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OPINION: Poverty, Professors, And Policy [Monday Lines]

Published

1 year ago

September 30, 2024

By Lasisi Olagunju

There was a time in this country when professors earned more than federal permanent secretaries. That was before Nigeria happened to itself. A professor in 1973 was on a consolidated annual salary of £3,000; permanent secretaries earned £2,800. Today, the most senior professors do not take home N450,000 per month; federal permanent secretaries gross N1.3m monthly. From that gross, they pay this tax, and pay that rate and then net between N900,000 and N950,000 – more than twice the pay of the longest serving professors in Nigeria.

My source of those perm pec figures is a retired permanent secretary. He couldn’t have lied against himself. This ex-civil servant and his colleagues in service are likely to see the comparison I just made here and say my judgement or logic is perverse, that they suffer too. If such is said, I would borrow a proverb from my Fulani friend and retort that brides cry, hyena’s victims cry too but their tears are not of the same taste.

I am not the only one who has read a viral text on professors queuing for N35,000 loans to buy food rations in UNILAG. I forwarded it to some of my ogas in Ibadan and Ife last week. I also sent it to serving and retired professors in other places, fishing for gists. They all replied confirming the deflation of their tyres. One of them texted me: “I retired this year (from a federal university) after 40 years and six months, 20 of those years as a full professor, and on a monthly salary of N403,000. Today, you know what a bag of rice costs, not to talk of petrol which sells at N1,200 per litre. Now, how would one sustain a modicum of decent existence and not borrow?” I didn’t know what word of consolation to give. Another professor wrote me: “I will retire shortly and for people like me who focused on serving the system, it is good to hear these stories of post-retirement deprivation, obviously worse than pre-retirement poverty, even if close to Armageddon!”

I wrote in the first paragraph above that before 1974 in Nigeria, a professor earned £3,000 per annum. Today, my professor’s monthly salary of N403,000 translates to $243 per month. In one year, his pay would be $2,900 (or £2,169). A quick check: the purchasing power of £100 in 1973 is that of £1,242.24 today. At parity with the British pound sterling, £3,000 (Nigerian pounds) of 51 years ago equals £37,267.2 of today. How much would that be in naira terms? N83,129,657.16 per annum or N6,927,471.43 per month. If poverty reigns in places we call the ivory tower, those figures offer some explanations. If crisis and restlessness define industrial relations in our universities, it is because the teachers there are paid slave wages.

How did our smart university teachers get left behind? The English man calls female goats Does. In the very unfair, iniquitous political economy of traditional goat keeping, productive Does never belong to the absent. The goat of the one not present must always be male, the unprofitable specie that neither replicates nor multiplies itself. Varsity teachers had no seat where the knife portioned out the collective yam in the 1970s. They still do not in 2024 – although the system humours some of them as hirelings. They engage them as night soil men, services which Roman orator, Cicero, described as “vulgar” and which “incur people’s ill will.” They are never there where real actions take place. And, if you are not present or represented where decisions that affect you are being taken, your portion of pounded yam will always be smaller than the smallest. And because teachers are perpetual outsiders, their fowls get randomly eaten by weasels of power; their sheep by leopards of advantage.

There was a time in the United States when university teachers were like they lived in today’s Nigeria. They were forced by their economic circumstances to remain less than they should be. “In every teacher, a struggle for survival is going on.” Donald W. Rogers, who authored that line, started his February 1948 journal piece with this sad quote: “one can’t get rich at teaching.” My headline above was the headline he wrote. I took mine from his. Rogers wrote about teachers and two kinds of poverty which he said shared causal relations: “One can become so poor in goods while teaching as to become poor as a teacher.” But a society that pauperizes its teachers pulverizes its future. I agree with Roger’s position that the “quality of a college’s product is a function of its teachers.” Quality stands with teachers, quality falls with teachers. And it will fall where teachers struggle to live, because, as Rogers wrote, “greatness of vision and the capacity to fulfill it rarely flourish in privation.”

Between 1948 when Rogers wrote his article and now, a lot that is positive has happened to teachers in the United States. Teachers there now eat their eggs, yolk and albumin. Their “struggle for survival” of 76 years ago has been replaced with competition for excellence. Here, the stories we hear and read distress daily. The latest is the spectacle of professors and other PhDs at the University of Lagos shown on cooperative queues seeking access to loans of N35,000 to buy Ounje Eko, a psychedelic name for IDP rations. They need the money to feed their needy families. The war of survival is not being fought on the Lagos front alone; there are battlefields anywhere you see signboards that suggest schooling and lecturing. A senior professor of medicine at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, told me early this year that what Nigeria loses daily to the outside are not just young doctors and nurses, but also the senior ones, the trainers. The ones healthy enough to escape are almost all gone. But why? Why not? We may be ignorant of so many things but not the knowledge that the indentured is resource poor.

