--Friends: Please permit me to break into your silence, by asking you to read this this note from professor Pita Agbese. It is his personal reaction to Professor Kperogi's reply to my letter to you about a week ago. I promise you that this will be the last you will read from us about this affair. Blessings.
Farooq Kperogi and I
I thought that Prof. Bitrus Gwamna's response to the irresponsible piece that Farooq Kperogi wrote about Prof. Gwamna, the Association of Nigerian Scholars in the Diaspora, and me had sufficiently set the record straight but Kperogi's own reply to that response and his column in last Saturday's Tribune require my own response. First, in his Tribune column, he warned his readers that our association did not speak for all Nigerians in the Diaspora. We never claimed that it did. He accused us of being fraudulent and strangely enough, he informed his readers that I was the younger brother of Dan Agbese. Yes, Dan is my elder brother of whom I am extremely proud to have come from the same womb. Dan is an outstanding journalist and patriot. Why Farooq saw it fit to drag my brother's name to his quarrel with us is one of the strangest things that I have ever seen in a scholar. What was the purpose of that? That my "fraudulent behavior" is inexplicable given that my brother is such a man of integrity? That I am not truly Dan's brother if I could engage in "fraudulent" activities? This type of character assassination is not what I would have expected of a man who wants to be taken seriously as a scholar, but what do I know? Strangely, Kperogi included my picture in the piece as if I was on the FBI's Most Wanted List.
One of Farooq's readers, a young man from our village, whom I have never met but who generously called me his uncle, was asked by Farooq to find out why I had changed from his impression of who he thought I was, from our brief encounter in Missouri last year, to this "fraudster" out to launder the image of the Buhari administration and the Nigerian military. This, I thought was also quite strange. There is nothing to investigate about me. I don't live a double life.
In his response to Prof. Gwamna, Farooq mentioned how I knew many military officers and how I often travel to Nigeria. I think he did this to create the impression that my travels are funded from a secret military slush fund. How I wish! Since 1995, I have traveled from the US to Nigeria at least twice a year. I was a co-director, with Professor George Klay Kieh, on major research projects, "The Military Question in West Africa" and "The State in Africa." Both were funded by the Ford Foundation. Both projects entailed extensive research, networking and conferences in the United States and Africa. I traveled extensively in the course of co-directing both projects. I was also a co-principal investigator (with Professor John Mukum Mbaku) on another large project, "Ethnicity in the Third World." Prof. Mbaku managed the finances of that project. He is not just an outstanding scholar but also a highly competent manager of resources. At the end of that project, Prof. Mbaku had so resourcefully managed the funds that we had over $40,000 left unspent. I suggested to him that we should ask the Ford Foundation, which funded the project, if we could use that money to organize a workshop on social research methodologies for postgraduate students in Nigeria. Ford graciously accepted our request and Mbaku, Kieh and I organized a one-week residential workshop at the University of Ibadan for post-graduate students drawn from various Nigerian universities. I traveled to Nigeria three times in connection with this workshop and only one of the trips was paid out of the fund.
For four years (2008-2012), I was a senior consultant on the US State and Defense Departments-funded Trans-Saharan Security Symposium. It was a project designed to train middle-level and senior-level security officers on recognizing and combating threats to national security. It involved one-week in-country trainings and workshops in Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Mauretania, Burkina Faso, and Chad and a two-week regional training for security officers from each of the participating West African countries held in any of the participating states. We had eight to ten week sessions in the various countries annually. My role involved presentations on "The History of Civil-Military Relations in West Africa," "Introduction to Civil-Military Relations," "The Role of the Armed Forces in Combating Ethnic and Religious Violence" and in drawing up military simulation exercises. I was also the project's photographer. I got involved in this project because when the first training session was held at the Kofi Anan International Peacekeeping Training Center, Accra, there was no African among the trainers. The participants were highly critical of this omission saying how inappropriate it was for a training program on threats to national security in West Africa not to draw on the many African experts in this field. It was only then that Dr. Zakaria Ousman (Chad), Naomi Akpan-Ita (Nigeria), Julius Nyan'goro (Tanzania), Prof. Boubacar Ndi'aye (Mauretania), Gen. Jones Arogbofa, Gen. Ishola Williams, and I were approached and asked to serve as senior consultants. This was one of the most outstanding programs of my academic career. I have done most of my academic work on the political economy of military rule, and interacting directly with officers from the participating countries was intellectually rewarding. To be fair, I had a lot of fun. I met some of the most interesting persons on this project. I loved all the travels. The pay was also great. We worked hard and we played very hard during the project. I had some of the best meals of my life in the course of our training programs: red, red in Ghana, roasted rams in Chad and Mauretania, goat-head and roasted fish in Nigeria. Most important of all, our training had practical and real-life impacts. For example, in one of our in-country training programs in Nigeria, we conducted a simulation exercise on responding to a terrorist bombing in a city. Two weeks after our training, Boko Haram bombed the police headquarters in Abuja. Some of the participants in our training program were among the first responders to the terrorist bombing and they were glad that they knew what to do in light of our simulation exercise.
