By: Olu ‘Remilekun

“We cannot afford to forget that public order, personal security, economic and social progress, and prosperity are not natural order of things, that they depend on ceaseless effort and attention from an honest and effective government…” – Lee Kuan Yew

Myths are essential. More than that, they cannot be displaced because they are repertoire of how our ancestors made sense of the world around them in the primordial stage of living. There is an oral myth about why the sky is so high that man cannot touch it. It says that the sky was initially very close that men could touch it. However, men began to clean their hands on the white sky after eating and doing dirty works. As a reaction, the sky began to move up, inch by inch, but man insisted on jumping until the sky finally resolved to move so high that man can only see and appreciate it. It describes a logical procession of the understanding of man’s relationship with the environment. Nowadays, we have found ways to perforate the ozone layer despite the distance. What is this about?

James Birch gives a concise description of this sin that waits for the just hands of the law. He defines wild posting advertising, also known as fly-posting, as posters that people place on walls, fences, the sides of buildings and other places around the city, such as light posts, shop fronts and really any surface that one can cover. Emily Pohl-Weary describes her love for posters, billboards, murals and graffiti. She says, “you can learn a lot about a city from the art plastered on its walls, hydro poles and construction hoarding. They’re speedy introductions to the political issues and cultural activities that litter the urban core, and a great way to find out about concerts, movie nights, political actions, forums and discussions…It reveals a great deal about contentious socio-political conflict’.

Exploring the University of Ibadan reveals how the use of posters and stickers have become a menace that all and sundry participate in and comfortably live with. Every physical surface has become poster boards for the dissemination of information. Road signposts and traffic signals have become bill boards too. The Students’ Union, Halls and Faculties are complicit in this disregard for architectural beauty and order. Our walls, doors and objects around us have become media and testament of our lawlessness and inordinate living. Despite our acclaimed intellectual proximity to civility and order, our windows, doors, walls, pillars, road signs, traffic signs, trees and walk lawns have become our external hard drive, as scholars will emphasis on the growth and sophistication in technology through different eras of modernity. It seems, however that the inhabitants of the University of Ibadan have not developed beyond the wood marking and stone carving technologies, only with the use of papers now. Students have littered walls, structures and objects on campus with paper posters. Religious bodies and secular businesses are not better users of the environment as well. They cannot be blamed. The standard for publicity and environment use is supposed to be the University’s attitude. 

The gown seems to follow the lead of the town on this matter. Femi Osofisan’s lecture, “The City as Muse: Ibadan and the Efflorescence of Nigerian Literature”, gives a clue to how the town becomes inspiration to the gown. A year ago, This Day newspaper published an article titled “The Ugly Side of Political Posters” by Raheem Akingbolu where the use and removal of posters during the 2023 General Election was engaged. He writes, ‘since early last year, when the jostling for party candidates into various elective posts began, the ‘poster war’ has continued unabated. There hasn’t been any breathing space for the environment as politicians have bombarded every available space on the streets with posters…after the 2015 and 2019 presidential elections, the states’ outdoor regulatory agencies -the Lagos State Signage and Advertising Agency (LASAA) and the Oyo State Signage and Advertisement Agency (OYSAA), carried out the cleaning exercise’.

This shows that there is system in place to ensure sanity in the use of space in the town. In town, the contexts of the poster wars, related to “guerilla marketing” by Rahul Sharma and Dr Sudhir Sharma, is not different from what is obtainable in the University. The active actors per season are different and can be systematically dynamic in their approaches. Indeed, like wars, different armies are mobilized to carry out different tasks. Always carried out at nights when men sleep, the invaders plant their posters and stickers. At the beginning of a new session, religious bodies and organizations launch the campaign for fresh minds. They litter posters and banners in walkways, walls, cafeteria chairs, windows, room doors and anywhere students are projected and can be imagined to look at it. They do not stop advertisement throughout the session because businesses must prosper, by every means possible.

