Why ASUU Strike Lingers

– Ochefu, Former Vice-Chancellor

The chequered story of the Nigerian University system has become part of the daily narrative of the country’s dysfunctional system. Like an elephant, this huge system is perceived differently by different persons, with each perspective looking quite plausible. In this interview, Professor Anthony Aboki Ochefu: scholar, professor of African Economic History, administrator and former vice chancellor of the Kwararafa University, Taraba State, provides an insight into the university system that can only be the product of deep knowledge, great experience and measured introspection. It is not just descriptive but analytical and prescriptive. To us, at TRUE VISION, this is indeed a CONVERSATION with the future.
Professor Ochefu spoke with the TRUE VISION Associate Editor, SIMEON OGOEGBULEM

On the incessant strike action by Nigerian public universities
For me, it is very unfortunate for strike, over facilities and compensation for workers, to have persisted for nearly 40years in a body of intellectuals and they have not been able to find a solution to the problem. It all goes to show that critical and creative thinking and goodwill on both parts of the workers and their proprietors have not been entrenched.
From the last analysis that was done, we have had, if you cumulate the number of days the various unions in this country have been on strike in the past 40 years, it has come up to about three years. And when you contextualize that in the industry that we are in, which is not just education but higher education, you will understand what I mean that the situation is very unfortunate.
It seems that there is a deliberate gang up by the elite to destroy public education in Nigeria.
Again, I have heard that argument over and over. I do not think that it is a deliberate effort to destroy public education.
I think it more of lack of understanding of seeing the big picture about the role that education plays in the development of a society. And people think that is very easy to do. But it is not.
When you contextualize how ruling elites perceive education and the role it plays, it differs from society to society and from historical epoch to historical epochs. So, you have to situate the current ruling class and their own understanding of education in general and public education, in particular, and higher education in specifics, to begin to understand and appreciate their attitude, impressions and opinions to what is going on in the education sector in the country. And if you look at it from the historical trajectory, because again, we pay lip service to history, we do not seem to tie up the loose strings. At independence, the National leadership of this country, asked the question of what the nation needed to do in order to develop rapidly within the context of the First national development plan. Do we educate the mass of the
population, do we industrialize and if we industrialize, what type of industrialization or do we invest in in agriculture?
These questions were debated amongst themselves and the answer they provided was that “we should do half and half”.
That is carry out the development in bits and pieces. The ruling elite in India posed the same question in 1948 and debated it for months on what the Congress Party of India should do with their country at independence. Everybody came up with different perspectives. At the end of the conversations, Nehru told them that there could only be three options and that the three options were: education, education and education. Nehru submitted that without educating the mass population of illiterates the party inherited at independence, India would not make any progress. So, India began massive investment in education, cheap low quality mass education. That is the origin of barefoot doctors in India. That was how
the Indian teachers flooded Nigeria for teaching jobs in the 1970s with most of them, teaching science subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics and Economics. Those who went to school in the 70s will recall that over 90 per cent of science teachers were Indians.
Recall again that at that time, if you went to school in India, you will be looked down upon. Indian universities were not comparable with universities in other parts of the world. But government said that if we do not educate these people, we are not going to be industrialized, our agriculture is not going anywhere. So that must be the focus. India did not start reaping the benefit of that policy that was started in 1950 until in the 1980s that India started reaping massively from that mass education policy.
Till today, if you are looking for 100 PhD holders in mathematics to attend to any mathematical problem you have identified, the only place in the world that you can get them is in India. Same with Physics, Chemistry and medicine. India is the only place in the world that you will find someone who is a medical doctor but also has a PhD in Radiography. So, in terms of human capacity in any of the sciences, social sciences and even in humanities, not to talk of information communication technology, India is the place, and it was because the country made that investment in education for over 30 years.

You may not find this in any literature, we also know that India deliberately conned the West to help them grow their tertiary education. What did India do? If you graduated from a university in India in some selected courses especially mathematics, physics, Biology and economics and you made a first class in any of these four subjects, the Indian government would sponsor you to go and continue your education in top universities in Europe and America So the Indian government will secure you admission in Yale, Harvard, Stanford and these other top Ivy League universities to go and start your first degree; No masters but first degree all over again. And you know Indians with their baby face, a man is 25 years but he will be looking like a 19 year old boy.
You can imagine having made a first class in mathematics and you come and start 100 level mathematics in Harvard.