This rain beating the vulture of the Nigerian academic started a long time ago. As a university undergraduate almost four decades ago, I had a lecturer who repeatedly described his job choice as “an oath of poverty.” As a Marketing student at the polytechnic some 40 years ago, I had a young teacher who would pause his Economics lecture midway, throw away the chalk in his hand and shout “I need money!” He died shortly after I left that school. And, it wasn’t that he was an unsteady character. It was his material condition that ailed his balance.

I encountered all the above years and years ago. The experiences are as fresh as now; the cancer has metastasized. To mark the 50th anniversary of the University of Ibadan in 1998, IFRA-Nigeria organized an international conference on ‘The Dilemma of Post-Colonial Universities’. Professor Ayuba Hudu of Ahmadu Bello University delivered a paper at that conference on the working conditions of staff of Nigerian universities, using his ABU environment as his field of study. Sobering as Hudu’s findings and conclusions are, they are what we’ve always known to be true. In one instance, he discovers that as of the time of his study, “Ahmadu Bello University continues to pay N800 as night allowance to senior lecturers on research trips while officers of the same rank in the civil service are paid N7,000.” He quotes a lecturer: “Both my remuneration and working facilities are grossly inadequate. A hungry man can’t enjoy his work. As at now, lecturers do not have any living conditions. A group of people whose work demands great mental work should be properly paid so that undue external pressures for survival, decent appearance, transportation problems etc. are not allowed to distract their concentration. Until such is done, it will not be fair to talk of their work output – especially when the facilities and working environment are non-existent.”

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That was 26 years ago. The situation is worse today – especially with education becoming of less importance on the scale of preference of our governments. But, what can the teachers do to cleanse the clogged arteries of their vocation? The best of them do not belong to where hard decisions that impact their lives are taken. Even if their log plunges into the depth of power and stays for ages in that water, it will never become a crocodile. And the Nigerian establishment is a mix of crocodiles and sharks.

So, will this tragedy continue till resurrection day? Sometimes a problem charts more than one road to its solution. In Jane Watson’s ‘Three Hungry Men and Strategies for Problem Solving’ (1988), we encounter a mathematical problem that offers so many avenues for possible solution. Watson gives the problem: “Three tired and hungry men went to sleep with a bag of apples. One man woke up, ate 1/3 of the apples, then went back to sleep. Later a second man woke up and ate 1/3 of the remaining apples, then went back to sleep. Finally, the third man woke up and ate 1/3 of the remaining apples. When he was finished there were 8 apples left. How many apples were in the bag originally?” Those who were asked to answer the question varied in age and social status. Some of the examined worked backward (or forward) with fractions, some without fractions and the two groups were right. One attempted the solution with a diagram, another used algebra, yet another used the ratio concept, and all came up with what they believed solved the problem. The correct answer is 27 but the examiner got from his ‘students’ 24 different strategies. In the end, some got it right, some got it wrong but all participated in finding a solution to a common problem. That is the approach I recommend here. The issue with our university system must be seen as a troubling nut that must be cracked. And, all stakeholders, including the government, must be willing to come to the table with whatever key they have for the iron door.

At the core of this problem is funding. Why can’t our country’s government accord education very high funding priority as it is giving the Lagos-Calabar coastal road? Adequate funding of the universities is a must if we will exit poverty and create equal access for children of the rich and those of the poor. The Tinubu government has a student loan programme. It will get it right if it fulfills a number of ‘ifs’: if the programme is widened to accommodate all who need and want the loans; if greed, cronyism and corruption are not allowed to kill it; if the loan consistently and adequately finances a student’s education till graduation; if repayment is not expected to come from a graduate’s joblessness; and, if it is adequately funded, public universities will, with peace of mind, charge appropriate fees. And, if the universities charge reasonably for services they render, they will be free and solvent enough to meet their obligations to staff, students and the society. Otherwise, we roll from one crisis into another.

