University of Ibadan alumnus Ibukun Babarinde did the
institution and Nigeria a remarkable favour last week. Shocked at what he found of Mellanby Hall’s
toilet facilities, he pulled out a camera and took several scandalous pictures
that were later published online.
First, let me disclose that I am also a UI product, and a
Mellanbite. As a youngster, it was my biggest dream to go to Nigeria’s finest
tertiary institution. My happiest day as
a teenager was probably the day I laid my hands on my admission letter.
I recall a university that prided itself on its excellent
academic tradition, but it was also a clean, well-maintained and safe
campus. When I say, safe, I mean that
you could walk and work anywhere on the campus at any time of the day or night.
I also mean that its facilities were exquisitely
maintained. I do not recall toilet
facilities, in any hall, library or faculty that you hesitated to walk into.
It would appear that Babarinde, who left the university in
2008, just six years ago, had the same general experience. His pictures show Mellanby Hall’s toilet
facilities in a disgusting, embarrassing and dangerous state.
They show toilets so dirty it is difficult to believe that
they belong to a public institution. I
have seen cleaner toilets in Lagos markets. How can a student learn in such an
environment?
In an essay I called “Nourished By The Trees,” I recalled a
completely different experience.
“Ibadan proved to be all that I had dreamed. I met famous people, joined
fascinating clubs, drank of the wells of ideas on offer everywhere you turned,
explored the huge central library, and walked long pathways that had been
walked by many a remarkable intellectual. Sometimes, I did not want to go to
bed: if you do not fall asleep, you do not wake up to find that an epochal life
had been a dream.
“In the midst of all the excitement of the campus, it would
take two years—two-thirds of my undergraduate programme—for the truth to sink
in: the university was not really a place, and I was not there for a particular
course of study. The university was a life, a culture, an atmosphere, an
orientation, an awakening, a discovery. The university was an instrument, much
like a pencil-sharpener, fashioned to develop blunt instruments into sharp
tools.”
My favorite patch of real estate on campus was the Botanical
Garden, which I introduced as a huge area of about 100 acres of tree samples
from all over the world for botanical research.
“Each of the trees was dutifully identified, and a short
legend told you the basics you needed to know about the plant. The size of
those trees and the maintenance of the Garden told you that many people, for
many years, had worked hard to see that generations of students and researchers
benefited from their dream.
Along one side of the Garden ran a small, quiet brook,
separated from the Garden by a small footpath…Sometimes, as you walked this
path, you could hear small animals scurrying away as you approached. Birds sang
in full-throated orchestras, each melody magnified and broadcast widely by the
deep quiet. The Garden of Eden had to be somewhere nearby…
“It was in that final year in Ibadan and in that
expertly-maintained Garden that I realized that excellence does not consist of
anyone trying to do everything well. It is an individual ensuring that what he
owes is faultless. If the commitment of that one person is to the larger
society, indeed to posterity or time, or to doing the right thing for no other
justification beyond its being right, the day arrives when there is somebody
inspired by that effort. Thirty-one years ago, I was one such man wandering
around in the shadows of someone’s commitment, thinking mine was the earth…”
Even after my graduation in 1978, I visited that garden for
spiritual replenishment every chance I had.
My last trip in the 1990s was complete disaster, as part of the property
was being savagely destroyed for a construction project.
I left in a hurry, but that experience somehow prepared me
for Babarinde’s devastating pictures which speak darkly of a disaster that is
certainly not limited to one hall.
In “One Night In Legon, Ghana,” a 2005 essay for ‘The Campus
Life,’ a publication of UI’s Advancement Centre, I recalled a 1976 visit of the
Debating Club to the University of Legon.
I was a participant in the first of the two-day annual
debating contest that year, and I commented on how similar both institutions
were as we arrived at Legon’s Main Auditorium.
“As you know, Ghana and Nigeria, raised in the well-tested
colonial cauldron of Britain, are similar in many respects,” I wrote. “I did not think that either of the
universities in Ibadan or Legon saw themselves as being different from, or
inferior to Oxford University. That evening, as the judges took the stage and
the six speakers were being introduced, you could see just how similar they
both were. We might as well have been in
front of the standard Trenchard Hall crowd.”
One look at Babarinde’s pictures and I am ashamed I once put
UI and Oxford in the same sentence. I
know that times are hard, and that Nigerian universities are battling for the
finances necessary to become competitive.
Still, there is no excuse for the University of Ibadan, or a university—any
university, anywhere—to have a single toilet facility of that nature. It is completely antithetical to the concept
of a university and a university environment.
For three years, Professor Isaac Adewole, UI’s
Vice-Chancellor, has spoken about repositioning the institution as Nigeria’s
premier university, following the adoption of his proposals by the Council and
the Senate.
The question is what those standards really are, and whether
his plan is to drag the institution into the toilet. Is it really possible for you to advance high
standards when you are so dirty?
The same question is present in most public and private
establishments in Nigeria, where, despite heavy posturing, only Oga’s facilities
are cleaned regularly.
I once worked for a newspaper where there was only one
toilet for all of the staff, and I still have nightmares when I recall having
to use it. Oga had his own toilet, and
it sparkled. I worked for another
newspaper where it became a priority to have excellent toilet facilities, and
we worked hard to ensure them, but it was a different story when I visited
several years later. Oga had his own
toilet; it sparkled.
I have visited Nigeria’s presidential palace once in my
life. I was shown to a visitor’s toilet
which had been exquisitely finished in marble, but the place was awful because
it lacked maintenance.
The moral of this story is that in Nigeria, Oga’s mission is
often to make Oga happy so that he can go out and make speeches.
At UI, are Professor
Adewole’s standards really superior to those shameful toilets at Mellanby?
I guess that when his guests complain they have encountered
one of those facilities, he laughs and tells them they should have come to his
own.
• Email: sonala.olumhense@gmail.com
• Twitter: @SonalaOlumhense
Culled from SAHARA REPORTERS
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