UNIZIK VC Selection Hullabaloo And The Paradox Of Character

My alma mater, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, has been in the news in recent weeks. The reason is that what should have been a quiet routine internal process of selecting a Vice Chancellor turned out to become a chaotic rat race that threw up inglorious accusations and counter- accusations from various interests. It all began with selecting an acting Vice Chancellor and climaxed with a very controversial appointment of a substantive VC, before the plot returned exactly where it had started – the interim Vice Chancellorship of Prof. Joseph Ikechebelu.

This episode expectedly has continued to generate reactions from the public. For members of UNIZIK community, one notable point of public discourse has been the way some senior members of the staff have allegedly switched sides with the emergence of each Vice Chancellor within that short space of time. Individuals have been accused of showing desperation and lacking principles as they ran to hobnob with anyone appointed, just to ensure they are close enough to the office of the Vice Chancellor as to enjoy whatever patronage they hope will come from that office. So, just as the past six chaotic months have seen four different Vice Chancellors, some individuals have been accused of switching camps four times!

Without going into the merits or demerits of the accusations against each individual (as I have reservations about the justification of such accusations regarding some specific individuals), my concern here is to reflect on the societal factor that produces such inglorious behaviour in individuals – including the presumably highly refined ones. This factor is simply what I would call “de-institutionalisation” of public offices such that the offices lose a substantial part of their bureaucratic objectivity and begin to function as a fountain of favouritism from where nepotistic patronage abundantly flows to friends, relatives, lovers, concubines and sycophants of all hues.

Let me explain further. Certain Institutions are what they are due to their formal set-up and regulated functioning that is underpinned by rules and due process. Public offices are among such set-ups, and they are expected to embody institutional purity where the rule of law and due process strictly regulate operation towards the protection of common interest. Critical to such Institutions is bureaucracy which ensures procedures and objectivity as each institution discharges its functions. German sociologist Max Weber, in describing bureaucracy, observed that in a bureaucratic system, individual idiosyncrasies, feelings, and desires are subsumed under the values and goals of the organization or institution. Thus, in such a bureaucratic setting, individuals who occupy offices are expected to function strictly based on established rules and processes irrespective of what their personal beliefs, feelings and desires are. For instance, in a bureaucratic environment, an individual who is to take decision on my application for employment should simply look objectively at my interview performance based on officially prescribed parameters and must give me the job once I’m qualified irrespective of whether I’m their friend or foe, or whether they like my face or hate it. In the same vein, an official who is to take decision on my promotion is expected, by virtue of bureaucratic rules, to dispassionately assess my papers and do the needful accordingly irrespective of whether I’m in their good book or not.

But then even the blind can see clearly that bureaucratic objectivity hardly obtains in the functioning of our public institutions. Public officers are rarely able to live above personal sentiments and personal affiliations in discharging their duties. So, why wouldn’t individuals seek to be in good books of occupiers of important offices in a country where what takes you higher is not your character and competence but whom you know? In a university system where privileges like appointments and access to grants are not by what you can do but by whom you know, why wouldn’t staff members – both junior and senior – be chasing after Vice Chancellors and others that matter in order to be considered for such privileges?

While individuals must be held accountable for their conduct, reality dictates that we do not discountenance societal factors that contribute in moulding the character of individuals. This sociological approach to viewing the problem illuminates the practical path to solution; a cure that will be collective and institutional, hence exhaustive and sustainable. In his INVITATION TO SOCIOLOGY: A HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE (1963, New York, Penguin), legendary sociologist Peter Berger dedicated a chapter to discussing how an individual human is inevitably a reflection of their society. This chapter (ie chapter 5), titled “Society in Man,” powerfully engages the reality that the individual self is socially created using fabrics harnessed from the society within which the individual evolves, hence the individual is hardly different from their society. Berger wrote, ‘Looked at sociologically, the self is no longer a solid, given entity that moves from one situation to another. It is rather a process, continuously created and recreated in each situation that one enters, held together by the slender thread of memory” (p.124).

