“Excellence in education need not mean elitism, and equity need not
mediocrity” – Mary Jean LeTendre
I recently watched a short debate
on Channels TV, Sunrise Daily programme, between two Nigerian academics. The
two scholars were: Dr. Akyala Ishaku, who came to the programme to establish
the existence of the COVID-19 virus in Nigeria and the other gentleman was
Professor Cyril Otoikhian, who was there to disprove the existence of the virus
altogether. For the avoidance of doubt, I am neither a life scientist nor a
virologist. So, I will resist the temptation of passing a verdict on who among
them won the debate. Rather, in this piece, I would like to concentrate on the
instruments of science, academic methodologies and scientific references
deployed by both parties to argue their cases.
For your information, before
watching the program, I have never heard of the two senior colleagues. It was
after watching the said program that I did a little background check and found
out that Dr. Akyala is a lecturer and a virologist at the Faculty of Natural
and Applied Sciences, Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Nasarawa State and he
also has an affiliation with the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology,
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. While Prof. Cyril is a Professor of
genetics at the Novena University, Kwale, Delta State. Also, I have never heard
of the Novena University in Nigeria until that same day (please forgive my
ignorance). Therefore, I can safely
declare that I do not have any conflict of interest in their debate.
To begin his defence, Dr. Akyala
laid out how a scientific debate is done, how hypothesis are being proven with
empirical evidence, and how a counter argument is being put forward to disprove
existing order or hypothesis. He then reeled out established scientific
evidences as published by reputable first quartile high impact factor
scientific journals like the Lancet and Nature that established the existence,
origin, and evolution of the Coronavirus in over 700 published journal
articles. He later narrowed down his arguments to Nigeria and cited the results
of a recent research conducted by African
Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases headed by Prof.
Christian Happi at the Redeemer’s University, Ede, Osun State. The research was
able to establish the existence of COVID-19 in Nigeria with over 20 clusters
spread around the country. At this point, I was already deep in thought of what
the counter argument of this TV debate is going to look like. Because, to me,
the debate is already over before it actually began.
To my surprise, Professor Cyril
started his defence by saying he wonders why Dr. Akyala is sounding this way.
Then, the University Don goes ahead to explain what he knows as the scientific
method. In his words, he said: “whatever
they are doing inside (the Lab), let them bring it outside and put it on a
table. Let every scientists be available, let all samples be available, let all
reagents be on the table, the cameras be available and let them show us what
they are calling COVID-19.” He added: “but all I saw was a funny attempt
that would not yield any results”. He mentioned the name of the American
immunologist Anthony Fauci, but did not make reference to any of his published
works and then concluded that COVID-19 is not even real at all. And the
Professor went on rambling until I got lost. But I can understand why the
professor wondered why Dr. Akyala is sounding the way he did. The truth is
that, the scientific method and reference sources used by Akyala are actually
alien to the University Don. To put it mildly, Cyril came to the fight with a
stick, while Akyala showed-up with a bazooka!
In his second outing on the same
TV programme, Dr. Akyala said that he did a little background check on
Professor Cyril by searching for his contributions in Google Scholar and he
found out that he has never publish any work in virology in any impact factor
journal. That was the last straw that broke the camel's back. But when the
Professor was given a chance to defend himself on why he has no published
contribution in an impact factor journal. The University Don quickly created an
imaginary enemy for himself who is all over the internet pulling down his
contributions to knowledge, including his social media posts. He said that he
became a professor by assessment, and that he has more than 120 publications
across different areas of specialisations that he has studied. Then, he made
references to videos of Fauci and videos of himself in ITV Benin. This, to me,
is a national disgrace! Because I cannot imagine how a professor would make
reference to edited online videos posted by conspiracy theorist as evidence to
win a scientific debate on a national television.
In all honesty, I understand the
type of publications that Prof. Cyril claimed to have published to become a
professor (I do not want to say much on that, except that they are publications
that are normally packaged in Ghana-Must-Go bags and moved around our campuses
during promotion exercise). I also understand the type of publications that Dr.
Akyala made reference to as well. The two scholars were actually not talking
about the same thing, and therefore cannot flow at the same frequency. In reality,
we still have academics who do not know anything about high impact factor
journals, and reputable scientific sources like ISI Web of Science or Scopus.
Also, we have academics who still do not understand the concept of rigorous peer-review process.
That is one of main banes of the academic community of this country (I call it our little secret). Unfortunately,
it cannot be my burden to educate you in this limited space. If you are a
University lecturer and you wish to make contribution to knowledge, then I strongly
advise you to study the best practices in scientific methodologies and know about
academic databases for reputable scientific literatures. You should try as much
as possible to put what you have learned into practice without making
compromises. Then, establish yourself by publishing your research works in internationally
recognised platforms. Otherwise, you may become what one of my academic friends
used to call Ghost Professors (which means academics whose works cannot be
found in any serious academic database).
The fact that Dr. Akyala used
only Google Scholar to discredit the academic qualities of his co-debater and,
also, the fact that Google Scholar is not even a serious academic database, shows
how lowly rated the professor is. Google Scholar is mainly used to monitor
general citations and h-index, and it is still not recognised by research
Universities. And anybody with a good first degree in science ought to know
what science is and how it works. So, for the professor to argue the way he did,
inspite of the scientific evidences for COVID-19 presented by Dr. Akyala, shows
that he is a mediocre. Therefore, the professor's main problem is not because
his works are not on Google Scholar, but rather a complete misunderstanding of
science and its methods. If this kind of gross misunderstanding of science is
allowed to spread in the academic and scientific community, the consequences would
be better imagined than experienced.
He is currently a Dean Electrical Engineering in Federal
URDU University, Islamabad. Dr, Naveed did his Ph.D in Communication and
Information Systems, Dalian University of Technology, China. He did his masters
in Computer and Communication Networks from France. He holds degree of Electronic
Engineering from Pakistan. His main research areas are Wireless Communication,
Wireless Sensor & Adhoc network and Underwater Communication.
He receives his PhD in Computer
Science from the prestigious University of Technology Malaysia (UTM), MSc in
Computer Science from Bayero University Kano (BUK), Nigeria and a Bachelor of
Technology in Mathematics with Computer Science from the FUT Minna, Nigeria. He
was the former Head of Department (HOD) and a pioneer member of the first Cyber
Security Science Department in Nigeria at the Federal University of Technology
(FUT) Minna. At the time he is visiting research scholar as an Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity in IT
Department, Community College of Qatar (CCQ), Doha, Qatar.
Dr. Hamid is a currently based in
Malaysia. He received his PhD from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). His
areas of interest are cloud computing, analysis of algorithm, network security,
e-commerce, web development and Internet of Things. His area of research is “Optimal
Resource Scheduling for Infrastructure as a Service in Cloud Computing based on
Cuckoo Search”.
Dr. Zubair received the Ph.D. degree
in Electrical Engineering from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) Malaysia in
2017 and M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from University of Engineering and Technology,
Taxila in 2012. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of
Electrical Engineering, Federal Urdu University of Arts Science and Technology,
Islamabad.