The first examination you write, you will shatter all their records and America will now give you a scholarship and announce that they have discovered a genius and chase you up to PhD. That was how India trained all their research scientists and they started going to NASA and other industries. So, when they are saying top corporate leaders in America are Indians, nobody knows how that came about. These are people whose fathers went to America and got their PhDs and when they finished, they children went into the same industry or field. It was a deliberate and calculated process that they embarked upon. In Nigeria, at independence when they took that decision, it was that decision that saw the federal government establishing the University of Lagos.
If you remember at independence, Nigeria inherited a colonial university at Ibadan. So, the first university that was established by the federal ministry of education was University of Lagos that took off in 1962. The three regional universities at Nsukka in 1960, Ife in 1962 and Zaria in 1961 all came into existence because of that policy which is expansion of capacity to train more Nigerians. Thus, by the time the first national development plan was truncated by the crisis of the mid 60s…a lot of people ended up as teachers who did not have any business with teaching in the first instance. By the time the NPN government came in 1979 and by 1980/81 the economic downturn happened, payment of salaries became an issue, teachers were the first to suffer. Restoring History in the nation’s educational curriculum
We have fought the battle for the restoration of History as a subject in our schools and we have won. It was a 30-year battle from the time History was yanked off our school curriculum. History as a subject has been restored and they have started teaching it in our schools. The final approval came about two years ago so the teaching of the subject is finally picking up.
On the Falling standard of education in the country To flip the question, why is it that our standards are this bad but our graduates who find their way out of this country and travel abroad excel? Standards are bad, I will be the first to admit that but I am telling you that even in that bad standards, we still have people who are ready to learn. Some of the private universities have shown that if you make the requisite investments, you will be able to get out the required standards from our students. The numbers tell the story.
The National Universities Commission, by their own law, says nobody should teach in a class that is more than 30 in a faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. In the sciences, you should not teach more that 25 students. And in the medical sciences, your class should not be more than 20 students. That is the law as prescribed by NUC, the regulator of university education in the country. In the first five public universities, the average class size in any of these disciplines we are talking about hovers between 80 and 100 average and in some cases, it is more. In some of the second generation federal universities and first generation state universities, that number doubles. So, I am a professor and teach three courses per semester and I have on the average 250 students in each class. It means that I will mark 2,000 scripts in each examination and if I make the mistake of giving continuous assessment, it also means that I also have 2,000 scripts to
mark in a 15-week cycle. What type of quality assurance can I generate out of that situation because we have broken this down to the numbers? Assuming I asked you to answer three questions and if according to the marking scheme, each question requires at least a minimum of four pages, that is 12 pages and if I am a speed reader, I will need a minimum of one hour to read each script to make sense out of it. Do the mathematics on how long it will take me to mark 2,700 scripts. And remember that I am supposed to give two continuous assessment and one examination per semester because that is what the law says. So, the quality control of the teaching aspect has been thrown out of the window by the sheer pressure of the system because you have for example, about 36,000 students who are applying to read medicine and the
space available is less than 2,000.

You have overall nearly two million candidates trying to come into the system through JAMB. And the space that is available is about 700-800,000. There are now 111 private universities, and they account for 7.6 per cent of total university student population in the country. While the first five generation universities and six second generation universities put together, account for 40 per cent of the student population. We have 54 state-owned universities and 48 federal universities.
When you put all that number together, you will begin to understand the pressure on the system in terms of access and how that translates to quality assurance and how it translates to the output that we see. And that is why in the market today, some of the private universities that are able to manage this number in terms of class size are coming out with products that can compete with the best anywhere in the world. In the same system, a lecturer who is teaching at the university of Benin full time is also teaching at Benson Idahosa university part time, has 20 students in his Benson Idahosa university class whereas he has 300 students in his University of Benin class. Between you and me, which class will you prefer to go and teach? I am just using UniBen as an example It does not have a public address system, the class is hot and the students are rowdy and so the environment which the man does his work is not even there. Same city just down the road, the man is sitting comfortably in the class and engaging his students. So, the situation now is not what it used to be as we know it. We are now churning out students who cannot read and write properly as well as having employability skills. It is because the system is so choked up that
deliver the goods maximally.
Do we still need more universities whether private or public?
Our higher education capacity index is less than 10 per cent. The higher education capacity index is an index used to measure the number of people who seek higher education and to access it. Unfortunately, the figure is less than 10 per cent. When you story. calculate that index and put it side by side the number of universities that we have, you will see that we do not have enough universities in Nigeria. The population that seeks higher education in Nigeria are higher than the spaces available. That is one side of the other side of the story is that the existing universities, can they absorb more people than they are currently doing?
