NIGERIAN STUDENTS LIKE TOY SOLDIERS
By the time you read this, another day of negotiation impasse between the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the FG would have passed. That is, assuming that there is any negotiation - the way I understand the word - going on, as ASUU appear to be hell-bent on having their demands met before schools could be re-opened.
On the face of it, one could say fair-play to ASUU for demanding what, by an earlier agreement, is rightfully theirs’ and refusing to renege on a plan like the FG had shamefully done to bring about this distasteful state. But on a keener look, this pursuit of a ‘‘revolution in the education’’ sector by ASUU is coming at a cost too much for the cause. That is, assuming there is a ‘cause’ close to what it’s been made out to be.
When two rams fight, there is the occasional horn loss, but when the beasts squaring up against each other are mammoths the size of the FG and ASUU, it is us students - not more than the grass they step on - that ultimately bear the scars of battle. ASUU’s war tactics is simple and quite effective; seeing as the FG has lost credibility of the Nigerian masses, it sought to malign the FG in the public domain by casting mire on its image while building an image of a pseudo-perfectionist for itself, and leading the people into believing that the cause which it fights is largely of common good.
Shall we fooled by ASUU whose constituent elements are university lecturers whom we know too well? Same lecturers who’d seek to exploit students (in more manners than financially) at the slightest chance? I say NO. If lecturers know this much about agreements and are uptight with them, how come mine miss as many class periods for the flimsiest of excuses (when we are lucky to get any)as they do? Would all shoddy works done in classrooms by lecturers be excused based on their welfare; or the sheer ineptitude apparent in university administration be blamed on same? I won’t delve into dirt-digging on ASUU for space, purpose and reasoning of this article would not permit.
May I quickly add, that this is not by any means an attempt to eschew the FG of blames on their gross incompetence for letting this strike drag on for this long or even come up in the first place, rather, it is to expose this issue on what it really is; a fraud, an insult on first, our rights and sense of belonging as citizens of this nation, second, our collective intelligence.
My grief is with the nonchalance at which a matter which should urge utmost exigency as a nationwide stoppage to life in a nation’s ‘highest citadel of learning’ is being treated. The obvious mangling of academic calendars of different universities doesn’t even tell half the story of the far-reaching rot this current inaction would bring on our education system.
ASUU’s insistence on their demands or nothing while watching our academic life stall belies their claims of wanting the best for the education sector. If indeed they care about the quality of education in Nigeria, would more pragmatic steps than downing tools to resolve the current imbroglio with the FG not have been taken, rather than watch, that which they so claim to defend, degenerate into a near-cadaver state? What ASUU is doing is the equivalent of cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face, but for in this case the face is not the lecturers. This strike could last another month, two or more but when school re-opens there would be barely any change to the status-quo of life in our classrooms and hostels, but for the account balances of ASUU members.
We are, sadly, pawns in the hands of power-brokers again.
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