Which Way ASUU?

Reality Dawns

The last few months have showcased some harrowing experience for some academic staff in Nigeria especially for ASUU leaders and their loyalists. Nigerian government seems to have goofed again in shameless braggadocio. Nigeria is leading the league of African countries whose leaders glory in lies and everything opposite of integrity. 

December 31 has come and gone with over two weeks added incase of logistics to know if the Government can for once fulfill their promise. ASUU leaders have threaded the part of honour by suspending the strike conditionally to see whether the Government would do the needful. The Government has fought tooth and nail to break the strength of our union -one the few powerful democratic aparachitks remaining in Nigeria. And they seem to be succeeding in the eyes of men. 

They have done everything possible to weaken the unity of our members; sending the IPPIS staff even at nights to get our members coerced into enrollment in this unsavory platform and in places like UNN a very reasonable percentage bulged. I don’t blame those who yielded because everyone needs to survive in a jungle like this. IPPIS has been forced upon us because the ‘leviathan’ has refused to bulge to superior reason. Divide and rule is an old system of government used by the foreign colonialists. But in the hands of our indigenous colonialists, it is even a brute force that takes us back to what Thomas Hobbes calls “the original state of nature where life is selfish, nasty, brutish and short”. Yes, many lecturers are dying in silence. Some are suffering from broken homes due to artificial poverty. Some have died trying to do odd jobs like taxi driving, trading and all what not which they are not trained for. Hunger warfare/starvation is an old system  used by fascist governments and applied during periods of war like during the Nigerian – Biafran War. I have never seen it applied conspicuously in any sane democratic clime. But here it has been applied successfully in Nigeria to cow the academia – who are supposed to be one of the most respected class of people in every society all over the world. And people are keeping quiet. The Youths spoke when their immediate interest /freedom were threatened by police brutality but remains in silence over their perennial interests. 

*The Morality of ASUU Strike*. 
If the ASUU strike is a selfish fight, God knows I am hardly interested. Some of us are in the academia as a vocation or at best a profession and not just an occupation. The fight is to turn government’s focus aright to the people’s needs (educational funding) not just the comfort of a few in Nigeria. But the culture of selfishness won’t allow the powers that be see the reality beyond their nose. If peradventure the #EndSARS protest had been directed against the bourgeoisie class, the Private Universities (where the children of the rich are) and other self serving infrastructures in Nigeria as we had during the French revolution, maybe the leaders would have been jolted to sobriety. But I pray that Nigeria won’t degenerate to such a state of anarchy and genocide as the Lekki massacre of few months ago would have provoked.  

The Nigerian educational system has been slaughtered and buried without any funeral. It started systematically with the neglect of government schools at both Primary and Secondary level. Their unions were hijacked by our evil government and it is now the turn of the Tertiary Institutions to be killed and buried. When this present war is finally won by the government, then the mayhem will be completed. The law of karma (let me not call it God, because many no longer believe in God) will surely visit all those who are instruments and accomplices in the destruction of the future generation of the poor and middle class citizens in this jungle called Nigeria. 

Funny enough, in every bad situation, there are evil people benefiting from it. Just like during the first wave of Covid-19 in Nigeria, some politicians benefited from it. Some of the food stored as so called ‘palliatives’ have rotten in the warehouses. Some were released for the poor during Christmas only for the bags of maize and garri to have gotten rotten and ravaged by maggots. This is Nigeria for you. When the government destroyed Primary and Secondary School System, the Mission Schools began to thrive again and now some Church men and women have driven their selfish desires to a point that many of these mission schools built by the poor and the middle class are no longer affordable for the Parishioners who built them but for the rich. What is really happening in this Country? Are we still in a democracy or aristocracy or plutocracy or cabalocracy? 

I repeat that it is not a selfish fight that ASUU has embarked upon but a fight for the right of the Nigerian Youths to public schools. A good salary for teachers both Primary, Secondary and Tertiary is the only guarantee that the best of brains will remain in that system. But when the reverse becomes the case, we have only planted a recipe for brain drain and brain wastage in Nigeria. 

*Which Way ASUU?* 
My question for my colleagues as they resume school is; Are we resuming under what conditions? So that the lecturer being owed for 9 months, for example, will begin to find his/her way back hungrily to the class to teach a big crowd of students and then expose himself /herself to Covid-19 infections?  If lectures will be done online, who bankrolls the data cost? Or is the resumption only for the IPPIS complaints while the rest are set out for the slaughter house of starvation? I have never seen Nigeria as bad as this. But like I said in my previous write up on this matter, let everyone examine the morality of his/her action under Immanuel Kant’s philosophical principle of universalization which states simply : Whenever you want to do anything and want to question if it is right, ask yourself a simple question ‘If everyone does what I am doing now what will be the consequence?’.

If the Government wants a quicker spread of the second wave of Covid-19 among the proletariat class (since most of their children are not in Government Universities) so that there will be another shut down and enforcement of the vaccines, let them say it clearly. If all the money invested in Covid-19 control and time lag from the first wave to this moment have not enabled the provision of or at least subsidisation of the Covid-19 test kits in our public Universities then they should quietly own up to the fact that they are not yet ready to move on with public education under this pandemic. If they cannot pay the teachers basic salaries without infringing on the autonomy of federal Universities as provided by the law or imposing an inefficient payment platform not designed for the system, let them own up their failure and stop deceiving the Nigerian public. 

FR BEN AGBO.