Monday Lines 1
The enemy is behind everything that happens to anyone here. In electronics and computing, a glitch is an unexpected software or hardware malfunction. Here, you have your phone frozen or your app crashed, you respond cursing the devil that is responsible for the trouble. You suffer network failure, you hit or tap the desk and pray against the spirit of lost connections. Or you simply blame the village witch, and the next-door neighbour whose jealous, suspicious eyes you’ve been seeing in your dreams. You bind and curse them all —and all their generations.
At exactly 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, May 2, 2023, thousands of students across China prepared to take the Advanced Placement (AP) Chinese Language and Culture exam. One after another, they logged into the AP testing platform. For some, the exam began smoothly—they managed to answer a few listening questions—then their screens abruptly froze. Like today’s dog expertly pursuing today’s hare, the obedient citizens of the tech world did what the manuals advised troubled users to do: log out and try again, standard troubleshooting step. Many logged out and attempted to sign back in. But the system told them no: “Access denied. This account is already in use.” Nothing they did resolved the glitch. They remained logged out and locked out – and stranded.
The experience was not a one-centre fiasco. The malfunction was widespread; students from over 700 high schools were impacted. A makeup examination was later organized for those affected.
China is home to 56 officially recognized ethnic groups—a fine mix of cultures, languages, and traditions. But when the AP Chinese exam system glitched, no one pointed fingers at anyone’s ethnicity. No teacher or senator screamed: “Glitch caused by majority Han to retard the progress of the Hui.” There was no binding the devil and cursing the enemy. The problem was simply taken for what it was —a glitch, a technical chaos.
JAMB discovered that an unfortunate glitch happened to a part of its 2025 exam and explained how it happened; it offered apologies and remedies. But some people say the JAMB glitch was not an accident; they say it was a carefully designed plot by the Yoruba, led by JAMB’s Professor Ishaq Oloyede to deny Igbo children university education.
Nigeria is an impossible country. Oloyede is an Egba man from Abeokuta, therefore he must be carrying out a Yoruba agenda against their historical southern rival across the Niger. That is what some people say in rooms and verandas and on rooftops. I gasped reading very enlightened people, even respected top media people, entering the fray, blasting the walls of reason.
Well, it turned out that the glitch affected more candidates in Lagos (a Yoruba state) than the total number of the victims in the South-East. In Lagos, there were 206,610 victim-candidates; the whole of the five South-East states had 173,397. Could the Yoruba have hated their neighbours so much that they would add their own part of the earth to the scorched? Only a suicide bomber would not mind inflicting more harm on himself than on his target. And suicide bombing is not a Western Nigerian delicacy.
Read the “moth in the hardware” story in the evolution epic of the computer. Anything machine can malfunction at any point and caused by anything. That is why it is called a machine, an invention by man. Read the Greek origin of the word and its long journey to today’s form and meaning.
The genius called Thomas Edison when he encountered technical hiccups which he called ‘bugs’ in his inventions, famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Science historians say Edison tackled the bugs and hiccups in his inventions through a combination of rigorous experimentation, documentation, and iterative problem-solving. I am almost sure that our scientists and engineers are part of this JAMB controversy, not as professionals proactively in search of solutions to future glitches, but as public or closet ethnic champions.
I read a report credited to the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The chairman of ASUU-UNN, Comrade Óyibo Eze, told newsmen in Nsukka on Wednesday that the massive failure, which he claimed mostly affected candidates from the South-East, was a deliberate attempt by JAMB to stop children from the zone from getting higher education.
“JAMB knows that children from the South-East must score higher before they can get admission, whereas their counterparts in some parts of the country will use a 120 JAMB score to get admission to read medicine at universities in their area. In the JAMB recently released result, out of 1,955,069 candidates who sat for the 2025 examination, over 1.5 million candidates scored less than 200, and the majority of these are from the South -East and Lagos State, where many Igbos reside,” he said.
Nsukka’s ASUU reduced a national disaster to a glib tribal talk. It even added Lagos to its sphere of tribal influence. Jesus said: “It is finished.” Until I read that news report, I had thought that ASUU (of any branch) was what we thought it was: an association of intellectuals. Now we know. “If gold rusts, what shall iron do? For if a priest, upon whom we trust, be foul, no wonder a layman may yield to lust.” Geoffrey Chaucer who wrote those lines in ‘The Canterbury Tales’ apparently had ASUU-UNN in mind.
The union should have left such cheap tribal talk to arrogance of ignorance and those who revel in it. There is a reason why university teachers are called intellectuals. “An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.” That was Albert Camus in ‘The Enigma of the Universe’ (1948). If you are called an intellectual, your scent must be self-awareness; your breath, critical thinking; your thoughts, introspection. Psychologist John H. Flavell called it meta-cognition — thinking about thinking. A union of university teachers which failed to question its own assumptions, and neglected an analysis of its reasoning before taking a stand on a key national issue puts all branches of knowledge to shame.
A teacher should never be found “in the thick of the hoi polloi”, saying what the unwashed, the unthinking are saying. Or, maybe we overrate some people. Or, should I say William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the US ‘National Review’ magazine, was right in his popular political preference for the crowd over the caste of the learned: “I’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” If anyone holds that same opinion today of the Nigerian ivory tower, the person would be justified.
I have my own grouse with JAMB, and this is on the unresolved issue of those it calls underage candidates. I wrote about it last year. Their results are withheld this year. There is a subsisting court judgment which nullified the age restriction policy authored by JAMB. The order issued by the Delta State High Court, to the best of my knowledge, has not been upturned by any higher court. Besides, if you would not give these young people admission, you should have programmed your system not to accept their applications, fees and all. So, if there would be an uproar, it should be for victims of that policy. What we have on air, instead, is a war of tribes and tongues over a glitch that has extracted apologies from the JAMB boss and remedies given the victims.
