Gowon’s memoirs at 90 (2)

Gowon’s memoirs at 90 (2)

Interesting enough, even before these changes, when I was a Visitor to most of the universities in Nigeria, I used to tell the students how lucky they were to go through university education where they would have big letters after their names: B.A., BSc, MSc, MA, Ph.D and whatnot.  And I said to them: “Me. Yakubu Gowon.  For all my hard work and studies, I only have military qualifications and letters after my name.  And they are all written in very small letters.  So small that you will need a magnifying glass to see or read them.  Letters like: Psc (Passed Staff College), Jssc (Joint Services Staff College), Jfsc (Joint Forces Staff College), IDC (Imperial Defence College) and things like that.  I told the students how I wished I could have such big letters after my name like BA, MA, Ph.D and so on.  So, there was this desire to seek further education and to broaden my intellectual horizon.  And as they say, every disappointment is a blessing.  With the change of government and not knowing what the future would be for me, I wanted this transition from military and from this secure life that I was used to before to ordinary life.  So, the best place to do it was to go to school.  And interestingly enough, after going back to school, the press started writing that the reason I was overthrown was that I did not know politics, that I did not study politics at the university level, that the reason things didn’t go right was because I didn’t have education in courses like economics and politics.  So, I decided to go seek knowledge in these areas of studies.  I was eager to know something about politics, about economics and about law, because these were the areas people said I was weak.  That if I had known them, it would have helped me when I found myself in a leadership position.  I wanted to study those three at the university.  Only to be told by the vice chancellor of Warwick University and his team of academics that interviewed me that even a genius cannot do these three disciplines at a go.  I had to choose only one or two.  What they did was to fashion a course of study that would give me some insight at the university level into all these three: politics, economics and law.  So I read politics with international relations.  At the university, we call it “Polint.”  So, I had BA (Polint).  And then later on, I did my masters and then converted it to Ph.D. 

(To be continued)