The answer is yes. Can the class sizes be reduced so that the class-teacher ratio can reflect best global best practices, the answer is also yes.
Herein lies one of the issues, the ASUU has with the government. ASUU is telling government that by your regulatory standards, I am not supposed to teach more than 30 students in a class, but I am now teaching 200. By implication, it is either you employ four more lecturers to join me so that we can balance out or you pay me for extra work. Government is saying, we cannot pay you for extra work and we are not employing more hands. So, somebody needs to sit down and do the mathematics that if I am going to increase the capacity of University of Ibadan to take additional 5,000 students so that at each admission year, Ibadan can take 10,000 students, we need this extra number of classrooms, academic staff,
laboratories and lecturers as well as administrative staff. When you put all the cost together vis-à-vis the cost of setting up a new university, we are not doing all those calculations.
Rather we are establishing universities based on political and emotional sentiments. When you come to the private universities, they have the capacity but they do not have the students because of costs. The private universities are the ones charging the true costs while the public universities are charging the subsidized costs and you (CANNOT) get quality because of those subsidized costs. And the irony is that government is not even ready to subsidize fully and it is thereby putting pressure that in three-year cycle, you go on strike, go and struggle then come back and government pays lip service and the circle continues.
On the dependence of the faculties of public universities by the private universities to keep their wheel of
academic activities running while public universities are on shutdown. ASUU seems not to be in a hurry to resolve the crisis.
Well, I may say that it is a double jeopardy. However, I will not say that it is because some of the lecturers in public universities also lecture in the private universities that ASUU is not in a hurry to call of the strike. The reason why issues are not being resolved has nothing to do with ASUU. It is the federal government that has delayed the resolution of these crisis because the negotiated agreement was presented to government in May 2021. I will tell you that for free. After the negotiations, both parties agreed to take the resolutions to their principals. The federal government team led by Prof Munzali Jubril took the report to his principals.

Unfortunately, the minister was not available because of his health challenges then and so by the time he came back and resumed work, it was almost October/November of 2021. And that was when they looked into the report with any seriousness and identified certain areas, they said that government would not be able to carry. So, communicating that government reservations to ASUU took much longer and the Union had to declare yet another industrial action for the two teams to come back to the negotiating table which is quite unfortunate. So, the fact that ASUU members are teaching in private universities as an excuse for not doing anything about resolving the strike is not correct.
On the issue of autonomy and university administrators coming up with innovative ways of funding their
universities.
For public universities, there is a limit to which a chief executive can try and make a drive for creative funding of his or her institution. This is because there are processes involved. I must tell you that I have been a Vice Chancellor before.
So, running a university is in three parts. There is the student services (remember that it is because of the students that you are there in the first instance), you also have the staff services and finally, you have the …… Services. So, in public universities, you cannot charge market rates for accommodation that you provide for your students. You cannot charge market rate for the water you provide, same with power and other student support services. For instance, if photocopy is N10 outside, within the campus it will be N5, same with sachet water. All those restrictions are provided to give the university a sense of an environment where goods and services are within the reach of members of the community.
When you go back to history, you will understand that the university was like a dwelling place for people who are seeking knowledge. They lived very frugal lives, eating sparsely and they feel that what energized them was exchange of ideas and knowledge. Luxury was not part of their calling. Frugality has always been part of the university spirit going back thousands of years. So, some of these traditions you see universities operating today, robbing, processions and the like did not start yesterday, all are products of the legacy. So, universities do not like paying for services, they like getting these services gratis.
That is where the whole spirit came from and that is why a university lecturer does not demand payment for his service. For instance, if I come to your institution to deliver a lecture, I will not say pay me my hourly rate of say N250,000 per hour. I will rather ask for an honorarium. All these are minor details that a lot of people do not understand and it tends to affect our thinking. Universities from other parts of the world make money from engagement with the industry.
For instance, if Julius Berger has an engineering problem, it will call University of Technology, Minna and request how the problem could be solved. Julius Berger can say take the N100 million, research on the problem and tell me how the problem could be solved. The relevant professors at the university can now mobilize some of her students that did well in their undergraduate class and give them scholarship for their master’s degree to carry out comprehensive research on the problem in order to come up with a solution to the problem. If at the end of the day, a patent comes out of it, the students will negotiate a commission from it.
That is how researchers from other parts of the world make their money, they do not make money from their salaries.