Shakespeare’s King Lear says “I am a man/More sinn’d against than sinning.”
We should have enough of people reading tribal meanings into anything and everything they are involved in. What I write here is a debugging attempt, an effort at telling ethnic moths to remove themselves from our relays; an attempt at protecting the system from human glitches.
Or, maybe we should just pack up Nigeria since we cannot live a minute without threatening each other. And over what? Over glitches that can happen even under an angel’s watch.
Monday Lines 2
NNPC’s Ojúl’arí ọ̀rẹ́ ò dé ‘nú
In Yoruba, there is a proverb: “Ojú l’arí, ọ̀rẹ́ ò dé ‘nú” — literally it means ‘we only see the face; friendship does not go deep inside.’ That is the name the Group Managing Director of the NNPCL, Mr Bayo Ojulari, bears. The name calls attention to why appearance and essence sometimes wear different colours. It teaches a lesson in how names, faces and accents may be mere masks — not mirrors.
In Nigeria, the powers of power always wear tribal costumes. Every big position is a sacred grove, only the initiates have its access cards. Kinship confers initiation rights at the grove; free cakes are the benefits. For this and other familial reasons, about a month ago when Ojulari was made the boss of Nigeria’s national oil company, Yoruba people, home and abroad, danced round the world. They thought the NNPC had become their grove.
There is a town called Oke Ode in Ifelodun Local Government Area of Kwara State. Chiefs and youths of that community competed for space in newspapers, on radio and TV with press releases thanking President Bola Tinubu and their own stars for the appointment of Ojulari. They said he was their son in whom they were very well pleased. The chiefs, in particular, added, for effect, that he was “able and capable of bringing the necessary turn-around in NNPC for the benefit of Nigeria and the entire citizenry.”
But the man by himself gave a definition of himself last week. He spoke extensively to BBC Hausa in flawless Hausa language, clearly and purposively choosing and declaring where he belongs. Newspapers did English translations of what he said: “I was surprised when people said I was not from the North. I am a child of the North, and I come from Ilorin. I was brought up in Kaduna State. I started learning Yoruba when I was 15 years old. When I left Kaduna, I went to Zaria to study, so I am a northerner,” he said — and added: “I need the support of the North to do this work well and bring development to the North and the whole of Nigeria…”
What Ojulari said is a culture jolt to Western Nigerians, and I saw it in more than one critical Yoruba circle. It is a reminder that the face is not necessarily the soul. It is also a warning that a name may and may not mirror allegiance or belonging.
Three things I noted in what the man said: That he is from the North is true and the truth; Kwara is geographically north. It appears settled forever, no matter what I may think or feel. That the man is from Ilorin will be declared false by Ilorin, and held to be very untrue by the people of Oke Ode, his father’s hometown. The city he claims, Ilorin, is in Kwara-Central senatorial district; the town that claims him, Oke Ode, is an Igbomina town that sits deep in the savanna of Kwara South. Much more fundamental is this: “I need the support of the North to do this work well and bring development to the North and the whole of Nigeria.” Now, read the last clause of that sentence again. Did you see that ‘the north’ comes first before ‘Nigeria’? So, between the two which one is really his country?
In the pantheon of the gods, some deities are more worthy than others. The North is that deity who stands by you with everything it has. When you have northern Nigeria on your side, you can sleep completely and totally. No ant will dare walk your skin; rodents won’t disturb your rest. Ojulari knew this as a proven fact. He, therefore, desperately wanted the North behind him. And, with that interview, the boss man has owned the North; the North is expected to accept and own him.
I discussed that interview with a big man from the North – a Fulani businessman. I told him that the oil man did not need that ethnic part of the interview. I expected the NNPC boss to know that these are very treacherous, testy, delicate times in Nigeria. Identity in Nigeria is not a buffet; you can’t claim Yoruba before appointment and do cultural code-switching after the swearing in. What define leaders here are the name, language, tribe, religion and geography they wear. And, each of those items has an opposite; the affirmation of one quickly alienates the other.
I believe Ojulari could claim his northernness without posting a disclaimer of his ethnic, linguistic and communal roots. His interview has stomped his feet on the eyes of that part of the earth which calls him son. The language and tone of the interview suggest his mother tongue is a footnote; an afterthought that came after 15 years. His hometown, Oke Ode, did not even feature at all in his story as told by him. I hope his Yoruba is strong enough for him to understand that rain beats one into the same house more than once. He can still make quiet amends.
A lesson: Butterfly gazed at her reflection in a clear pond and said, “These wings are too grand for an insect—I must be a bird! I am a bird!”
Butterfly convinced herself and stopped associating with insects; she opted for the assembly of birds.
In his majesty, the eagle arrived the next meeting of birds. He spotted butterfly and queried her:
“Why are you here?”
Beautiful butterfly replied: “I have wings like you. I fly. This is where I truly belong. I am a bird.”
The eagle smiled, patted butterfly on the back and gently told her: “You are truly beautiful, but you are not of our tribe. You flutter, we glide and soar. The world may keep praising your beauty but you should never let achievement, praise and adulation make you forget who you truly are.”
So, the Hausa-speaking Yorubaman who started learning Yoruba at the age of 15 should listen to the elders when they warn his butterfly never to think itself bird. Achebe’s Ikemefuna called Okonkwo father. We all know how fatal the boy’s run for cover turned out in his ‘father’s’ arms. May be I should kuku read out that part of the story: “As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, ‘My father, they have killed me!’, as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down…”
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