30/09/2026
University of Ibadan: No Muslim VC in Seventy Years
Who told you that tolerance means the gate stays shut only in silence?
I want to start this piece by pulling down a phrase that has fooled too many people for too long. Yoruba tolerance, particularly when it comes to religion, is a dubious lie, a myth polished and repeated by two groups: Christians who benefit from the arrangement, and weak Muslims who carry only the faintest atom of faith and are too timid to name the wound.
Let me tell you a story, because a story explains what a slogan hides. Since the colonial era, missionaries ran the schools, and a Muslim child who wanted an education often had to trade his name and sometimes his faith at the gate. Convert, or stay outside. That single arrangement did two things. It pushed our own people to build Muslim missionary schools out of necessity, and it planted a seed of shame in the mind of every Muslim child who watched his friend get a seat simply because he agreed to sing a different song on Sunday. Our fathers absorbed that shame and, without realising it, began acting exactly the way the system had shaped them to act: intimidated, apologetic, always minimising themselves. From the 1950s through nearly the 1990s, many educated Muslims quietly buried their Muslim names in their files and in their handshakes. I remember returning from Saudi Arabia and meeting a brother working at a publishing company who told me, almost casually, that his own colleagues of many years did not know he was Muslim. Think about that. A grown man hiding his own religion inside his own country, in his own office, among his own countrymen.
Now here is where I refuse to follow the crowd. I will not spend this piece blaming the architects of that old colonial game, because my philosophy in life has always been simple. Never complain about the enemy, and never expect mercy from him. Ask yourself instead what you are doing about it. So the sharper question is not what the missionaries did in 1930. The sharper question is what our own Muslim community has been doing since. And the honest answer is uncomfortable. Our community is weak. Our mindset is feeble. We were nurtured on timidity, and we dressed that timidity in the robe of wisdom, calling caution what was really cowardice.
Picture two boxers in the same ring. One trains, studies his opponent, and throws combinations without fear of a bruised eye. The other stands in the corner, calls his own passivity "strategy," and tells himself that ducking every punch is the wiser path. Which boxer wins the belt? The Muslim elite of this country, the very people with the degrees, the titles, and the access, have too often been that second boxer, and it is they, not the ordinary man in the mosque, who carry the greater blame for our stagnation.
I remember a story from the late 1980s about a Muslim Vice Chancellor at one of the universities in Lagos. Here was a man who had climbed to the very peak, the seat every ambitious academic dreams of, yet when the struggles of the Muslim students and staff right under his own roof needed a voice, he offered nothing. He became, in effect, useless to the very community whose son he was. That is the deeper tragedy. It is not only that opportunities are blocked from outside. It is that when a Muslim finally reaches the top of the ladder, our own community rarely has a single bold, coordinated approach to lean on him with. We do not use what I call the all options formula, the willingness to push through every legitimate channel available, legal, political, academic and organisational, all at once. We wait, we hope, we pray quietly, and we call that patience.
Now let us return to the University of Ibadan. I put it to you plainly that it is systemic, not accidental, that Muslims have been kept far from the seat of Vice Chancellor for nearly eight decades. There is a story making the rounds of a Muslim academic who converted to Christianity because he desired the position badly enough to trade his faith for it, only to be told during the selection process that his conversion was recent and therefore suspect, and it was that very history that disqualified him. Sit with that for a moment. A man who abandoned his own religion for a chair still could not sit in it. There are also whispers, and I state them as whispers because that is what they are, that the selection process for that seat has not always been free of outside influence, with certain church interests in the South West said to have a hand in who eventually rises.
And the exclusion did not stay locked away in the Vice Chancellor's office. It walked itself right down to the undergraduate classroom. Muslim female students at institutions connected to the university have had to fight, sometimes in court, simply for the right to wear their hijab to lectures, as though a piece of cloth on a woman's head were a threat to academic order. Ask yourself a simple question. Does a scarf lower anybody's ability to answer an examination question correctly? Then there is the matter of the examination calendar itself, quietly drawn up in offices where no one thought, or perhaps did think and did not care, that major Islamic festivals like Eid el Fitri and Eid el Kabir fell on those very dates. A Muslim student is then made to choose between his prayer and his paper, a choice no Christian student is ever asked to make on Christmas or Easter. That is not an oversight repeated year after year. An oversight happens once. A pattern is a policy wearing an oversight's clothes.
So here is where I land. Yes, the old colonial machine built the wall. But eighty years is enough time for a determined community to have built ladders over that wall, tunnels under it, or simply a new gate beside it. We have not, because too many of our best minds learned to admire the wall instead of climbing it.
If our own elite will not fight for the door, and our own community will not challenge an exam calendar that mocks our festivals, who exactly did we think was going to open the gate for us?
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Ismail Zakariyah Fagbo
