Ahaoma Kanu and Okey Ndibe

Prof. Okey Ndibe, thank you very much for this opportunity to have this interview with you, I have looking forward to talking to you and for this short while that we have met, I have discovered some part of you that I never knew was. For the benefit of many of your readers and fans who may not know so much about you, I will like you to give us a little brief on your background and childhood.

I am Okey Ndibe and I was born in Yola which is in the present Adamawa State on May 15^th 1960 and my father was a postal clerk at that time while my mother was a teacher at St. Theresa School which has since changed name now. We lived in Yola until early 1967 as Nigeria was plundering itself into what became the Biafra War. My father sent us home with my mother; they had four children at that time; my last sibling was born during the war in 1968. Four of us were born in Yola. So we came home and were refugees in a number of places in Anambra State. At the expiration of the war, my father became the Post-Master in Enugwu-Ukwu post office while my mother continued with her teaching career and rose to a head mistress. So I went for my primary education at St. Anthony’s Primary School in Enugwu-Ukwu and for my secondary education I went to St.Michael’s Secondary School in Nimo both in Anambra State. Initially I was to go to go to America to study in California but that didn’t happen so I went to the Yaba College of Technology (YABATECH) Lagos where I studied Business Management. From there I went to the Institute of Management and technology (IMT) Enugu where I finished with my Higher National Diploma (HND) in 1983. I did my youth service with the National Concord and by the way, while I was doing my HND programme I was hired by Satellite Newspaper which was owned by Jim Nwobodo at a time to write editorials for them. So I was an editorial writer with them.

How did you get hired?

Actually my first piece with a newspaper came out a year I finished from secondary school. I sat down one day and wrote a piece for the Daily Star which was then the biggest newspaper east of the Niger. One day my father called me and asked if I sent a piece to the Daily Star, my heart began to beat as I imagined that the Daily Star must have contacted my father and said tell your son never to send anything to us. But what happened was that a man who knew my father read the piece that I sent and went to my father to enquire if the writer was related to him. My father said yes, I have a son called Tony Okey Ndibe but he wasn’t sure if I was a writer; I was using my full names at that time. He asked me and I said yes before he informed me that my piece got published. That was how I started and it gave me a confidence that I could write so I started writing and sending to other Nigerian newspapers at that time; so my articles appeared in the Daily Times, in the New Nigerian, appeared a lot in the Daily Star and the West African Magazine. When Jim Nwobodo’s newspaper was about to come out, one of the editors, Chris Ejimofor and he was actually the MD of the paper, happened to read one of the piece that I wrote which appeared in the Sunday New Nigerian. He came to the office and was raving about this piece and somebody who knew me told him that he knew Okey Ndibe and he was a student. Chris Ejimofor said go find him for me and I will give him a job. They called me and offered me a job in the Satellite.

How old were you at that time?

This was in 1980 so I was 20. I was offered a job to be writing editorials and I quickly accepted it because the pay was flattery but my mother said she wanted me to go and finish my HND. I told them that I would prefer to be writing for them part time. So I was writing a column for the Satellite Newspaper even though I was still a student and it gave me a certain kind of prestige with both lecturers and students you know, I would come to school and my lecturers will tell me we just read what you wrote today. It gave me some respectability with the female students you know, it was very impressive. Before I finished, I had been sending some of my piece to The Concord and Ray Ekpu was publishing them so when I finished my programme, I was posted to Port-Harcourt for my Youth Service. I happened to come to Lagos on a visit and stopped over at the Concord to say Hello to Ray Ekpu for publishing my articles for some time even though I had never met him.

On getting to his office I informed the secretary that I wanted to meet him but I don’t think I made an impression on the secretary because she gave me a piece of paper to fill so immediately Ray saw my name he rushed out and was asking where is Okey Ndibe? I said I am the one. He brought me immediately into his office and asked what are you doing now I want to give you a job? I told him that I just finished and I was posted to Port Harcourt. The Guardian requested that I work for them in Port-Harcourt and that was how I started writing for a mainstream newspaper. Before I finished serving, the Concord started this magazine called African Concord; it was initially Concord Weekly but later became African Concord. Louis Obi who was my colleague was asked to be the founding editor of the paper and he hired me to join him as a staff.

I worked for the magazine from 1984 to 1986. Then the Guardian was coming up with it’s own magazine called the African Guardian and I just went to visit some of my colleagues at the Guardian and they told me that they have been sending messages to you because we want you to come work for us but I said nobody has sent any messages to me and it happened that we negotiated right there and then I joined the Guardian Newspapers.

 I worked for the Guardian for two years before Prof. Chinua Achebe, who was then a distinguished visiting professor in the U.S, phoned me one day from the U.S to inform me that he and some friends of his were setting p a magazine and they wanted me to come and become the founding editor of the magazine which was based in Massachusetts. So on December 10^th, 1988 , I relocated from Nigeria to the United States to be the founding editor of this magazine.

You studied Business Management even at a time you started writing articles that were appearing on national dailies, why didn’t you go for a course in communications as that was evidently the discipline you were cut out for?