The Nigerian Army now has a Civil Affairs unit. This grew directly from the project. I am glad that I was part of the team that drew up the outlines of this unit designed to encourage a cordial relationship between the armed forces and civilians. I came to know many military officers in the course of our training programs. On another personal note, I accumulated over 1 million miles in Delta's frequent flyer program, mostly for flying for this project.
I also came to know some US military officers as I used to be a visiting instructor at the US Air Force Special Operations University at Fort Walton Beach, Florida. The Trans-Saharan Security Symposium also included several retired US generals as instructors. I have gotten to know many of these, in particular, Gen. Russ Howard.
I should also note that I have done all my sabbaticals in Nigeria. First, at the Yakubu Gowon Center where I directed its projects on, "Consolidating Democracy in Nigeria" and "Creating Stable Civil-Military Relations in Nigeria." I was also the Center's principal grants consultant. We wrote several grant proposals that were successfully funded. I did not charge the Center the minimum going-rate of 15% of the funded projects. If I did, I would have made a lot of money. I did not charge anything at all. By biggest reward was in helping the Center to organize an international conference on democracy in Nigeria. President Jimmy Carter, President Olusegun Obasanjo were the keynote speakers. Gen. Gowon and Chief Ernest Shonekan were other former heads-of state who attended. My presentation generated a heated discussion and Chief Shonekan who was seated next to me on the panel, privately told me that I was right in my criticism of some of the pro-democracy organizations. My second sabbatical was at the African Center for Democratic Governance (Afrigov). I believed in what the late Prof. Aaron Gana and the Center stood for. I worked at the Center without any pay, except a furnished one room apartment that was provided for me. This room was so small it did not have enough room for table. I had to stay in my office at night if I needed to work on a table. I enjoyed the Spartan lifestyle. I traveled on behalf of the Center entirely at my own expense. Just as I did at the Yakubu Gowon Center, I wrote grant applications proposals for Afrigov. The most successful was a multimillion Naira grant from the European Union for a one-week workshop on effective legislating for members of states houses of assembly. My third sabbatical was at the University of Jos. My appointment letter stated what my basic salary was going to be. I did not know that allowances raised the amount considerably. When I converted the salary in Naira to dollars, it was so small that I told myself that I would not even bother to ask to be paid. It was only much later that I was told that my calculation was wrong. By the time I realized this, I had already completed my sabbatical. My one year salary had accumulated and by the time I applied to be paid, the amount was so huge that it raised suspicion on the part of the VC. To cut a long story short, the salary was slashed substantially. It was okay by me. I was more interested in teaching. My most recent sabbatical was at Bingham University. As Prof. Zalanga noted in his response, Bingham has had a major financial crisis. My first salary was paid three months after my sabbatical ended. Bingham still owes me for seven months. My several travels from the United States to Bingham, at my own expense, cost me more than the entire salary that Bingham offered to pay me.
I took time to narrate all these to dispel Kperogi's belief that I travel to Nigeria often on a secret military slush fund. I am not the money-grubbing scholar ready to dispense my expertise for the right amount that Kperogi is intent on portraying. At Bingham, one of my students lost her father and the man who had offered to pay her fees in quick succession. I offered to help but as it has turned out, she has no one else to pay her fees. So, over one third of my Bingham salary will be used to pay her fees. I have taught her photography and given her a camera and equipment worth more than 300,000 Naira. I am happy she has been able to earn a few thousand Naira from her newly-acquired photographic skills.
