A Class Act, By Donu Kogbara

Professor Attahiru Jega had been a distinguished Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University Kano, BUK, for five years when ex-President Goodluck Jonathan hired him to chair the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, in 2010.
He completed his INEC tenure last week and then quietly – without drawing attention to himself – went back to BUK at the beginning of this week, to take up a post as a Political Science lecturer… and was respectfully received by the current Vice-Chancellor and the Head of the Political Science Department.
Now that’s what I call a Class Act and well brought-up gentleman!
Being in charge of elections in the Giant of Africa is a major gig; and Jega has been a superstar on the national and international stages for half a decade.
He has wielded vast amounts of power. He has managed multi-billion naira budgets. He has been the Oga of hundreds of thousands of employees. During the recent elections, INEC employed 50,000 ad hoc staff in Lagos alone.
Desperate aspirants and candidates galore have begged Jega for support. Foreign and Nigerian journalists have regularly hassled him to grant interviews.
Ambassadors from distant shores have gone out of their way to meet him.
All sorts of august organisations, both here and abroad, have invited him to give speeches. And he will go down in history as a courageous champion of democracy who dispassionately umpired the first-ever Nigerian election in which an incumbent has been defeated. He has become an unforgettable household name.
The sky is now his limit and he could easily have stayed put in Abuja, enjoying the warm glow of celebrity…OR spread his wings and jetted off to a sophisticated and comfortable overseas location to do a fancy job at a famous world-class educational institution or at the United Nations or wherever.
But he has chosen, instead, to return to his roots and share his formidable intellect and the practical experience he has gained via INEC with young students in the very modest city of Kano…AND chosen to dedicate himself to a low-profile academic environment for the foreseeable future…
AND chosen to serve under people who were probably his juniors when he was a Vice-Chancellor.
And I’m pretty sure that the salary and perks are nothing to write home about!
I salute Professor Jega’s heroic patriotism and greatly admire his unmaterialistic humility, which is especially commendable in a country that is obsessed with status, rank and wealth…and full of former senior government officials who hang around in Abuja, constantly lobbying to get juicy new Federal appointments, because – having tasted life at the top – they’d rather not come back down to earth and revert to their previous “ordinary” occupations.

The other day, I was chatting to a friend who runs a parastatal and is very depressed because he was appointed by ex-President Goodluck Jonathan and strongly suspects that President Muhammadu Buhari will remove him in the near future.
It was clear that he would be utterly miserable if his tenure was not renewed. And I reminded him that he had been a successful engineer before he got the parastatal job…and pointed out that it would not be a big deal if the President sacked him because he could easily revert to being a successful engineer.
He looked at me as if I was mad! And yet, he had been happy as an engineer. Sadly, being in government had made him lose interest in his real profession.
Wanting to stay at the top and in the spotlight is human, understandable and not a crime. Our VIPs enjoy extremely pampered existences; and it’s normal to miss the flattering attention and myriad advantages when the party ends.
But it’s good to be capable of cheerfully living without the pampering!
Life is like a pyramid, in the sense that there is much less room at the top than there is in the middle or at the bottom. And very few can stay at the top ad infinitum; so it’s best to adopt a nonchalant attitude towards appointments.
I’ve never been at the top. But I used to be a Ministerial aide, so I know what it is like to be mollycoddled; and I must confess that I thoroughly enjoyed the reflected glory – people are so nice to you when you are working for a dignitary! – and that I loved benefits like being met at airports by eager-to-please protocol guys and never having to worry about stuff like paying my hotel bills.
But when it was time to leave the Ministry with my Boss and say goodbye to the multiple privileges that were attached to the Special Assistant role, I shrugged philosophically and reverted to my “real” job – journalism – without regrets.
Mugabe’s joke
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe cracked an absolutely hilarious joke a few days ago. Reacting to the American Supreme Court’s recent blanket legalization of same-sex marriage, Mugabe said that he was thinking of travelling to Washington DC to propose to President Barack Obama!
I personally do not share Mugabe’s hatred of gay people. And while I’m not a great fan of the idea of same-sex marriage – I think that gays should not mimic heterosexuals on every single level and should settle for civil partnerships – I know many gay people who have great personalities and would never hurt a fly.
And I have always felt that homosexuals and lesbians are born gay and should not be persecuted for sexual preferences they didn’t choose (why would anyone CHOOSE to be gay in a world that is still largely hostile towards gays?.
However, even though Mugabe was being sarcastic, it IS very amusing to imagine the spectacle of 91-year-old African man getting down on bended knee to ask for Obama’s hand in marriage!!! I nearly fell off my chair laughing.

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