Now in the public universities, the federal government says you cannot charge a student more that N90 per bed space per session and this has been on ground since 1976. And what do the students who are entitled to that accommodation space do? They buy the space for the N90 stipulated by government and sell it to their fellow students who are not entitled to the space for as much as 30-40,000. You provide water and other sanitation needs, provide electricity and also carry out general maintenance. So, if it is that N90 in this day and age and you have 2,000 in the hostel, what is the cost recovery in providing all those services? If you are Vice Chancellor and you are running a 500KVA generator with the current rate
of diesel, you know what it translates to. So, these costs are such that if you say pay the appropriate fee, it is understandable but when government says you cannot, because of our agreement with students, the Vice Chancellor is highly constrained.
Twenty per cent of what you generate is user charge because you do not call it IGR, you have to remit it to the federal government as part of their contribution to the consolidated revenue. I am sure you read in the newspapers recently about how the Vice Chancellor of University of Abuja was asked to remit about N750,000 to the federal government and he was trying to explain to them that it was not a revenue but a user charge. I have to give students ID cards and I ask them to pay N5, 000 for it. I have not made any profit from the production of the ID Card. I have only given it to them at a cost. I have sports facilities, Libraries and internet services to provide for the students. So, when I charge the students N45,000. The university community is the second largest land holder in Nigeria after the government. That is if you
aggregate the total at the disposal of the universities. Nobody has more land than the universities.

The decaying infrastructure in the public universities
Government in 1999/2000 said that they can no longer go into hostel development. That they want to hand it over to private investors on Build, Operate and transfer (BOT) basis. A number of private investors came and met with the Federal ministry of works and signed agreements with government to lease land to them to deliver the hostel projects.
From that 2000 till today, not even one of the private investors have come back to deliver on the projects. The reason is simple, the numbers do not just add up. If I go to the bank to raise a facility of N2 billion to build a 1,500-capacity hostel and I am forced to charge a particular amount which if I do, I will no be able to recover my investment until the 16th or 17th year. I have not added my profits, my cost of money and maintenance costs. By the time I add all these costs, I am already 20 years, by which time I am mandated to return the hostel back to government as enshrined in the agreement governing the BOT protocols.
If you are a businessman, will you take that risk on venturing into that line of business? You know that these numbers do not lie. Would you not rather go and import rice from somewhere else than go into hostel development, knowing fully well that in five years time, the turnover you will make from the rice importation business cannot in any way compare to what your social investment in constructing a student hostel under the BOT protocols would have attracted to you. So, we came back and said let us be realistic the numbers are such that for you to make money on hostel development and be comfortable, the minimum a student has to pay as at that time was N80,000, double the amount government was saying
should be charged by the private developers. Now the figure is about N250, 000. Anybody who wants to build a hostel and recover his funds within a 10-year cycle, the minimum that would be charged per bed space is N250,000. So that is why it is working for the private hostel owners but not working for government hostels simply because the numbers are not adding up.
Why the disconnect between research and the industry, a situation which tends to make it look like research is dead in this part of the world?
Research is not dead; I do not think so. I will say that research culture is rather poor not dead as a lot of universities are doing research. The National Research Fund is very competitive, you have over 10,000 people applying to the Fund coordinated by TetFund. Besides, there a lot of research grants that are flying up and down. A lot of people are doing research. The amount of money available to the university system for research has grown tremendously but it is still not enough. Few years ago, we were talking for NRF giving N2billion as grants to researchers across board, now that number has grown to about N8billion. We are celebrating it but for me, it is not yet there until I hear that we have N100billion in the NRF, then I will know that we are taking research seriously. The countries that have developed earmark an average of 1.5 per cent of their GDP for research and development. If you look at the top 10 most developed countries of the world, that is the average amount they set aside for development.
The disconnection with the industry is real. However, most of the research we do in this country is not on any national data base. So, I do no know what you are doing, and you do not know what I am doing. There is very little coordination.
It is only now that the Committee of Vice Chancellors in collaboration with TetFund and the National Library to build a national research repository whereby all research that have been done in our universities will end up in one repository so that researchers can go and find out what research has been carried out in their fields of interest.
For instance, if you are carrying out a research on cassava production, I will enter my topic and be able to see the list of all research that has been done on cassava production in Nigeria. And the repository will tell me the percentage of my research that is original because many people would have already carried out some research on my subject matter. The response can help me modify my research topic to say cassava production in Sokoto and such modification of the research topic and my originality index can jump my research index from 0.2 per cent to say 70 per cent meaning that not much has been done on cassava production in Sokoto. It will help one to know which area to focus on instead of wasting time and money. I can tell you that a lot of Nigerians have carried out cutting edge research but most of them are not on the national data base that many people and the industry can benefit from. So, our national knowledge repository is not electronic and is not giving us the value that we deserve in this country.
