What It Takes by Lola
Akande; Kraftgriots, Kraft Books Limited; Ibadan; Nigeria; 2016; 316pp
It is acutely annoying and unacceptable to
my temperament that in the bid to earn the coveted PhD some ambitious students
are made to stretch from three years onto eternity the task of writing a
so-called dissertation that ordinarily can be completed over a cool weekend.
The professors who supervise the doctoral candidates in the universities almost
always turn the poor wannabes into quivering servants and genuflecting slaves.
Lola Akande’s What It Takes lays bare
in cold print the shenanigans underpinning the earning of the Doctor of
Philosophy (PhD) epaulette.
Back in September 1998, the somewhat vain middle-aged
single-mother protagonist, Funto Oyewole, could not contain her joy when she
procured 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 thusly: “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.”
Funto’s reasons
to believe are anchored on her poor mother living in Ibadan, her daughter
Deyemi, and her bosom friend Folake. It’s through the care of Folake and her
fiancé Geoffrey that her accommodation problem is solved. 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.
In the light of
her frustrations with Prof Ephraim, Funto recalls her miserable undergraduate
lecturer at Eastern University of Nigeria, Dr Ugochukwu Mbanefo, who even after
his students had spent umpteen hours on their knees, begging him, made the
entire class to carry over the course. In her moment of weakness Funto falls to
a one-night-stand with the happy-go-lucky Adams after a nightclub dance, much
to the chagrin of her friend Folake. Funto’s solicitation for the HOD’s help in
appealing to Prof Ephraim boomerangs as the enraged supervisor swears that he
would no longer supervise her work.
Funto in her
lowest moment barges in on Folake and Geoffrey after her friend’s husband-to-be
had dismissed Funto as “a miserable, low-life parasite.” Her attempt to find
part-time work at Clamorous University is disaster writ large. Only the love of
Shettima somewhat uplifts the distraught Funto after the departure of Folake
and Geoffrey to England. 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. It is 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. In a final twist, it is Prof Ephraim who
selflessly signs Deyemi’s referee letter for a workshop in the United States.
Lola Akande has in What It Takes written a very insightful novel for the modern age as
per university studies in Nigeria. It extends the frontiers of the inanities of
the ivory tower as exposed earlier in The
Naked Gods by Chukwuemeka Ike. What
It Takes by Lola Akande takes no prisoners and ought to be recommended
reading in all Nigerian universities. It is 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 of course dedicated a poem
“to my academic friends who sit tight on their doctoral theses and have no
chair for poet or inventor.” It is all so 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.
