The news of 58 out of 146 students making First Class degree from the Faculty of Law, University of Ibadan, has garnered attention. Many of the comments were derisive of it. They wondered how this could have been and whether it was not an affirmation of the ubiquity of the low quality of education, decline in the Nigerian academy and nil prestige of its ivory tower. Being a participant observer kind of, having graduated from this same faculty about eight years ago, I think I am qualified, more than many, to comment on the veracity or otherwise of the claims.
With an earlier PhD from this same university, I had two failed trials in my quest to gain admission to the university. In the first, the late Prof Kola Olu-Owolabi, who taught me in the Department of Philosophy, University of Lagos in 1988, when he was yet a doctoral student, personally took me to the then Dean of the faculty. He held my hand excitedly like a pharmacologist who had just discovered a curative drug for a stubborn disease. Smilingly, the Dean told us that there was no opportunity left for me. The second time, my friend, Adebayo Mutalubi Ojo, took me to a lecturer friend of his in the faculty. It was a dead end. It was at the third trial in 2013 that I got admitted into the Faculty.
The above examples point to the punishing scrutiny that students go through to enter the faculty. Again, around 2015 or so when my son attempted to gain admission into the faculty, we met a bulwark. I was excited that I would be in the same faculty with him as undergraduates. I indeed looked forward to it. After the post-UTME, his total score was 68 or 69 and the cut-off point was about 70 or 73 (I can’t remember the exact point). Everywhere I went, they told me he couldn’t be admitted. They said even if I knew the VC, he couldn’t help me. I had to take him to BOWEN University, where he eventually had his law degree. I know professors in UI whose children couldn’t gain admission into their own school and who had to take them to private universities.
When we began classes in the faculty, it was a grilling exercise. I came into the school persuaded about the cliche of dwindling education in Nigeria. By the time I went through the mill, I totally got converted to the converse perception. I can speak authoritatively for my 2017/2018 Class. They were brilliant students. In class, old men like me felt little. They read ahead of class and demonstrated it in the quality of their participation. If you didn’t prepare for a class, those boys and girls would make you look miserable due to their preparedness.
The faculty didn’t encourage indolence. Though I was at this time a Special Adviser to a Governor, I dared not skip class. I was treated like all others. No preferential treatment. The best the then Dean, who taught us Criminology, would do was to ask respectfully “Senior Citizen, stand up and answer the question, please “ Woe betides you if you didn’t do your assignment. Caught cheating? The faculty made example of you. You must wear the white/black uniform with a black tie to match. No exemption.
My classmates were hyper-brilliant, apparently because of the entry sieves UI placed on admissions into the faculty. I was thus not surprised that my class produced over 20 First Class graduates. Yours sincerely, an oldie in the midst of Gen Zs, managed to have a 2-1. The set also proceeded to replicate the strides at the 2019 Law School by recording over 20 First class graduates. Today, those boys are flung all over the world carrying high the faculty’s banner like the horn of a unicorn. One of them is Mujib Jimoh who should by now be rounding off his PhD in an American university, as well as Maxwell Okpara.
If testimonies I pick from subsequent sets in UI’s Law Faculty are anything to go by, the quality hasn’t dropped.
