REMARKS AT “M. M. YUSIF DEBATE” HELD ON NOVEMBER 3, 2011

DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

BAYERO UNIVERSITY, KANO

Good Evening Everybody! As I'm listening to the speakers and looking the audience I was thinking on challenges facing University System in Nigeria.

I mean a university system which is not dominated by sycophancy; not system with scholars searching for fame, and for power, and indeed not of scholarship as market and as careerism.

But university as a centre of learning and research and for development of human society.

I am talking of a university community where ideas are forming, circulating and quarrelling or battling with each other, making the community lively.

This brought closer to me as examples the University of Mopotu in Mozambique; University of Daresalam Tanzania; University of Makerere in Uganda; and Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria – Nigeria; in the 1980s.

Bayero University, Kano too was not left behind. If you were a man of ideas, from the gates of the two campuses, you would start coming into battle of ideas.

The students of B.U.K., divided into ideological camps never agreed with each other, whether in classrooms or outside classrooms.

That made B.U.K. to be lively for teaching and research – both for students and the lecturers.

Indeed, in B.U.K. in those years, development of knowledge (whether in social or natural sciences, in engineering or in medicine), became a real social criticism.

However, with interference from outside, in students campus politics, the differences between students, founded on ideas and resolved by ideas, became to be resolved by violence.

This set a continuos decline which is still not reversed. It is the responsibility of the students to turn down the problem by themselves.

Let me advise the students of B.U.K. that the history of development of knowledge – from Plato to date – shows that students disagreement over ideas – including ideas from their teachers – is what has produced excellence in centres of learning and research. Otherwise university education will go away.

So, here I throw the challenge to you. Mine is a little push to encourage you. This is it as an annual debate starting from this year – with prices and certificates to be issued to all the participants.

Thank you. Well done.

M.M. Yusif

November, 2011