RELISHING A COLONIAL LEGACY IN 2018
These days I am regular visitor to Zaria in Kaduna State and each time I stepped foot on the grounds of the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) I just would not be able to help push that feeling away that I had been transported back in time some 50 or 55 years ago when Nigeria must have been some place of reckoning amongst the nations of the earth.
Depending on how one sees it, ABU Zaria appears to be frozen in time and this feeling of nostalgia is so gripping especially when I spy the architecture, the old brick-wall décor of the block adjoining the present Senate Building, the old brick-wall quality of the front parapet of the Department of Physics, Department of Geology, etc., and the general tree-lined arboreal ambience of this institution of higher learning.
When I was told the watersupply system at the Samaru Campus is independent of the Zaria central waterworks and that sewage processing exist and this system is recycling-based, I could not help it but decried the day in 1960 that Nigeria was granted independence.
In hindsight, our “independence” was a terrible judgment in error especially now in 2018 that there is no hospital in Nigeria fit enough to treat President Muhammadu Buhari.
When I walk the paved pathways of the Samaru Campus under dense foliage I usually pretend I am some very old academic, an Oxford don type, who is out to contemplate some vexing academic issue; the ABU campus is a true “inside world” that sharply contrasts with the fly-infested “outside world” where everything is in disarray and the government is AWOL, apparently.
The brash, young Nigerians of the 1950s in the mould of Anthony Enahoro were too much in a hurry to send the British packing; the Brits did not come to enslave or exploit us, they came to enlighten us and we would have done well to let them do the administering until the time the local folks would have been sufficiently educated to take over the civil service but we wanted “independence.” Today, we are more mentally enslaved than at any time in our history that we erroneously thought we were slaves.
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