Growing up as the son of Late Col Anthony Ochefu
Well, growing up, we his children did not get to see much of him. It was only after he retired from the army in 1975 that we started having him around. But even after his retirement, he was still moving around, doing his business, trying to look after his family and other commitments. For me personally, it was when I relocated to Makurdi to start the Benue State University that I started seeing him much often, knowing him more intimately and having a very strong relationship with him. During my primary, secondary school period and even part of my university education, I did not get to see him much often because he was busy doing a lot of things. We had a very close relationship. I came from a closely knit
family made up of four brothers and two sisters. One legacy which my father bequeathed which he also picked up from his father was education.
If you wanted to get money out of my father, all you need to do is to drop a list of text books. But if you say you needed money for clothes or shoes, you will need a lot of explanation to do before you can get the money if you are lucky to convince him. My father was somebody who was driven by the love for education. Incidentally, the highest formal education he had was Standard Six. Then he taught himself every other thing including writing GCE from home and it was that GCE that enabled him to be commissioned as an officer because he joined the army as Other Ranks with his Standard Six certificate. So even though he never went to the university, he was vastly read and he had knowledge of every subject. And his own father was not vastly read in the Western sense but he went to Quranic school and was able to read and write Hausa and Arabic. He speaks Hausa fluently and always had his radio to listen to the BBC Hausa Service.
He was quite knowledgeable and made sure that all his 13 children except one was sent to school. So, I have four uncles and aunties that are graduates in medicine, engineering and education. My father was very passionate about education.
What do you miss most about your father?
What I miss most about my father is his cross platform thinking. He always had that knack for thinking differently. He was a very deep original thinker. If you present a situation to him, he will always come up with a solution. I will give you two examples. First, In 1973, he wrote a memo to Gen Gowon when he was the Provost Marshall of the Nigerian Army.
That the amount of land the army had that was lying fallow was much and submitted that there was need to start a Corp of Nigerian Army Farmers. He noted in the memo that over 80 per cent of the other ranks of the army who came from the village were naturally farmers. That in peace time, these other ranks should be put in productive use to produce food for Nigeria. He even volunteered to be the head of that Corps. But unfortunately, that memo did not see the light of the day.
It was not until about three years ago under Buratai that the Army established that Corps. You can see how far ahead he was in thinking.
The second example was that in 1999, I was part of a small team of academics, technocrats and other professionals who came together to analyze the developmental challenges of Benue State as we were going into the elections that year.
So, we put together a development document called the Benue Advanced Plan. We analyzed it and thought that we had written a very sound document. I took it and he read it and the next day, over coffee he said that we wrote a good paper but that we however missed a very important part, and I could not imagine which important part that we had missed. He said that we missed to include good governance that without good governance, everything written in that document will not work. It was like how did about 12 of us not see that angle? So I took it back to my team and when I told them what I discussed with my father and so good governance became chapter one of that document. So, we were talking good
governance in 1999 before Obasanjo’s government started talking about good governance. So that was the type of person that he was, deep creative thinking and that is the part that I miss him most. He died in November 1999, Akume became governor of Benue in May 1999 and by July, when I met my father he told me that this your man was not going to be successful. I told him that the man is just starting but he disagreed with me and told me that any administrator who is going to do well that you will see the signs within the first two months.
Between your parents, who do you naturally tilt towards?
(scratches his head) This is a tough one because my mother is also naturally gifted in her own right. She had a very strong entrepreneurial spirit the type of spirit that drove her to now establish what is now known as Mammy Market all over the Barracks in the country. One of my most popular research materials based on the number of downloads it has achieved all over the world came out of a conversation that I had with her which is on the topic of prostitution in Idomaland. We were having a conversation and she said when prostitution started in Idomaland that they were young girls and their father warned them not to go into prostitution. So, I probed further asking her if she was born when prostitution started having at the back of my mind that the Bible has described prostitution as a very old profession. She told me that she was there when prostitution came to her community and that one of her strong headed sisters decided to go to the “Road” as they described prostitution at that time. According to her, her sister was bitten by a snake on her way to join the prostitution gang and had to be brought back home. She stated that her father had warned them that none of his daughter would go into prostitution and that if she had crossed that river, it was her dead body that people would have brought home. That now instilled fear in to the rest of the girls. So, I picked it up from there and started researching and I found out that the “Akwuna”, the Idoma word for prostitute is not actually an Idoma word. I now identified how prostitution came into Idomaland. Commercial sex came into Idomaland through the construction of the railways. And
the first set of people who brought the business of commercial sex workers were Igbo women.
