Class War: ASUU vs FG
Kehinde A. Ayoola (OAU, Ile-Ife)

Dr Ngige's recent condescending and disparaging remarks on national television achieved the effect of convincing discerning Nigerians that some members of Nigeria's ruling elite class have completely appropriated the country and its resources as belonging to them. Ngige's words and body language, which complement President Buhari's asinine "enough is enough" speech prove beyond doubt that the FG is waging a class war against ASUU.

A good student of European history knows that class wars can be brutal and bloody. Indeed there has been serious casualties on ASUU's side of the divide, but class war fatalities don't have to be one-sided. If ASUU members realise that they have been pushed into war trenches where warriors survive on unripe fruits and herbs, they will revise their approach to the ongoing ASUU struggle against the destruction of university education by the Nigerian central government.

The ruling elite have been preoccupied with looting for too long; everything has been put in place by the Nigerian Executive, Legislature and Judiciary to guarantee unfettered looting by this class. Ngige bare facedly rehashed how the FG paid so much in 2020 to lecturers for academic earned allowance (EAA), revitalisation of universities, etc as if the money came from his purse. But Nigerians are not deceived because the total figure was far less than N150 billion, a mere fraction of the amount recently looted by the suspended Accountant General of the Federation (AGF). If ASUU members knew the humongous sums several other self-serving characters at the CBN, NNPC, FIRS, Presidency, National Assembly, etc loot with impunity on daily basis, they will know that ASUU leaders have not asked for too much.

A few days ago, the National Arbitration Court ruled that Nigerian judges should be handsomely remunerated. While the most junior judge will now go home monthly with N7 million in line with what their counterparts earn globally, senior professors at bar are expected to be content with N416,000, which at the official exchange rate of less than $1,000, falls short of what their counterparts earn globally. Is anyone still in doubt that Nigerian academics are systematically being emasculated and relegated to glorified lower level civil servants?

The ongoing ASUU strike is beginning to strike me as the mother of all ASUU strikes. To borrow a cliché from Sir Winston Churchill, ASUU should never surrender, because to back out after coming this far is to give in to humiliation, irrelevance, and the acceptance of second class citizenship as the lot of university lecturers in this country.

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