Moses Abel (whoever that is) had just added his clanging decibels to the orchestra of noise some reactionary forces are generating around the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. In his write up titled *UNN: Where Dreams Die in Darkness – A Heartbreaking Betrayal of Nigeria’s Future,* he was intentionally emotional, dramatic, and largely lacking in context, beyond generally blaming the Vice Chancellor for the same thing he, the VC is gallantly fighting, the effect of the years of rot the university has suffered.
No one denies there are challenges, of power, water, and such services. But here’s the truth only biased commentators like the writer pretend not to know, these issues did NOT start under Professor Simon Uchenna Ortuanya who is yet to clock one year in UNN as the VC. To even start with, which other school, in the mold of UNN, or any other part of Nigeria, can anyone boast of the kind of utility services Abel is stoking up hate against Professor Ortuanya, for their supposed absence in the school?
Who was first before Professor Ortuanya upon resumption, to raise the alarm, that with the level of decay he inherited, it would take a titanic battle, as he was prepared to wage, and is currently embroiled in, to rescue the school from imminent collapse? He met huge problems that were so many years in the making. And in less than one year, he has halted the drift, to the extent that unlike before his coming when the arc was hopelessly pointing downwards, things are now not just looking up, they are moving up.
What is making the difference now is that someone, the current Vice Chancellor, is actually confronting the rot head on. He is blocking leakages. He is reining in abuse, and redirecting funds to real infrastructure. Professor Ortuanya wasn’t the Vice Chancellor when a student who allegedly went to the bush around one of the Franco Building hostels to ease himself because the toilet facilities in the hostel was unfit for human use, allegedly lost his life after stepping on a live cable that was recklessly abandoned nearby.
The first thing the VC did when he started work was walk from his office to visit the nearby hostels, inspecting in detail the state of the rooms and the convenience, and acknowledging fully their intolerable deplorability. He immediately kick-started their rehabilitation. New ones are also in the pipeline.
The writer of course knows the type of rackets that run in the university, of which interests he obviously pushes, which the Vice Chancellor is fighting tooth and nail to stop, including such areas as managing and running the hostels. That kind of change makes enemies, just like whenever entrenched interests are threatened. They don’t usually stay quiet. Abel is therefore understandably not staying quiet. But the game is to resist the progressive change that is unfavorable to them, sometimes hiding under the status of a concerned critic. And they amplify discontent, push narratives, as they are doing now, to frustrate reforms.
This is one of the reasons reforms are not comfortable or easy to implement. Fixing a broken system doesn’t happen overnight. There will be friction. There will be pressure. There will be rejection.
Professor Ortuanya is reforming the way things are done in UNN. That is not a failure as the hack writer is suggesting. That is a process that is leading to rebirth and not death. They are the ones who want death for the school, which the VC is doing everything to stand between them and the survival and thriving of the school.
So, despite the noise, UNN remains academically relevant and competitive, chalking up impressive advancements in ratings, in Nigeria, Africa and the world, under Ortuanya. The weakened structure is not only being strengthened, the foundation is getting the special Ortuanya recast, even if the dust those resisting are stoking is swirling so much in the air.
Students’ concerns are valid and must be addressed, as the VC has been most visibly attending to, in Nsukka, Enugu and Ituku campuses of the University. But they should not be weaponized to distort reality or derail progress. With the level of decay brought upon our public facilities, especially as obtained in UNN, that school doesn’t need another cycle of destroy-and-abandon.
It needs leaders willing to do the hard, unpopular work of rebuilding, as Professor Ortuanya is courageously undertaking.
He is on that path. It won’t be easy. It won’t be quiet. Dislodged people will make noise. They will try to reframe the narrative. But it is necessary to ignore them to continue with the salvage work. So, UNN is not dying.
UNN is fighting back to life. The Vice Chancellor and his team of patriotically disposed and capable public servants have been making their marks, visible all over the place. The detractors want to rub their tar brush of infamy on these. But, as before, they will fail again.