One irresistibly powerful tool used by society to condition the behaviour of individuals is reward system. This is simply the process that determines who gets what and for what reason. What is gotten here may be pleasurable or painful, good or bad, and the reason may be for a positive or negative action of the receiver, merit or favouritism on the part of society. The reward system is the ultimate stimulus that elicits behaviour from individuals.

Thus, when people, as often the case, say that an average Nigerian is corrupt, what they are implying, even without knowing this, is that the society and its reward system encourages corruption in individuals. Yes, an average Nigerian is corrupt, not that there is corruption inscribed in the DNA of the “species” of human called Nigerians, rather it is a manifestation of the reality that individuals behave according to what their society encourages. From the secondary school student that seeks to “pass” their SSCE and UTME through “special centres” and thereafter pursue university admission through connection or bribery to their graduating counterpart giving bribes to obtain a favourable NYSC posting and their parents that back them on this adventure, it is all about a system that incentivises corruption and demotes merit. It is, therefore, easy to see that the same Nigerians will behave differently had they found themselves in a society with a different approach to public life. This is the paradox of human character.

But then why are we seeming to have been surprised by what has taken place in UNIZIK by way of how Prof. (or Dr?) Bernard Odoh emerged as the VC of the institution? Are we for real or just feigning ignorance of the fact that no recruitment in our public space is ordinarily implemented based on merit. As stated earlier, our public institutions have been substantially de-institutionalised and de-bureaucratised such that they rarely operate based on the institutional principles of objectivity and due process, hence public recruitment at all levels have become grounded in nepotistic and debauched idiosyncrasies of individuals charged with driving the process. Many of us UNIZIK staff members may simply have to look at the process that recruited us (at whatever level we started this phase of our career) to see whether it was honestly grounded in merit and due process as we all are now prescribing for the office of the Vice Chancellor.

Years ago, I had applied to be employed in the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) and was invited for a written test held at Yaba College of Technology, Lagos. After the test, I was telling a relative how surprised I was at the elementary nature of the questions we were given in a test meant to serve as a yardstick for recruiting a workforce skilled in the profound art of journalistic literation, and she simply said in a dismissing tone, “The test is just a fascade, they know those they want to recruit, and they are the ones that will get the job.” How right she was! Of all those I kept in contact with after the exercise, the only person that got the job was a girl, fresh from school, who had told me immediately after the test that she wrote almost nothing as most of the questions were strange to her, but then that she was confident of being recruited being that she applied on the strength of her father being a retired senior personnel of NAN. So, the recruiters, working in a de-institutionalised and de-bureaucratised setting, were more impressed by family ties than the possible good performance of some of us coupled with our years of experience in reputed national media houses

Without doubt, what happened with this girl’s recruitment was what had repeated itself in Odo’s appointment as UNIZIK VC. It is a systemic cycle of decay that makes no news when it happens on daily basis with recruitments at the lower cadres but makes so much news when it happens with high-profile recruitments such as that of a Vice Chancellor. Those of us who studied journalism know that prominence (high-profile persons or events) makes news. And once a recruitment process becomes so de-institutionalised, nothing can be guaranteed – the recruited may be qualified or unqualified, competent or incompetent – all because qualification and competence were never the major motivation that drove the selection process.

Finally, all this continues to strengthen my conviction that the last general elections in 2023 grossly fell short of the quality of electoral discourse our nation needs at this time. I intently listened to all of the four major presidential candidates and was able to observe how each one of them either failed to speak on or merely glossed over the very foundation of our problems – our lopsided reward system. For instance, they did not address the issue of nepotism in public recruitment and in the granting of other public privileges, which has kept reinventing favouritism and corruption as well as promoting mediocrity in our public space. They did not address the problems of delays and corruption in judiciary which have kept messing up our reward system thus perpetuating evil. Rather the candidates were more concerned with how to remove petrol subsidy, sell the NNPC and generally implement the neo-liberal scripts of the Bretton Woods Institutions of World Bank and IMF which have over the decades proved not to be the solution to our perennial problems. They would have done better by foregrounding the problem of de-institutionalisation of our public space, clearly articulating the issues and the strategies they intend to adopt in pursuing solution. But then this is a discussion for another day.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.