I should also mention that I have done consultancies for NEMA, INEC and the Ministry of Aviation, all under PDP administrations. These were very small amounts, but I was glad I did them. For NEMA, I organized a training program on how to use digital imaging to document disasters. I was glad I introduced this program at NEMA. I think my "profit" was just enough to pay for my airfare.
It is funny that today, Kperogi is painting me as a cheerleader for the military. Yes, I prefer today's military to the military we had during military rule but I have always decried military interventions in African politics. I believe that political intervention is neither good for the military nor for Nigeria. My first scholarly publication was on military expenditures and private capital accumulation in Nigeria. I was glad that I was the first scholar to demonstrate how military expenditures in Nigeria are structured with an objective to fleecing Nigeria. I was also very critical of the dubious transition programs, predicting that the Babangida transition was deliberately designed to fail ("The Demise of Nigeria's Forthcoming Third Republic").
I don't have friends among the officer corps in the way that Kperogi implied. I worked with a number of serving and retired officers during our Tran-Saharan project. Among these was General Jones Arogbofa who later became the Chief of Staff to President Jonathan. Arogbofa is an officer and a gentleman and I was glad I got to know him. We were at Dakar shortly after I lost my mother. All my colleagues took me out to a bar to try to cheer me up and to console me over my mother's death. Gen. Arogbofa did something that night that remained indelible in my mind. He drank a glass of beer in memory of my mother. He had never drunk any alcohol in his life and I don't think he has had any other drink since that night. I was moved to tears by this gesture. Many people who knew our connection thought that I could make money through him when he was the Chief of Staff to Jonathan. I did not, and I was not expecting to do so. I did not even see him throughout that period. He once asked me, while I was in Nigeria, to come over to his office at Aso Rock. I went but he had flown with President Jonathan to Zamfara State. We laughed about this afterward. An officer I ran into at the Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport, Abuja, on my way to the country to bury my younger brother, surprised me when he aborted his flight to the UK that night and showed up at my brother's funeral two days later. I have never given him anything and he has never given me any money but no amount of money from him would have blown me away over the way his coming to my brother's funeral did. I have been very lucky. It is people like him and Gen. Arogbofa that count themselves my friends and I equally count them as friends. Friendships based entirely on mutual respects and admiration.
I made frequent visits to Nigeria in the 1990s because I was part of a USAID-funded project on university linkages. The Iowa-Nigeria Linkage was a linkage program between four institutions in Iowa and four similar institutions in Nigeria. It brought faculties from UI, Ife, NISER and the Ibadan Polytechnic here on an exchange program. Faculty and students from the four institutions in Iowa made several trips to Nigeria. The project was suspended after the Abacha coup in 1993, leaving $200,000 out of the $1 million grant unspent.
The MacArthur Foundation awarded six other colleagues and I a grant to conduct a research project on the "Crisis in the Niger Delta: Options for Long-term Solutions. I made several trips in connection with that grant.
It may also interest Kperogi to know that I have flown to Nigeria three times using my accumulated frequent flyer mileage. Similarly, I always take advantage of airline offers to passengers when a flight is overbooked and people are asked to volunteer to give up their seats and fly on later flights. I have used coupons from such offers to fly free to Nigeria twice.
Most often when I fly to Nigeria on my own, I rely on loans from our university's credit union to fund the trips. I have a running joke among the personal bankers there that comes November and May, they expect me to come for a loan for a trip to Africa. I should note that every summer, I either teach a summer class or I get a summer research grant. Since I have been here continuously since 1989, I failed to teach or get a summer research grant only once.
In 2017, while I was at Bingham, the National Defense College invited me to give a lecture on US-Africa relations. When I informed the college that I would have returned to the US by the date of the conference and would come only if the college would pay for my flight, the college declined and withdrew the invitation. I had no way of funding my trip then and I accepted the withdrawal.