To study Mass Communication was out of the way; it wasn’t part of the equation for me at all. I felt that what ever I was going to gain from studying Mass Communication I already have. I had developed a skill as a writer and an editor by just reading; from consumption. So I knew how to report stories, how to do features, how to do analysis and how to write editorials.

Now for me to have done for formal training would have been for me a waste of time really. Outside of Nigeria, especially in Europe and America, people recognise that journalists come from a diversity of backgrounds so you have people who studied Law, who do Sociology, who do Science, Arts and Medicine for that matter who do Journalism because it covers every possible field of human experience. So the fact that I studied Business Management was not a detriment to my professional growth. If anything it was an asset because it equipped me with other experiences and dimensions of skills that Mass Communication or even a course in English might not have given me.

I will like to know the books and some of the authors that you grew up reading that really impacted in to your chosen career while growing up?

I was lucky to have developed quite early a deep interest in African Literature; I happen to believe that Africans have written and have continued to write some of the most exciting contemporary literature that we read. But I had a fairly balanced education in the sense that when I was in secondary school I discovered Victorian Literature and began to read Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and so on.

Also I read Shakespeare but it was really when I discovered Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that that I appreciated African Literature and through Chinua Achebe I discovered Ferdinand Nyono, Ngugi Nwachongo and also read Wole Soyinka; I got to Wole Soyinka primarily through his poem, The Telephone Conversation which just enchanted me. Then his next work that I read was The Man Died which confounded me, in fact, it was many years later that I felt intellectually equipped to return to The Man Died and found the fascinating thing Soyinka does there. By discovering Achebe I also discovered a whole library of African writers. 

Let’s have a look at the educational standard then and you coming from the perspective of someone who has been there as a student, a writer and a teacher both in Nigeria and abroad, can you give us a comparison how the educational standard was then and what we have now so that you can highlight some of the factors responsible for the deterioration in our educational sector right now?

More than 20 years ago, when I was still at the Concord, Mike Awoyinfa interviewed Chinua Achebe and he said that the quality of education in Nigeria has fallen calamitously. Achebe’s statement then provoked a gale of reactions from some lecturers from the University of Lagos (UNILAG) who questioned the criteria he used in arriving at the conclusion that the quality of education in Nigeria has fallen. Some of them said that because Achebe had only a first degree, he was not positioned to judge the quality of education in the country. Well 20 years after that statement was made there is no question at all that the standard of education has fallen in a very terrible dimension. The Nigerian story in a lot of ways has been a drama of degradation and of devaluation and this devaluation, this fall in standards has been perhaps more deeply felt in the educational sector than in a lot of other sectors. Why is it so? If you look at it there has been what we call the Brain Drain.

There was a time and we must remember that scholars like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Emmanuel Obiechine. Abiola Irele, Biodun Jayifo, Ikennna Nzimiro, Ernest Emeyuonu. There was a time that these scholars who are giants in their fields by any standards were teaching in Nigerian universities. I like to suggest that that was the Golden Age of the education system. And then we had the years that military regime under Buhari, Babangida, Idiagbon and even in the civilian regime of Shagari, made the environment inhospitable to intellectual pursuit. So what we found was an exodus of many of Nigerian experts.

In what ways did they make the environment unfriendly?

In so many ways. One was that they undermined the autonomy of the university; a lot of lecturers and professors were fired in the universities in the name of weeding out what they called unduly radical elements or disgruntled elements. You found an era when VCs and heads of other tertiary institutions became servants to a most imperious and a most negative force in the country which led to some lecturers reporting on other lecturers; where vice chancellors and rectors of polytechnics will frequently report to the military ruler or even the civilian governors on those lecturers who were not toeing the line, who were dissidents and these lecturers were losing their jobs or were denied their promotions or were being told that they could not teach the courses they wanted to teach. Anytime you put such reins on intellectual pursuits, the real intellectuals who take the vocation of teaching seriously will leave and seek out other arenas in the world where they will have the freedom to pursue their intellectual endeavours that is one.

Again the way the politician leaders began to meddle in the appointments of the leaders in the university of those who were heading the institutions in a way that the political structure became invested in what was taught in the university and what wasn’t taught, in the way the teachers were reduced , were dehumanized in terms of what they were paid, in the way funds were withdrawn from researchers and from such pursuit; people who wanted to do research found out that they didn’t have the resources to do it and also in the evolution slowly but in a sense precipitously within our society in a culture that demeaned the intellectuals.

There was a time in Nigeria and still is a time were if you are a lecturer at the university and return to your village gathering where funds are being raised and you get up and want to speak and the MC introduces you as ‘our professor wants to speak,’ people will laugh; to be a professor became an object of a cruel joke so you they look at you as somebody who spoke grammar and had no money. There was a time when lecturers had to drive Kabukabu (private taxis) to supplement their income because they didn’t have enough. So what happened was that a lot of those lecturers, who had mobility left in search of other places. Lectures in my experience, lecturers found that they could not sustain themselves based on their income they began to look for other sources of income; some of them began to drive cabs on a part time basis, some of them went into business while some of them lost interest in teaching and began to sell handouts to the students. And so you will fail a course if you refused to buy handouts from some lecturers. So it happened that if you read someone else’s handout and you understood the course very will and you could write an excellent paper, a lot of lecturers will fail you because they want you to buy their handouts because that was where they made their money.

