When Tinubu Gets Academics Votes of  Confidence : What’s Up?

When Tinubu Gets Academics Votes of  Confidence : What’s Up?

By Bagudu Mohammed

Earlier, the Daily Trust newspaper reported that over 600 senior academics drawn from universities across the North had endorsed President Tinubu’s second-term bid. What could have passed as just another political alignment took a revealing turn when one of the academics offered an honest intervention, disclosing that the statement now dubbed the “Kaduna Declaration” was not a product of imposition or trickery.

Having received the invitation himself, he explained, the intent of the gathering was made clear to him, and he simply and politely declined. That singular act of conscience strips the episode of conspiracy and restores it to what it truly is, an exercise of choice.

The concern, however, goes beyond the declaration itself to the chilling shadow it may cast on all academics, regardless of whether they freely expressed their choice or abstained, he wrote. The optics are inescapable and dangerous, because these same academics are the pool from which returning officers and electoral umpires are drawn. When endorsement becomes conflated with partisanship, public trust in the neutrality of the ivory tower is imperiled.

As Robert Merton’s sociology of science reminds us, the ethos of academia rests on disinterestedness; once that is perceived to be compromised, the legitimacy of the entire electoral architecture suffers collateral damage.This is why alternative perspectives matter, and matter urgently.

Recently, we watched with horror as a social media commentator was murdered in cold blood in Kano and a religious cleric was openly attacked in Sokoto, the episodes that point to a rising tide of political and religious intolerance in our public space.

What Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann called the Spiral of Silence is taking hold here, where fear of isolation, ridicule or even physical harm forces people to conceal their true preferences, thereby creating a false consensus louder than reality itself.

For one, while the fear expressed by that dissenting academic is entirely reasonable, it is also commendable that senior academics, even if they represent only a minute fraction of the academic population in the North, could boldly express their political choice without apology.

The paradox of freedom, as John Stuart Mill argued in: “On Liberty” is that it must include the freedom to be in the minority and even to be wrong, for it is through the collision of adverse opinions that truth retains its vitality. Their declaration, therefore, is less about Tinubu and more about the survival of personal conscience.

The society must not surrender to another emerging form of tyranny, a tyranny that does not wear the uniform of the state but the mask of the mob. This is what Alexis de Tocqueville warned would become the tyranny of the majority, where non-state actors weaponise coercion, harassment and digital lynching to force a single narrative and set the agenda through intimidation.

When dissent is branded as betrayal and choice is met with threats, we are no longer in a democracy of ideas but in an ochlocracy ruled by the loudest online crowd.

A deeper reflection compels a simple thought experiment. What happens if tomorrow over a million academics identify with Peter Obi, Atiku, or Seyi Makinde? If the right to endorse today is criminalized by public hounding, it will inevitably produce what psychologist Irving Janis termed Groupthink, a condition where academics, out of fear, succumb to self-censorship, surrender their intellectual autonomy, and trade personal judgment for the safety of the herd.

Research on academic freedom by the AAUP consistently shows that when scholars fear retribution for extramural utterances, they retreat, and society loses its most critical layer of independent thought. To limit that right is to institutionalize group censorship.

The religious clerics, regrettably, appear to be among those fanning these hate-motivated hostilities and the broader insecurity, by the way they frame certain political sentiments as sacred and cast those who resist conformity as either ungodly or financially induced. This sacralization of politics, as documented by Jonathan Haidt in his work on moral foundations, makes compromise impossible because it transforms a contest of policies into a cosmic battle between good and evil.

Politics, at its core, is about competing ideas and interests, and brinkmanship or bullying must not be weaponised by a helpless majority who resort to jungle justice to perpetuate a kind of civilian coup, while simultaneously accusing state institutions of failing to live up to democratic ideals.

While I am not a politician, it has become a civic duty to provide alternative narratives that puncture simplicity and fantasy that attempt to portray certain figures as superhuman and their ideas as silver bullets, even when recent memory shows that some of those once so projected turned out to be no different from the others they replaced.

As Karl Popper cautioned in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” the allure of the messianic leader is the most potent threat to an open society, because it promises utopia while silencing the very criticism that makes progress possible.

Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575