We must avoid another season of disruption in our public university system. It will add to the poverty of the poor. ASUU has issued another strike notice and, you can’t ask the teachers who suffer willful deprivation not to go on strike. It is the only tool they have. Cries and yells cannot move a government that feigns loss of hearing. The union said last week that it had extended the 21-day ultimatum it earlier gave the government on August 18 by 14 more days within which it expected all the lingering issues to be addressed to the satisfaction of the union and its members. What are those issues? They are about adequate funding of the universities to enable them perform their duties as catalysts of development. ASUU’s demands include better working conditions for staff of the universities, release of their withheld three-and-a-half months’ salaries due to the 2022 strike action; release of unpaid salaries for staff on sabbatical, part time, and adjunct appointments affected by the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) and release of outstanding third-party deductions such as check-off dues and cooperative contributions.

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Yet, we cannot discuss and achieve national development without tackling the rot in our universities. Derek Bok, author of ‘Higher Education in America’, writes that the universities “have assumed an importance far beyond their role in earlier times.” He writes that in the modern world, colleges and universities help “to strengthen our democracy by educating its future operators.” He adds that the universities are “the country’s chief supplier of three ingredients essential to national progress—new discoveries in science, technology, and other fields of inquiry; expert knowledge of the kind essential to the work of most important institutions; and well-trained adults with the skills required to practice the professions…” The most prosperous state in the United States is California; with a nominal GDP of $3.987 trillion in 2024, it is the world’s fifth largest economy. It owes its prosperity to its wise investments in education. It is home to 35 of the world’s 50 leading AI companies. That California is “home to the most Fortune 500 companies” is a function of its creation of a robust knowledge-based economy baked by its universities.

The Nigerian system would, instead, wonder why we, at all, need professors and the universities that habour them. It would justify its stance using the law and common sense. Is it not true that the constitution which provides the framework for the government and all it does with us does not recognise colleges and universities as trainers and producers of leaders? Education “up to school certificate level” is all you need to be president of Africa’s most populous country and one of the continent’s largest economies. It will therefore be wasteful, even suicidal, to empower the universities and the heretics within their walls. Is it not historically true of our context that higher education is a pollutant of the mind? Does it not create an irreverent citizenry that asks too many questions? Do the universities not produce a population of critics who frown when knees of democracy are made to bend deep into the ground in supplication to raw power?

“How painful it is to have to go on living, despised by all, even by yourself, and at the same time keep up a brave pretence that you not only think well of yourself, but even regard yourself as a decently useful public servant.” Raphael O’Leary wrote that passage of pain and put it under a piece he entitled “Pity the Poor Teacher.” O’Leary’s “poor” speaks of a different kind of poverty – not the slave-wage or wage-slave burden crushing the Nigerian professor. Where I come from, we say what-shall-we-eat comes first before what-shall-we-do. A hungry, ill and deprived professor will profess nothing positive. His teaching will be an any-how teaching. And, if “how we teach is what we teach” as said by John H. MacArthur, a former dean of Harvard Business School, then it means we can’t use our schools to kill poverty or get our own Silicon Valley nor shall we ever escape the present dank, dark cave of negativity.

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Police Warn Against Protest In Aso Rock, Environs

Published

2 hours ago

October 19, 2025

Editor

The Nigeria Police Force has warned intending protesters, agitating for the release of Mazi Nnamdi Kalu, against any form of protest around the Aso Rock and its environs.

A statement by the Force Public Relations Officer, CSP Benjamin Hundeyin, in Abuja, said the warning followed an order of a Federal High Court, Abuja.

He said the court, in a suit between the Federal Republic of Nigeria v. Omoyele Sowore & 4 others, on Oct. 17, restrained any form of protest around the Aso Rock and its environs.

“The order restrains the respondents and any other persons or groups acting under their instruction from staging protests within and around Aso Rock Villa and its environs.

“Other areas are the National Assembly Complex, Force Headquarters, the Court of Appeal, Eagle Square and Shehu Shagari Way.

“Accordingly, all intending protesters and counter-protest groups are strongly advised to avoid restricted areas and to refrain from any act capable of provoking confrontation or disturbing public order,” he said.

The police spokesman said the force would ensure the free flow of traffic, protection of lives and property, and security of all law-abiding citizens.

According to him, any person or group that uses protests as cover to incite violence, carry or use offensive weapons, vandalise public or private property, kidnap, or engage in acts likely to cause loss of life or serious injury will be dealt with decisively.

He said offenders would be arrested, subjected to full investigation, and prosecuted under relevant criminal laws, including laws relating to public order, violent conduct and terrorism where applicable.

Hundeyin said those who incite others via social media or other platforms would be investigated and prosecuted, using digital evidence.