I have been living in the United States since 1980. I come from a very large family. My father had thirteen wives. I therefore had twelve step-mothers and many brothers and sisters. Some of my trips to Nigeria have been funeral trips. I have gone to Nigeria to bury my father and mother, six stepmothers and several brothers and sisters. Nobody paid for any of these trips and I have never asked anyone to do so. Close friends such as Prof. Gwamna, Prof. Zalanga, Prof. Chris Ogbondah and others have given me some money during such sad events. I remain profoundly grateful to them.
One of the most gratifying aspects of my life has been meeting people who have made my life much better through their friendship and fierce loyalty. In teacher's college, Akila Usman Gwarry, now retired AIG Gwarry, was one of such friends. When I got into a little trouble and some people threatened to beat me up, Akila said that he would burn down their thatched roofs even if that meant that his own father's house would be burnt down in retaliation. Luckily, it did have to come to that but a friend willing to have his father's house turned into a heap of ashes because of loyalty to me was really a friend. The late Dr. Joseph Shekwo was such a friend in graduate college and in my working life, I have been fortunate to have two friends like that: Prof. Julius Ihonvbere and Prof. Bitrus Gwamna. Bitrus is the nicest human being that I have ever met and even if all my life had revolved around fraud, I would never involve Bitrus in such fraudulent activities. Bitrus would never hurt a fly and I will never hurt Bitrus or drag his name in the mud. What Bitrus and I have is a friendship of a lifetime. He is an ardent Christian and I am a Chief Priest but our religious differences have never come between us.
We set our organization based on the model of a similar organization that the eminent political scientist, Prof. Peter Ekeh and seven of us set up at the height of the Abacha dictatorship. The association of Nigeria scholars for Dialogue, had only eight members: Ekeh, Prof. Eghosa Osaghae, Prof. Ebere Onwudiwe, the late Dr. Pat Williams, Dr. Leslie Obiorah, Prof. Folu Ogundinmu, one other person whose name has escaped me and I served as its executive secretary. We held two conferences and published a monograph. We also sent a memorandum to the Tobi Commission that drafted the 1999 Constitution. The Commission thanked us in its report.
I am sorry if this response has been lengthy and verbose. I don't know how to respond to personal attacks such as Kperogi has launched against me. I came into this with a serious handicap from my upbringing. My father taught me that if someone calls me a big head and I do have a big head, that would not be a nice thing to say but that the person would be truthfully describing my anatomy. On the other hand, if I don't have a big head and someone calls me a big head, that person would only be lying and that I should not take that person's judgment into account. Kperogi reportedly included my picture but most people on this forum, not knowing me may still have no idea whether or not I have a big head. At least, I have introduced myself or reintroduced myself to you.
I have made my position on the Buhari administration very clear. I prefer it to most of Nigeria's most recent administrations. Those like Kperogi who pillory Buhari can do so to their heart's content but they can never force me to join them in their excoriation of the administration. I will not join them not because I serve as a hired gun for the administration but because I have a right to disagree with Kperogi and any other critic of the administration. Some have even accused me of supporting Buhari because I was trying to get noticed for an appointment. I have never lobbied for any appointment but those who get appointed do not have two heads or have more educational qualifications than me. No one can lecture me on the ravages of violence in Nigeria. Three times, my homes in Nigeria have been razed to the ground on account of violence. My hometown, Agila, was the only place completely destroyed during the Civil War, a destruction that a Catholic priest compared to the destruction of Carthage.
I wage daily war on the Internet against the sadistic, incompetent and mendacious leadership of Samuel Ortom of my own state, Benue. My stand on Ortom has earned my death threats but I cannot succumb to such threats. I recently celebrated my 65th birthday. Life expectancy for Nigerian males is only 54 years. I have lived 11 years beyond my expected shelf life and if I were to die because I want to see a Nigeria that works for all its citizens, I will regard it an honor and a privilege.
Dr. Bitrus Paul Gwamna
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/007d01d519a9%24b1b2cc30%2415186490%24%40gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPWX8rXNH4h_taM2Jpv8Exo2CC04Kxui%2BhDBKiMpRVtXwwdngA%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment