The Academic Staff Union of Universities has been on a biting industrial action since July 1, 2013. The underlining issues are of public knowledge, therefore reiterating them here would be unnecessary. The strike action was initially met with the characteristic lull in the system. With no one ready to quickly assume responsibility and everybody preferring to behave as if it wasn’t their business, the hope was that with time the striking lecturers would return to class, leaving Nigeria and her business to continue as usual. Slowly however, the lull graduated into a quiet murmuring and before long, the floodgate of opinions was opened. Expectedly, the resulting narratives, have been a curious cacophony of all sorts, some out of sincere patriotism, some out of sheer weakness of half-educated minds, some out of dangerous ignorance mixed with utter desperation. Certainly, in such times, it can only be a matter of time before everyone (something my people in Yorubaland would refer to as Taja Teran) becomes an expert on how to manage ASUU. And so it was. Before long, all and sundry began to postulate on what ASUU stands for, or should stand for, or should not stand for, or should be standing for. Whatever!

In the midst of the back and forth game of narratives, dirty politics turned the tables. The then Minister of Education, Prof. Rukayyatu Rufai, was swept away in a tsunami-like political coup targeting at arresting the influence of the recalcitrant PDP G-7 governors (as the group then was). After all, it’s a man’s prerogative to choose to chase rats even when his house is on fire. The exit of Rufai politically paved the way for Nyesom Wike to assume a new title of Supervising Minister of Education and he immediately set to work to deploy his trademark tactics. Since then, the story has been a tale of “One week, one trouble”. The new set of narratives has ranged from the government going to the media to say that ASUU is playing subversive politics to the last one in which the ASUU leadership was referred to as a group of militant minorities, all in a wave of what some have labelled as executive recklessness. Nobody knows whether Wike had the authority of his principal before he attempted, as he last did, to force open the universities with military fiat. However, with the kind of jobs Wike is strategically placed to do to ensure 2015 is a reality, the powers that be are sure ready to live with his vituperations, whether they be presidential or not.

Closely on the heels of government, are the parents. It is good for us to look at what the parents have been saying. Nigeria is a unique country, if not, why would you have parents who would stoically stick to their guns that their wards must attend fast decaying universities and would frown at any group that consistently demands that they are made better? In a country where the only symbol of societal relevance is a university degree, even when most are acquired from glorified secondary schools masquerading as universities, that must be the case. Let us assume, without conceding that these parents are direct stakeholders in this matter, that it would accordingly be our expectation that they hold an uncompromising view on the quality of education their wards receive and would therefore demand something commensurate to their expectation, where the reverse is the case.

However, recent events appear to suggest that there may be no real expectation after all. The parents’ narratives have been the most shocking. In the course of the strike action, some parents have taken to lashing out at ASUU, calling the lecturers names, and even trying to suggest that ASUU has a penchant for holding the university system hostage. All they have been screaming is that they want their wards back in school, Period! As far as they are concerned, ASUU should return to class, rotten infrastructure and half-baked education notwithstanding. This is rather unfortunate and a most shocking development, but maybe, we have just been exaggerating the desire for the best that we apportion to this group of parents all along.

It is a sad truth that the average Nigerian parent today epitomises the failure of the family system in a country caught in the crossfire of moral decadence and bread and butter survivalist struggle in which children have become mere social trophies. Today, the average parent cares less about the quality of education their child gets, as long as they have a daughter as a doctor or a son as a lawyer to show off before friends and associates as a symbol of the family success story. The primitive quest for fine social standing and acceptance has so much blinded many parents to the things of value that these days all these parents are after is how fast the four years for a degree will go by, without a thought for the quality of instruction. Gone are the days of sound family values, when parents would deliberately let their wards repeat a class, just to come out better instructed in a subject. Today, it’s a question of quantity, so much so that you see parents ferrying off kids as young as 12 and 13 years of age to the university, even when such may be totally lacking in the necessary qualities needed to handle university life. They dump their wards in universities across the country for four years or more, without bothering to come around and see for themselves the condition in which their wards study. Some of these students in their display of juvenile weaknesses are caught up in all manner of vices, while the parents are also on a frolic of their own, less bothered about how their wards turn out. No wonder, the society is today burdened with thousands of graduates brandishing all sorts of degree qualifications, yet empty in substance.

This is the same group of parents calling ASUU all sorts of names, having suddenly forgotten that if not for the consistent struggles of ASUU over the years, government would have succeeded in its objective of commercialising and privatising university education and most of their wards would have been shut out by now. Over the years, government has deliberately underfunded university education, with the aim of weakening these institutions and surreptitiously selling the argument that it can no longer fund them, with the ultimate ploy of privatising them.

One may perhaps not forget those who are supposed to be raw materials in the universities, the students. What has been their story? Absolutely nothing! Many do not even understand the issues surrounding the strike, let alone appreciating the good it portends. An inconsequential few who claim to know have since become misguided, junketing from one political platform to the other, selling their birthrights to politicians. This should be shocking, but it is not. It is an all too familiar story. The endless noise about leaders of tomorrow is nothing but an over-flogged clique. Even the students are not interested in being leaders of tomorrow, as long as they can share whatever is left of the country today and cruise round the world their ambition is fulfilled. During the life of the current ASUU strike, students in Brazil for weeks led massive protests demanding a reversal of government cut in university funding. Same for students in Chile. In Greece, universities have been shut for months now, while the students have been unrelenting in their protest. Same for the United Kingdom, where students took to the streets protesting unfriendly policies on university education. Back home in Africa, Egyptian students have been at the forefront of months of protest to force out the military adventurers. These are students in universities with facilities far better than ours, yet they remain unrelenting in demanding a better system. It is all predicated on the prevailing consciousness in those countries and the culture of values that the older generation had succeeded in transferring to the younger ones, a culture in which you consistently demand that which is right.

The happening here is however a reflection of the failure of the family system, as earlier discussed. Education to the Nigerian youth is nothing but an inconvenience forced on them. They would rather pursue a career in music even if they do not know how to play a single musical instrument or understand the basics of harmonics, than acquiring the knowledge of dialectic reasoning or logic. While the average Chinese kid is rooted in the discipline of voracious knowledge acquisition with his counterpart in Europe, a geek tucked away in a book sanctuary trying to break new grounds, the Nigerian youth is either a social media loafer or a football die-hard, so much so that for them, a football viewing centre is a more profitable arena than the university lecture theatre.

by Olusola Adegbite
http://www.punchng.com/opinion/ASUU-strike-and-the-many-narratives/

Nice write up, @mods, front page .

The expose is quite informative, it's fp-worthy.

The exposé is quite informative, it's fp - worthy.