He said the Inspector-General of Police (I-G), Mr Kayode Egbetokun, had directed the Commissioner of Police (CP) in charge of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and relevant operational commands to ensure strict enforcement of the court’s order.

Hundeyin said the I-G had directed the CP to maintain visible and strategic deployments across vulnerable locations, and ensure the safety of residents and lawful activities in the FCT.

He urged organisers of the protest and participants to avoid the restricted areas specified by the court and refrain from carrying weapons, engaging in provocative conduct, or encouraging others to breach the law.

Hundeyin also urged the protesters to channel their grievances through the courts and other lawful avenues rather than the streets.

The police spokesman said adequate security arrangements had been made to protect lives and property of law-abiding Nigerians.

He enjoined those, not engaging in the protest to go about their lawful businesses without fear as anyone found to be in breach of the court’s order or in contempt of the law and be arrested and prosecuted.

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OPINION: Amupitan’s Magical Marriage To A Buffalo

Published

3 hours ago

October 19, 2025

Editor

By Festus Adedayo

While growing up, I went on hunting expedition with elderly men. From it, I found out that the forest, as an ecosystem, is diametrically opposed to the human world. In the forest, the hunter exists with “other beings”- animals of different shades and character, plants – whose existences bear similarity with man’s. One of such beings is an unseen spirit whose existence the hunter can take for granted only at his own peril. In the forest, the hunter is in a continuous struggle with these beings but is seen as an interloper. In this forest community, every member of the ecosystem contests for primacy, sometimes in a mortal and fatal manner.

Whenever human arguments begin to sound like claptrap to me, I bail out to avoid going mad. My refuge is always among animals, in the wild. It is a place Yoruba curiously call ìgbé. Ìgbé is, literally, excreta. I find greater logic in excrement than sweet-smelling human contraptions. To explain Professor Joash Amupitan’s recent appointment as the Chairman of the Independent Nigerian Electoral Commission (INEC) and the forebodings that line the sky, I had to go in search of animals whose lives could give explanations of the weird life of man. Whether in the sullen murmur of bees, the cruel humour of monkeys, the deafening roar of lions, the ugly beauty of hyenas or the artistry in the skin of zebras, the wild is a better place to find peace of mind. Or don’t you think so?

In Ayo Adeduntan’s seminal work, What the forest told me: Yoruba hunter, culture and narrative performance (2019), the author conducted an interview with Ògúnkúnlé Òjó of Agúnrege village in Oyo State. Adeduntan narrated how Òjó’s hunter master, Ògúnòṣun, married an efòn, the buffalo. In description, the African buffalo is one of Africa’s ‘big five’ safari animals, alongside rhinoceros, elephant, leopard and lion. Living only in Africa and Asia, the buffalo is reputed for its huge horns. Though a herbivore like cows, feeding only on plants, the animal often falls prey to predators like hunters, lions, leopards, hyenas and wild dogs. It can also be vicious; in order to defend herself, the buffalo strikes its prey with her horns.

According to Ògúnkúnlé Òjó, this particular day, he and another colleague on hunting expedition had shot the buffalo in the Agúnrege village forest. The animal immediately fell. Apparently frightened by the monstrosity of their kill, one of them had to run home to fetch their master, Ògúnòṣun. As they were about to get to the spot where the animal was felled, narrated Ògúnkúnlé, they suddenly saw a very pretty woman walking towards them. I remember Odolaye Aremu, Ilorin Dadakuada music lord, comparing the suddenness of the death of Western Region Premier, S. L. Akintola, to the instantaneous blow of a calamity when he sang, “…pèkílàá ko èèmò.” Said Ògúnkúnlé, “we ran into the animal, that is, the wife. She was a very beautiful woman” which in Yoruba is, “àfipẹ̀kí n l’abápàdéẹranl’ọ́nà, èyuùnìyàwó. Arẹwaobinrinni”. What Ògúnkúnlé implied was that the woman they met on the road to the buffalo’s remains was the same buffalo who had now transformed into a beautiful woman. It reminds one of Fagunwa’s Igbo Olódùmarè and how Olówóayé, swept off his feet by the sultry beauty of a woman named àjẹ́, was oblivious that he was making advances to a spirit woman.

What eventually transpired between Ògúnòṣun and the buffalo-turned-beautiful woman is instructive. “Our master exchanged greetings with her (the animal). She greeted our master, kneeling down in respect. This is no hearsay; I, Òjó the hunter, was present there that day. Our master wooed her and they both agreed to marry each other. She (however) warned: ‘Now that you have decided to marry me, be informed that the day you, out of anger, call me an animal, that day would be your last. It would not offend me as much if you hit me so much that I am wounded and bleeding.’

