To become recognised as a highly exalted owner of knowledge you must acquire the highly coveted PhD.
People are dead ready to cross the valley of the shadow of death in the bid to get the ultimate diadem known as PhD attached to their names.
It then goes without saying that if you’ve got it you do need to advertise it everywhere thusly: Dr Okoronkwo Olowokere, PhD.
In the drive to earn the coveted PhD some ambitious students are made to stretch from three years onto eternity by haughty supervisors.
My bad temperament tells me that the task of writing a so-called PhD dissertation can ordinarily be completed over a cool beery weekend.
In my own University of Mushin, the choice is for the student to choose whether he is capable of writing his PhD in a week or over donkey years.
Nobody needs to die in installments over the indeterminate years required to earn a PhD in these accursed shores.
It’s totally against my constitution that the sad professors who supervise the doctoral candidates in the universities almost always turn the poor wannabes into quivering servants and genuflecting slaves.
Lola Akande’s novel What It Takes, published by Kraft Books, Ibadan, lays bare in cold print the shenanigans underpinning the earning of the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) epaulette.
According to the plot, back in September 1998, the somewhat vain middle-aged single-mother protagonist, Funto Oyewole, could not contain her joy when she procures the PhD admission letter to the National University of Nigeria (NUN), Abuja.
Even as Funto had lost her job in the civil service, she is full of hope that there is a solid future for her as Dr Funto Oyewole, a joy shared with her daughter Deyemi who had just gained admission into the secondary school.
Immediately she sets foot on the campus in Abuja everything literally turns upside-down.
To get a supervisor for her literature studies proves well-nigh impossible as the Head of Department (HOD) informs her: “It’s fairly difficult to find a PhD supervisor due to a mirage of problems confronting universities in Nigeria. The number of academic staff in every university is grossly inadequate; hence, what has to be done is left in the hands of few academics who can only struggle to cope.”
When she tries to get the lecherous Dr Durojaiye as her supervisor the man asks for sex upfront: “All I ask of you is a piece of the ‘action’ and you’ll get my consent to supervise you in return. Fair bargain, isn’t it?”
Funto then goes in search of a lady, Prof. Lara Owoyemi, as a would-be supervisor, and gets the shocker thus: “If you are serious about becoming a PhD candidate under my supervision, you must have thirty thousand naira to get the consent letter you are required to submit at the PG School. After your registration, I will spell out other terms of engagement to you.”
Funto in the end ends up with Prof. Charles Ephraim as her supervisor who according to the HOD demands three things of his students: “The first one is patience, the second is patience, and the third is patience.”
Funto Oyewole is reduced to tears by the evil machinations of Prof Ephraim, an ethnic jingoist who orders her against her wish to fill in as a part-time student while brazenly registering the lady of his tribe, Agnes Ellen Noah, into the fulltime programme.
Prof Ephraim also insists that Funto must spend an entire year in understudying her project before writing a word of the dissertation.
She learns the hard way what PhD actually means, as she is told: “In Nigeria, PhD means, Prostrate, Hard work and Dobale. You are Yoruba; you know the meaning of Dobale. It means you will prostrate to them, you’ll work hard and you’ll prostrate again. It also means you’ll do more of prostrating than hard work.”
By September 2001, three years into her programme, she had finished writing the thesis but there was the fear of submitting the entire work to her insufferable supervisor.
When she eventually reveals that she had written all the chapters, Prof Ephraim replies: “I have misplaced the chapters you gave me.”
He then recommends a new list of books to be found in South Africa, USA, Canada or England which will entail rewriting the entire thesis.
Funto is as ever reduced to tears.
Her attempt to find part-time work at Clamorous University is disaster writ large.
Funto somewhat succumbs to the use of fetish prophets, spiritualists and shamans in the struggle to get her PhD programme back on track.
It all comes to naught. In the end, Prof Ephraim agrees to resume the supervision of Funto’s thesis.
It is not until December 2009, after more than a decade, that the dream manifests in the freshly-minted Dr Funto Oyewole, a glorious happy-ending shared with her daughter Deyemi who had graduated from the university and was serving the nation via the NYSC in the Presidency.
Lola Akande has in What It Takes written a very insightful novel that extends the frontiers of the inanities of the ivory tower as exposed earlier in The Naked Gods by Chukwuemeka Ike.
It’s indeed significant that Lola Akande is today a lecturer at the Department of English, University of Lagos, where Prof JP Clark as “the first African writer to be appointed to a chair in an African university, and as the first African indigene to occupy a chair of English on the continent,” delivered the inaugural lecture entitled “The Hero As A Villain” on Thursday, January 19, 1978.
Clark dedicated a poem “to my academic friends who sit tight on their doctoral theses and have no chair for poet or inventor.”
It’s obvious that a no-nonsense guru like JP Clark, author of America, their America, would have had no stomach to undergo the PhD prostration of Funto Oyewole as narrated by Lola Akande in What It Takes.