Then corruption sipped in; one of the things I found out while at the University of Lagos (UNILAG) was that the students, female students, came up to offer their bodies in exchange for grades. Some of people came up to me and offered money in exchange for grades. I told them that in my class the only way you do well is through hard work and I said to them that it’s going to start with me, I will prepare well for your classes and I want you to prepare well, I want you to come and ask questions. But some students went around and said, ‘we are sure he will take money and some female students said if he does not sleep with just anybody that means that he does not just sleep with anybody, he definitely will sleep with us because we are beautiful.’

 On one occasion three students walked up to me and said they wanted to ask me a question and I was all ears, they asked, ‘Sir do you mean what you said that  don’t give people grades based on money or sex?’ And I told them that I find it contemptible, reprehensible for any scholar, any teacher to do that so I mean it. When they told me that some of the students were saying that I didn’t mean it, that if they approach me I would take because they were very sexy, I said let’s wait and see if they were going to force me to take the money or rape me as it were.

So I went through very interesting exchange including a student who persistently called me up every week to tell me she was in love with me, when I told her that I was married she said she was not asking me to leave my wife but I said well I am not going to let you borrow me from my wife for even a minute. So after a while they began to call me Americana meaning that I was no longer Nigerian. And so you found a situation where to do the right thing was now being perceived to be foreign but I said no that Nigerians could do the right thing and I happened to be one of them. So it took a while for it to dawn on my students that I wasn’t going to abuse my position as a lecturer to enrich myself or to have sex nor was I going to exploit them, I made them know that I was going to be fair.

On one occasion, just when I was about to give them the final exams, the class monitor told me that there was a woman from your town who is an evening student and she says she is going to come and see me. I said that I don’t think that I had met any student from my town. He said that she was not in any class but she just found out that she was from my town and I told him to tell her not to come and see me because if she comes to see me I will give her a piece of my mind but he said, ‘Sir she couldn’t come to class because she was a custom’s officer so didn’t have time,’ so I said in that case she doesn’t have to have a degree. If you are in the customs and you don’t have time to go to classes then you shouldn’t register as a student; if you register as a student then you must make out the time to attend classes. I said to that woman that I can’t give a grade to you because you are from my home town. I can’t even give a grade to my own blood brother; if you are my blood brother and you make a D that’s what I am going to give you. I will love you exceedingly but to give someone a grade you did not earn is not love in fact it is virulent form of hate because I am empowering you to go around the world to present yourself as something you are not. That’s that.

You were just calling some of the names of scholars and authors that left and if you remember that at that time they were churning out literatures that were very thrilling, educating and otherwise; I remember the era of Pacesetters, African Writers Series and all that and we had some of the national dailies circulating half a million copies daily but suddenly there was this rapid decline in the reading culture in the country. So people are of the opinion that such decline came to being as a result of some of these wonderful writers leaving the country in that the quality of literatures went down and people, students and youths became no longer interested in reading, do you agree with that?

Not at all; clearly this might have contributed but then there has always been cult on campuses that we came to a point in some campuses as the defining phenomena. And my test theory is that students arrived in a university or polytechnic seeking intellectual stimulation, if they don’t get it or if there is a culture on campus that they watch gratification that is given to their lecturers, students are going to manufacture own form of stimulation and what do they do?

They join cults and so on that beat other people that maim, that rape women and so on. Now there was a communiqué of scholars on campus who offered intellectual excitements, who gave cause, who had intellectual debates, students will troop to those and will like to read some of the books their professors read and quote in their course. If on the other hand you find an intellectual aridity then students will invent excitement for themselves hence their participation in cults that’s one.

But I will not put down the sharp decline in the reading culture to the departure alone of major Nigerian intellectuals and scholars, no; that might be part of the equation but there is a lot more. I think that one factor to look at is the power situation; look at how hostile the day to day living of majority of Nigerians is. Most Nigerians today don’t have running water and the problem of running water is being compounded by the near total collapse of power in the country.

Now if somebody works in Lagos for example; you leave your office at 5pm , you spend two to three hours getting home. You get home and you are feeling hot and sweaty and you need to take a shower but you don’t have water, maybe your wife is telling you that the water we bought is finished so we need more money to buy water and you don’t have that money so you forego taking a bath and then there is no power; that person can’t read. You cannot take a candle or lantern to do so because you are already worked up. The first thing in the morning you have to run out again to go to work. At the weekend you go to your town union has an event or there is a wedding somewhere and you go to this wedding and it’s an all day event so you come back very tired, you can’t read. So there are so many factors that contribute the environment in Nigeria where reading is impossible. In fact to be able to read in Nigeria is a minor miracle given all the impediments.