“So they got married. She became pregnant and had the first child, the second and the third child. There was a quarrel between her and my master one day. As they quarreled, my master angrily insulted her: ‘Àb’órí ì rẹ burúni, ìwọ ọmọ ẹrankoyìí’ – ‘You good-for-nothing unlucky daughter of an animal.’ ‘Oh!’ the woman said, ‘You are done for.’ That was where the trouble started.”

Ògúnkúnlé Òjó then ended the story, stating that the buffalo woman then turned into her pre-marital animal state. “Yes. It is no hearsay. She transformed into an animal by Ademọla’s father’s house beside Igbadi Hill. That was when the two of them started to fight. Our master tried all his power and failed. That was how the woman ran away forever. One of the children is dead. The remaining two are still in my master’s house,” Ògúnkúnlé said.

The forest is a realm that is implicitly uncertain. Those who claim that forest conversations between the hunter and other beings who live in the wild are purely African fantasy underrate our reality. The truth is that the hunter shares the forest cosmos with other beings. While the hunter believes he possesses some superiority over animals and other beings in the forest, the truth is that it is a shared world. Indeed, the Yoruba worldview does not approve of man’s superordinate status claim in relation to other earthly creations. He is thus in constant war against these forest antagonists whom he cannot pacify and who also see him as a usurper. This reminds me of a childhood fairy tale we were told about Segbe, a boy who veered into the wild on a festival day to hunt game. The animals descended on him and made a barbecue of his flesh. When the search party scoured the forest for him the second day, the birds sang, “Who is there searching for Segbe? Human beings were celebrating in their homes. We, animals, were having ours in the forest. We have made a meal of Segbe’s flesh.”

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In animals, there is no hypocrisy, no pretension. Victims and victimizers are aware of their naturally ordained roles and do not pull any shroud over this. In their wild habitat, these mammal forebears of man seem to explain better the contradictions of human life and the illogicality of the life of man. It prompted my disagreement with Fela Anikulapo’s concept of “animal talk”. While excoriating the Muhammadu Buhari military government’s War Against Indiscipline philosophy of openly beating offending Nigerians, Fela called that philosophy a talk of animals. My disagreement is that animals’ lives speak to man, but man is too deaf to listen.

In Yoruba hunters’ narratives, while there is always a hunter, animal and spirit relationship, this symbiosis often ends up in calamity. While D. O. Fagunwa’s narrative of the relationship between the trio of man, animal and spirits in the wild was fabulism, he took it out of the real-life man-animal forest ecosystem relations and encounters. Fagunwa’s books opened our eyes to the symbiosis of this relationship. You can see this relationship in the encounter between Olówóayé, Fagunwa’s hunter and protagonist, and the one-eyed elf called Èsù-kékeré-òde, in the book he entitled, The Forest of God, Igbó Olódùmarè. In another of his book, Ogbójúọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmalè, this contest for supremacy between man and the spirit was illustrated by how a character called Tèmbèlẹ̀kun, a flesh-eating spirit, devoured Lamọrin, a hunter. Such is the nature of the dog-eat-dog relationship in the wild. ̣

So, last Thursday, as Professor Amupitan appeared in the Nigerian senate for screening, he suddenly pounced on my mind like a rampaging leopard. Whenever a hunter encounters an animal in the wild, his discerning mind tells him whether she is indeed an animal or an animal-turned-man. Putting on that same lens, what I saw last Thursday was an incestuous relationship between a hunter and a buffalo that would soon go awry. The hunter-buffalo’s love-turned-sour narrated above tells me I wasn’t mistaken. My reading is that of a tragic relationship that will soon come full throttle between Aso Rock, Amupitan and the Nigerian people.

History is Amupitan’s first nemesis. It holds that, like Ògúnòṣun, the hunter who got married to a buffalo-human, the new INEC boss is entering a graveyard of history where he would be so badly gored that he might emerge therefrom with a permanent scar. Since Sir Hugh Clifford’s Legislative Council election of 1920, Nigeria’s elections have been the graveyard of their electoral umpires. Since then, Nigeria has had electoral chiefs whose tenures ended in fiasco and, or ignominy.

