Before the gleaner and glimpser enters upon the path of Poet Niyi Osundare’s strength of thought, let it be known, in a massive sort of way, that he, the stirrer, who is penning this, is doing so from the standpoint of contemporary Nigerian melancholy, in specific, as applicable to our universities – which Osundare advanced and underscored in his landscape of language and knowledge.

Let us read one important message from our sayer and namer and one Nigerian sovereign of truth:
Dear Tony, I have just read this: the rank racketeering that postgraduate supervision has become in Nigeria. Damnable venality and cruel exploitation. I have denounced this evil on so many occasions, much to the chagrin of its practitioners in our I-bury Towers. The decay in our universities reeks to the skies. There is a need for urgent attention.

Keep on the good work.

Fraternal greetings.

Our subject’s clear awareness and keen assessment of the shallowness of our universities where their nature, ideal and doctrine of beauty are now buried – or are now being buried – cannot escape our delicate thought. The solid landscape of historical evidence is conveyed in Osundare’s rare but adequate expression which apprises us of what I am calling here his melancholy on account of the “damnable venality” plaguing our Ivory Towers, which in his penetrating linguistic creativity he calls “I-bury Towers” – where their common wealth is no longer their common wealth – or our common wealth.

Osundare is a very knowledgeable academic and scholar whose whole scale of experience enables him to recognise and appreciate that the breadth of the problem in our universities today is great indeed. As a non-neutralist when it comes to resolving a dispute or contest between what is right and wrong, he never refrains from being on the side of the former which is the side of virtue. The venal and “cruel exploitation” in our universities and the “practitioners” that plant and grow the decays of things there must be confronted and exposed with the ripeness and rightness of thought. Of course, they are within and outside the “I-bury Towers” that we must not allow to be buried. Even if buried they must be resurrected.

Now this stirrer would like to share some insights from some students of some of our universities today. These are insights which express the coarseness, roughness, rottenness, unpleasantness and decays of things in the universities. Professor Niyi Osundare and the gleaner and glimpser shared the malevolent funguses causing fatal abnormalities in our universities physically and otherwise. “On Postgraduate Courses and Thesis Defence in Nigerian Universities – A Thread:” We shared this grim report together:

First bewailer
“We had to pay hotel bills for members of the panel. You could also offer yourself, if your supervisor is the devil’s apprentice. Transport money inclusive.” 

Second bewailer
“I decided I’d never have anything else to do with Nigerian universities on the day I saw people defending their masters dissertations presenting coolers of rice, garden eggs and crates of drinks to their supervisors. I thought someone was getting married.

Third bewailer
“We were told we’d pay sixty thousand naira each for both entertainment and logistics of external supervisor(s).”

Fourth bewailer
“We spent the night prior to my mother’s defence at the university, cooking coolers of rice with assorted meat for the lecturers.”

Fifth bewailer
We fed the whole department. We paid a prior fee of two thousand naira. We still gave the supervisor gifts. This same supervisor then came on one of my facebook posts to say how I’m too opinionated to get married. I blocked him for my peace of mind. I don’t have strength.”

Sixth bewailer
“My husband was so frustrated by his supervisor that he abandoned his MBA and finally got it from a UK university without any sort of bribery.”

Seventh bewailer
“In my university, students had to buy brand new suits for their supervisors.”

Eighth bewailer
“The money I spent on my supervisor was enough to buy a piece of land in GRA.

“A bottle of special non-alcoholic wine and MTN airtime worth one million five hundred naira for “consultation” before he approved my topic.

“Two months DSTV premium subscription…

“Five thousand for every Chapter I took to him for vetting. Except Chapter 4 – he made me pay twenty thousand naira for it because ‘all my projects students knew I did it better [than any of them].’
“On the day of defence, we (a group of about 15 students) paid two thousand naira each for food and transport fare.”

Nineth bewailer
“We paid forty thousand naira each for ‘refreshment’ and ‘honorarium’ during internal defence. We are also going to replicate that amount, if not more, during external defence.”

Tenth bewailer
“My project topic was originally on aquatic snails.

“My supervisor said I should bring some snails to his house, not even the aquatic snails that I was supposed to be working on. I bought half a bag of land snails for him.

“A week later he changed my topic to cat fishes and demanded that I buy some catfishes and bring them to his house for inspection. I had to do it. I wish h’d asked for rice and drinks, as my colleagues were asked to buy. I would have spent less money.”

Clearly, each bewailer has yielded us a new thought about our universities today. Each one may be an inventor, but each invention of the inventor has left us in a state of utter perplexity. Indeed, we are non-plussed by the reported actions of the various lecturers and professors across our universities.

Professor Niyi Osundare and the gleaner and glimpser cannot, could not, but be in a state of melancholic melancholy.

But the quality of our imagination cannot, and will not, allow any melancholy to freeze our hope. Nigerian lecturers and professors are dwelling in a destitute time created by this age of decadence, of decadent Nigerian civilisation, unleashed on our universities by false, morally weak political leaders – who are holding us all in the land to heartless ransom. But this is not at all a sufficient reason for our professors to rankle those who believe faithfully in the might of our universities in every positively conceivable way. (And be it noted that at times lecturers and professors who oppose the trend are targeted and branded through sponsored fatal attacks).

What is to be done?
All compositions, including error-less poetry of virtuous virtue and standard creative journalism of ethical ethics of our time and world are the “ejaculations of a few imaginative men,” to borrow the words of the American minister, essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Niyi Osundare is one of such men whose quality of imagination is to flow our universities to the landscape of hope and meaningful change which The Galactic Federation will applaud.
To be continued next week.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.