I also found out that Akwuna is not even an Igbo word, but from another cultural complex that the Igbos adopted and because of our proximity with the Igbos, we inherited that word for prostitution. My mother had a lot of genealogy on her head. Besides being my mother, she was also my informant. I play with both of them. But I will say my father because, he could have easily been an intellectual given for his knack for strategy, structures and processes. My mother did not have formal western education as such having stopped her education in Standard Six. My mother was more of an entrepreneur while my father was more of a deep thinker.
Did She tell you how her name became associated with markets around the barracks all over the country?
First of all, the name Mammie was a corruption of Mummy. Her father worked with the then colonial public works department overseeing roads. When he left home for that particular tour of duty, his wife was pregnant. So, on their way back to another location, he was going to pass through his village, and he pleaded with his supervisor who is a whiteman to grant him permission to stopover in his house to see his wife. The supervisor obliged him, and he went and found out
that his wife had given birth to a baby girl. When he rejoined his team, the whiteman inquired as to the gender of the child. In the translation process, he told the whiteman that his wife gave birth to his mother as a female and the whiteman said “you mean that she gave birth to your Mummy?” As he heard the whiteman say mammy and felt that the whiteman has given his daughter a name. When he now returned for the naming ceremony, he now named his daughter Mammie.
So that is how the name came up in the first instance. She married very early, she was barely 16 when she got married to my father and he was 24.
Let me also tell you that my father had a harrowing experience when he was growing up. He grew up with the Reverend Priests and wanted to be a Priest. After his Standard Six, he was set to travel to Ibadan to begin his journey into priesthood, his mother blackmailed him and told him that if he travelled to Ibadan, she would commit suicide by hanging herself. As the first child of his mother, he told the white men that he was no longer interested in becoming a priest. So, from there he went to Kaduna and one thing led to the other and he ended up in the Army. At that time most of the people joining the Army as other ranks were stark illiterates but because he had Standard Six, it was easier for him to move up faster. His first posting after he left Kaduna was Enugu. By that time, he had married and arrived Enugu with his young wife.
Part of their bush exercise in those days from Enugu to Bamenda in present day Cameroun and back on foot. It was a six-month exercise, three months going and three months returning. They usually stopped over at Abakaliki, Ogoja, Ikom, enter cameroun, stop at Kumba, Manfe then, at Bemenda. And from there, they would start their return journey to Enugu. And mother had grown up with her Paternal grand auntie who was a trader and made sure that all the girls around her were not idle. he knew the tricks of petty trading. So, when she got to Enugu boredom was going to kill her. Her husband had gone on bush exercise, she was at home doing nothing just sleeping and waking. To tackle the boredom, she
now decided to start making Kunu to sell. That was how the whole business started just to keep herself busy. Then her customers liked the quality of her Kunu especially those from her cultural area. Kunu is not popular in Igboland but the Northern officers started patronizing her. But Kunu attracts a lot of flies and barracks are supposed to be very clean. So, the regimental sergeant major (RSM) shut her down because of the hygienic challenges the production of Kunu brings within its environment.
The loss of the little income she was making and the return to boredom threw her to inconsolable tantrum. However, after a time, as a compromise, the RSM told her that she could make the Kunu, but she could not sell it in her house and asked her to go to the bush behind the barracks and sell it there so that flies would not disturb people in the barracks. So that was how she went to the bush and cleared part of it and started selling her Kunu there. Her customers will come, buy the Kunu, drink and go back. And soon, her customers started demanding for other things such as akara, fried yam and other things. So, she had to encourage her neighbors and friends to come and join her there while she sold Kunu, her friends and neighbors sold other things like akara and fried yam. So that was how the nucleus of what became Mammie market started in 1954. When her husband was transferred to Abeokuta, she started another version of the market there.
From Abeokuta her husband was transferred to Kaduna. But in Kaduna, her husband was promoted from sergeant to Second Lieutenant. As an officer’s wife she could not be selling kunu in the batcha anymore because she had to move from the barracks to the officers’ quarters which was a different ballgame. So, she had to change the dynamics by packaging it and giving to people to go and sell and return her money. And in 1973, she incorporated the Mammie Markets Ltd with what is CAC then and went into transport, real estate, agriculture and also started a primary school in 1975 as part of her investments