny with truth of granitoid beauty. There is hardly any of our universities today, especially the public universities, where the AGIP does not exist. In our campuses they can lick – in fact, they lick – the arse and boots of any vice chancellor who usually prohibits and forbids them from calling a spade a spade in the university senate – or anywhere – they are needed to block or lock their tongues. Of course, when they are needed to honey their tongues, they must honey them without even the mildest resistance from their sycophantic lips. Now let me dare to ask this question: why is CCMAS thriving in the university system today? It is due to the stylistic and colourful importance of the “AGIP (Any Government in Power) ilk.”

Sycophancy is not scholarship. Sycophancy is not loyalty. Sycophancy is against decency, fairness and just actions. Sycophancy creates and breeds acrimony and disharmony. Our vice chancellors, their appointers, appointees and cohorts should be told this time after time. 

Our external and internal rulers and ruinous ruiners of our universities today should be told this emphatically and emphatically. Their actions have a ruinous effect on the Nigerian university environment.

The bad and wrong eggheads are copying their ruinous examples. Many of them have erected their ruinous castle of sycophancy. But this castle must be rendered derelict. One way of doing this is to relieve them of their sycophantic posts! What a tall order!
But is this all? What really is to be done?
To be continued next week.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.