A PROFESSOR IS EQUIVALENT OF A MAJOR-GENERAL

I must say I was surprised that Professor Farooq Kperogi’s back-page column of the Saturday Tribune of 11th September 2021 was a vituperation of the academic fraud that Ali Isah Pantami, Nigeria’s federal minister of Communications and Digital Economy got himself enmeshed in. All this while, I had held the belief that Prof. Kperogi was an all-admiring “disciple” of the harsh doctrines of Sheik Pantami, especially, as Kperogi once wrote, Mullah Pantami sought avenues to befriend Kperogi, a US stateside resident. This situation is rightly the nightmare-case for the FBI: a rambling Christophobe mullah resident in Saudi Arabia back then trying to ingratiate himself into the life of a devote Nigerian Muslim resident in the US, one so “devoted” that he “scored a hit” by marrying a Christian Nigerian-American Igbo lady and has probably “converted” her to Islam now. But, in his criticism of the fraud perpetuated by Pantami as per Pantami “stellar” ascension to the terminal rank of a Professor of Cybersecurity at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, where Pantami has never held any teaching or research appointment (why does the name “Hope Uzodimma” keep tugging at my consciousness?), Prof. Kperogi was thoroughly unbiased, stating facts as they should be. However, in doing correlation analyses of rankings in the civil service, private sector, military, etc., Prof. Kperogi observed that a professor in a university is the equivalent of a Field Marshal in the army. Alas, this is not so.

I have always held that the academia and the military, because of their strict regimental structures, are only the two institutions in Nigeria where law and order still prevail. I have had the fortune of experiencing both worlds, so to say. Because of the soldiering career of my father, my first 20 years of life was spent in a military setting, then it was another 10 years for post-secondary school education, and these past 20 years I have been associated with the academia as a teacher of physics in the university whilst enjoying the vistas open to me to do research inquiries. What I have come to recognise is the academia is the “mirror-image-mathematical-operator” of the military (to coin a term from optics and quantum mechanics): which is to say that, if an all-out war broke out and Nigeria desires to fill its military officer-corps with “brains” from the academia, the following ranking system would be adhered to, viz; Second Lieutenant/Graduate Assistant, Lieutenant/Assistant Lecturer, Captain/Lecturer II, Major/Lecturer I, Lieutenant “Light” Colonel/Senior “No PhD” Lecturer, “Full” Colonel/Senior “PhD” Lecturer, Brigadier/Associate Professor, Major-General/Professor.

Methinks a Lieutenant-General is no one more than a professor who is a Vice-Chancellor, a General is a professor who also serves as Chairman of Council of a university, and a Field Marshal is a Professor Emeritus who is revered for either the purposeful researches to his name or for the Nobel Prize that he has earned. Since there cannot be a plethora of Field Marshals in any army corps, or none at all, it follows therefore that a professor cannot be the equivalent of a Field Marshal. Actually, in the Nigerian military set-up as well as in the academia, the most stressful period for an “active-duty, up-climber” is the time of holding the rank of a Brigadier or an Associate Professor and not being sure that a “vacancy” exists out there that would enable that holder hit “generalship” or “professor” before retirement comes knocking on the door. Isn’t it the norm now that a “general” and a “professor” retires with “full salary?” No wonder the military was “smart” to append “General” to the traditional rank of a Brigadier; alas, ASUU has not got on this “trick” yet with respect to the prospect of an Associate Professor retiring with “full salary.”

Sunday Adole Jonah,

Department of Physics, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger State

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