Enters Amupitan. His first shot in the Senate last week was to confront the unpalatable graveyard image of electoral umpire bosses with comely semiotics. In semiotic theory, users deploy signs and symbols to create meanings. This they do through language, gestures and images. As he appeared at the senate screening exercise, the professor of law and Senior Advocate of Nigeria appeared with his family. Probably a student of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and philosopher, Charles Sanders Pierce, who founded this study of symbols, Amupitan knew that a semiotic portrayal of the presence of his children on his first interface with Nigerians has the power of convincing the people that, as a family man, he would be humane. However, the reality of what he is about to begin far transcends the tender-heartedness of the family.

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Amupitan spoke very well. Just like his predecessors. The professor from the sleepy town of Ayetoro Gbede said his life is influenced by a tripod of God, hard work and mentorship.

Soon, Amupitan will realize that he is in the same boat with persons for whom God exists only as a political slogan or refrain. Beyond their lips, there is no one so-called. In this God thing, he is alone. Again, more than ever before, Amupitan, whose literal rendition of his name means a history maker, will indeed make history. He will also tell a story. What story he will tell and the history he will make are part of the omen of a gathering cloud in the sky I see. Vultures are already hovering, signifying that the story the professor will tell will not only not be significantly different from his predecessors’, it could be worse. First is that, unlike many previous elections, Nigerians have the painful belief that the winner of the 2027 elections, especially the presidential election, is already known. This will leave Amupitan to contend with his own ambiguities.

Second is the gale of defections that has rocked Nigerian politics in the last few months. The defections render party politics no different from the petty business of market square transactions. They thus make Amupitan’s job a potential failure. The belief is that the Senators/House of Representatives members and governors changing parties like chameleon changes colour, are driven by the quest to have the party at the federal lip-frog them into victory. How would Amupitan deny the party of his appointor victory in 2027?

Already, Amupitan’s ambivalent heritage may also sound the death knell on his electoral umpire role. While the presidency gleefully flaunted him as having “hailed from the North Central,” everyone knows that putting Ayetoro Gbede as northern Nigeria is one of those geographical mis-ascriptions of today’s Nigeria. A town in Okunland, in Kogi West Senatorial District of Kogi State, Amupitan hails from this town, founded in 1927 by early Christian converts. The truth is, Ayetoro Gbede is Yorubaland. So, if northern Nigeria, which is today embroiled in a fight with the avatar of Nigeria, on allegation of under-developing the North, loses the 2027 election to Amupitan’s perceived brother, there cannot but be wahala.

Pardon my pessimism. What I see is Amupitan, with his lustering credentials, ending up brutally bruised. This liaison with a buffalo-turned-pretty woman will not likely end well.

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Remain Apolitical – NAF Warns Personnel

Published

16 hours ago

October 18, 2025

Editor

The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) has called on all personnel not to involve themselves in any political activities in the discharge of their professional responsibilities.

Air Vice Marshal (AVM) Usman Abdullahi, the Air Officer Commanding, Special Operations Command, Bauchi, made the call during the 2025 annual 10-kilometer walk and jog exercise organised by the Nigerian Air Force.

He also called on the personnel not to involve themselves in activity that is inimical to the calling of the military profession.

“You must remain apolitical. Don’t involve yourselves in any political activities and do not involve yourselves in activity that is inimical to the calling of our military profession.

“I urge you to remain loyal to the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the President and the Commander in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria,” he said.

Abdullahi, who emphasised that the NAF pays serious attention to physical fitness for all its personnel, said that the exercise was to increase their cohesion, keep their mental fitness as well as for them to be on the alert at all times.

He commended the Bauchi state government for their cooperation and synergy as well as the creation of an enabling environment.

Also speaking shortly after the 10-kilometer walk and jog, governor Mohammed said the participants’ outstanding performances were the result of discipline, consistency and determination to succeed.

These qualities, he said, were central not only to physical fitness but also to succeed in every area of life, adding that they had demonstrated team work, endurance and commitment to the values that made the Nigerian Air Force a model institution.

Represented by his Deputy, Alh. Auwal Jatau, the governor, said the exercise was more than just a fitness exercise but a celebration of unity and shared purpose.

“Seeing officers comprising airmen, airwomen, sister security services, paramilitary agencies, and NYSC members come together in such a lively atmosphere reminds us that sports and fitness can be powerful tools for strengthening peace and solidarity.

“Here in Bauchi State, we take pride in the harmonious relationship between the government, the Nigerian Air Force and all security agencies operating within the State.

“The Special Operations Command and other military and paramilitary formations have played a vital role in maintaining the relative peace and security that our people enjoy today,” he said.

Nothing less than 32 people received different prizes for their outstanding performances during the exercise which included Airmen, Airwomen, Nigeria Immigration Service, Customs Service and civilians among others.