How do what students see when they walk to classes and around the campus affect or influence their mental preparedness and alertness to learning and deep thinking? Are posters and stickers just aesthetics? Are they inconsequential to learning process and character formation? Unfortunately, the psychological battle for the mind of students is what plays out in the use of posters in the Halls of Residence and other public spaces. As described by Raheem, people, businesses and institutions are competing for spaces in the environment of students and in their minds. In an academic environment where spaces are expected to be suitable for meditation and critical thinking, the space has been littered and bombarded with posters and stickers of religious and marketing institutions. Being a market place is not a problem. The question is the product in stock. Rather than representing and displaying the University as the market place of ideas, our walls and windows hold stock of religion and consumerist goods. This partially explains the rise of small-scale businesses and religious gatherings at the expense of intellectual and ideological consciousness in the University campus.

Our walls and every surface that can be pasted upon have become supplementary decentralized and hydra-headed archives of in University of Ibadan. Indeed, what cannot be found in the National Archives about the recent activities in the University of Ibadan are freely accessible to those who can walk around in search for them. It’s free. The poster of Ojo Aderemi’s campaign for Student Union President is still on the windows of Zik cafeteria. What an irony about the intentional omission in the version of Students’ Union history that the Dean of Students highlighted during the recent inauguration of the Bolaji Aweda led Student Union leadership. Even Ojo Aderemi (was) littered (on) our windows. The recent and more colourful posters are those of Host (former Student Union President) and other aspirants during their electioneering campaign. The fresh defilers of our spaces, in their war for attention are the new Student Union, Hall of Residence, Faculty and Association leadership. Sigma Club is audacious in its use of posters in the open invasion of notice boards and press boards that are enclosed. The invasion is ruthless. 

There is a front line in the battle for space and mind. The strategy of engagement in the war is dependent on the popularity and frequency of space usage. The Zik River, Zik cafeteria, and Indy cafeteria road to Queen Idia and Abdusalam Abubakar and other Halls of Residence makes the walls and surfaces along this walk the busiest and vicious in the bombardment of posters and stickers. Zik cafeteria windows and doors are waste lands ravaged by the missiles of posters and stickers. This cannot be separated from the popularity and high patronage of the cafeteria in the student community. Zik Hall no dey carry last. One of Zikism’s blind spots is the continuous poster and sticker assaults that have ravaged its activism and intellectual space.

The Great Independence Hall of Residence is another theatre of this physical and psychological war. The walls, doors, railings, windows and poles in the hall are also littered with the posters and stickers of the new leadership faces while the faces and campaigns of others are silently archived. This spreads into floors and blocks where doors and railings are all littered as well. The most devastated space is the small gate and narrow way that leads out, beside Indy Hall cafeteria to the Deeper Life Campus Fellowship Centre and the dilapidated hall gym. It can be said that the space is the most ravaged frontline in the poster and sticker war zones. Katanga Republic cannot but mirror the devastated Congo in Central Africa. When will this war cease? Who will bring peace to Katanga? 

The psychodynamics of the Faculty of Arts battle space of posters and stickers is different from other spaces. Unlike most spaces on campus, there are recent evidences of peace and order in the faculty before the fresh incursion of posters and stickers. The faculty had created open notice boards, a space for imagined violent expressions. However, (possibly) due to the laxity of peacemakers, the entire faculty has become host to stickers and posters. There are two spaces allocated for this violent expression. The first is the walk entrance directed positioned to be monitored by the security personnel. The other is on the wall of the faculty students’ restroom. The war spilled over to other surfaces, even to plastic waste bins.

While social media has made advertising easy and much more accessible and more sophisticated, the use of paper has remained a relevant tool of publicity and advertisement. Raheem’s position about the use of posters during electioneering campaigns because it is considerably cheap, compared to other media is understandable and true for the more diversified electorate in town. However, the use of papers for campaigns in the University community begs the question of what is cost effective and most efficient. Maybe, maybe the town controls the gown after all. In an academic environment, the highest use of papers is expected to be for academic purposes. In recent times, there has been a consistent reduction in the use of printed copies for assignments due to the inflation in the price of paper. Despite the high cost of paper, in its pseudo campaign of #FEEMUSTFALL, the Students’ Union launched an expensive, audacious and litter campaign of paper posters which the Deputy Dean of Students affirmed to be a lesson driven home and was responded to, because it also got to his office doorstep. 

