National Association of Nonsense/Non-Students of Nigeria by Chinedu Ekeke

http://ekekeee.com/index.php?p=3060



The news, last week, of the death of three Students Union leaders from Ondo State in a ghastly car accident while coming back from Abuja where they went to bestow a controversial award on the Ondo State governor should bother every one of us. While conceding that bad roads – or lack of them, in most cases – was responsible for the auto crash that led to their death, the death has thrown open the scam called National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS).

I heard, because I haven’t seen, that there used to be a time when NANS represented – and fought to protect – the interest of students of Nigerian descent wherever they lived in the world. Those times, as I equally heard, NANS had the moral fibre and national followership to cause a halt on any government policy that they considered to run against the overall interest of the Nigerian people. Those days, I was told, were when intellectual sophistication and superior reasoning qualified people for the leadership of the body. Then their elections were conducted with utmost civility and decency and which, in turn, threw up sound minds in their leadership circle. That was then.

In my University years, I got close enough to Students politics to understand that the NANS in place now is the National Association of Nonsense (or, Non) Students. The body, if there’s a body in the first place, is populated by a combination of non-students and some students whose qualification for that appellation will always remain subject to critical questioning. Their leaders – of course they have no followership anywhere – are basically some bunch of intellectually challenged professional students who run after Abuja and the 36 State governors in search of free money from the national treasury. Their modus operandi is the conferment of awards on anybody who is willing. And our politicians live for nothing else than undeserved awards. They scout for them like vultures would scout for carcasses.

It begins with their elections. I was a delegate for one of the conventions that was to produce a president and other national leaders of the Association. Against the advice of folks with more experience in NANS politics, I refused to go for the convention with cultists. I had thought, out of my pardonable naivety, that I was going for a gathering of intellectuals. As an SUG representative from my school, I was said to be a member of the NANS senate, anyway. Who would expect that belonging to the senate of any organisation would not just be about intellectual discourses and debates? Well, this wasn’t.

At Old Parade Ground, Abuja, at the centre of military and police barracks, it was a theatre of the absurd. Candidates for the presidency of NANS were lobbying to lodge delegates in choice hotels and foot the bills. Their supporters were brandishing guns, machets, sickles and other dangerous weapons against delegates and supporters of opponents of the contestants. Every candidate for the positions being contested ferried their own army of cultists from wherever they came, into Abuja. From continuous postponement of the convention date (over one week) to the sporadic gunshots from many of the cult men that sent everyone running for cover every now and then, the convention ended a mere charade. And it gave me an insight into what a future with those ones as leaders will be in Nigeria.

There has never been one president in the last decade or so. It’s always been factionalized. Once the – usually violently conducted – elections are over, those out-bribed in the bribery contest form their own parallel government, meet their political sponsors (usually their state governors, senators, etc) and ask for official cars with which they’ll ply their factionalization and award-giving trade in the next one year. They usually get listened to; and the business begins. They contact journalists and conduct press conferences alleging irregularities in the elections and then declaring themselves winners. In one NANS year, you could have as much as three factional presidents running parallel governments.

And thereafter the race for Aso Rock begins. They want to have audience with the power brokers around the president so as to ultimately seek audience with the president. Once that is achieved, their lives get transformed. Tony Nwoye got transformed from NANS to PDP Chairman in Anambra State some years back. Okuma Hembe – the one who declared the readiness of “Nigerian students” to insist on Obasanjo remaining forever in office as president until the “Nigerian elite produced someone” competent enough to replace the Ota farmer – got his family rewarded with a slot at the Federal House of Representatives. That is why Herman Hembe is there. And we all know what he stands for. He is a product of NANS.

At the state levels, the factional presidents seek the support of equally morally bankrupt (and many of whom are) SUG presidents to penetrate the Universities. They seek to curry the favour of the management of the tertiary institutions. One of them made a fortune out of the award-hungry hypocrite of a Vice Chancellor we had in my days in school. With the co-operation of a former SUG president, they conferred a phony award on the school as the best in the South East. The Vice Chancellor paid them about N500,000 for that, and then bought advert space on national TV to celebrate the falsehood. Then some of us thought it was genuine, until few months later when the same racketeers returned with another “award” for the VC and the school. This time it was declared the “Best University in Nigeria”. Again staff and students were gathered to celebrate. And money was given to them. I ran into them in front of a local hotel in the neighbouring town fighting for the money Mr VC gave them from the University purse.

But they weren’t done yet. They returned a few months later to declare the University “The Best in West Africa”. These people weren’t up to ten in number. About six of them were all Students of one University in the South West. The others were their collaborators from my school. Those were the ones who gave out this award. And the VC who was seeking national attention for a possible senatorial contest or recommendation for a ministerial appointment doled out more money to them; and then gathered the University Community again.

Then there was another one for something that sounded like “The most environmentally friendly University in Africa”. The same gang was behind it. The same VC received it.

This isn’t fiction. This actually happened. My friends and I would joke that we were expecting the ultimate award from the merchants; the best University in the World! It didn’t come. I wish it did; it would have stamped a final seal on their folly.

This is why the Ondo State incident got my attention. In an election year for the sitting governor, the student leaders went to Abuja to declare him “Governor of the year”. Nobody knows the criteria used to do that. I think they just were out to seize the moment and make pecuniary gains from the situation.

But I will respect the dead and talk to the living.
One of the tragedies of Nigeria is that the elites have failed their country. That latent urge, by the Nigerian elite, to join the “privileged” in making wealth off a non-functional system is the bane of our society. We may eventually make the money, but we are destroying our land. A functional society cannot be built on greed and disregard for the weak. The Nigerian student must think along this line.

They should choose to build a truly credible National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) or let the National Association of Nonsense/Non Students, peopled by grandfathers, money mongers, empty heads, drop-outs and cultists, continue to further damage an already destroyed future for them.

so you see my friend, the problem of nigeria is GREED! the people giving phony award are greedy, people collecting it and dishing out money are greedy.
And painfully enough, the greedy 'nonsense' students will become leaders of tomorrow! I weep for Naija.