In the clarion call for the revival of moribund paper mills in Nigeria, the Chartered Institute of Professional Printers of Nigeria (CIPPON) lamented the rising cost of paper in Nigeria in a 2021 Premium Times publication by Alfred Olufemi. The President and Chairman-in-Council of the institute, Olugbemi Malomo, revealed that the industry is being ‘monopolised’ in Nigeria by a few foreigners and that about 300 percent rise in the price of paper far exceeds that of foreign exchange. He posited that unemployment would increase and could disrupt the country’s peace if the trend continued. It persists. This means that the cost of advertisement and publicity through stickers and posters have also increased. The rise in cost of prosecuting war of posters and stickers has not deterred the continuity of the assault like inflation has not stopped the waging of wars in the different corners of the world. Day by day, as each night passes, new posters and stickers find their way on our faces. 

Societies are governed by laws which are made to protect the imagined ideals of communities and states. Despite the sovereign use and clamour for the sovereignty of the law in countries and institutions created by them, laws are very much unknown to the people employed to run the institution. In the case of Nigeria, majority of the citizens, even those who can read and write are ignorant of the content of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria except when they have been charged to court for an offence. Is it an omission on the part of the government to ensure that the constitution is accessible to the citizens? Is it arrogance on the part of the citizens not to know and understand the letters and spirit of the laws that dictates their rights and privileges? The popular use of the famous clause “Ignorantia juris non excusat” ignorance of the law excuses not”, by the majority does not always translate to the conscious knowledge or practical accessibility of laws that they have been forbidden to claim ignorance of.  In his 2013 essay titled “Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse, But It Is Reality”, Paul Rosenzweig, in his appeal for change asserts “…all of the crimes in the code should be…accessible over the internet without charge, and kept up-to-date…” Again, in 2014, Harvard law School Dean, Martha Minow, also affirmed, “Our justice system has become inaccessible to millions of poor people and so every day, we violate the ‘equal justice under law’ motto engraved on the front of the grand United States Supreme Court.”

In the University of Ibadan, the system is gabbed in the same garment of consciously weaponizing ignorance amidst students. The last prints of the Student Handbook are in 2008/2009 and it has become an extremely scarce material in the University community. This created the context for Ojo Aderemi’s 2016/2017 inaugural speech where he quoted the student handbook in the approval of the use of hotplates in the halls of residence and other issues. According to the Student Handbook, “it is an offence to deface a university building in any way. The penalty ranges from reprimand to rustication for one semester and the repair of the damage done”. While it is problematic to expect that only students can deface the University Building(s), question to ask is where the law enforcers are? Is the University management ignorant of the law that was set to protect the architectural, aesthetic and psychological integrity of the university space? Are the students, especially the leadership, students and readers of the Student Handbook? These and many questions beg for answers. The dearth of answers to these questions and the consciousness of architectural integrity explains why the posters and stickers have ravaged the university community. 

To expand the frontiers of knowledge through provision of excellent conditions for learning and research…the vision of the Premier University of Ibadan reminds us of the consciousness of the founders of the University about the essence of excellent conditions for learning and research. When and at what point did the management and students forget these responsibilities that guarantee the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge? All have sinned but ignorance is not an excuse for the students and the management. As Lee Kuan Yew has reminded us again that “public order, personal security, economic and social progress, and prosperity are not natural order of things…they depend on ceaseless effort and attention from an honest and effective leadership and management.”

Will the Student Union and University Management be honest and effective? Will they channel ceaseless effort and attention to clean up the University face that we have all defaced? 

In the absence of timely and practical clean up action from the school management, the Students’ Union, AUCSF and MSSN leadership, students should take it upon themselves to ensure all posters and stickers are removed and a note of warning given to all person and institutions against defacing the University campus once again. This is redemption for us. We will await no messiah.