It is very saddening to hear in the news reports this morning that the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) is threatening to attack their Lecturers over the one month tenured warning industrial action. Maybe NANS and their leadership are delighted to find out that Chief Lecturers in Nigerian Colleges of Education and Polytechnics earn salaries far above that of senior professors in Nigerian Universities. Maybe they aren’t aware of the multiple evils, hardships and hazards that the FG imposed IPPIS has afflicted on the career of University Staff in general. Maybe they aren’t reading or listening to press reports or not monitoring the disgraceful and unwholesome manner in which our FG fails to honour simple age long Agreements with ASUU on the issue of University Autonomy, Salaries, Funding, and the internationally recommended percentage of budget for Education in all developing countries.
Above all, may be many of this generation of NANS leaders are unaware of the causes of mass revolution in world history whenever there was imbalance, injustice and oppression of the people.
Unfortunately, we now have a generation of NANS that has no clearly defined knowledge of the sociology of industrial action or trade disputes. Since when has NANS acted in ideological defence of the oppressed masses in Nigeria, not to talk of defending the rights and legal deserts of their oppressed Lecturers who now wallow in abject conditions of poor peanut salaries?
Yet, we custodians of the academic tradition continue to churn out graduates of English that can’t write a simple Letter to the Editor of a newspaper to agitate in ideological subversion of the evils of leadership in Nigeria. Yet we continue to produce graduates of sociology, political science and economics who cannot tell the difference between the Hegelian Dialectics and Marxian Economic Manuscripts. And our graduates of Medicine are now more relevant in crop and animal husbandry than the nobility of medical practice.
Soon this year, our NANS officials will be jogging on the brink of recruitment for political brigandage in anticipation of their support to elect another President that’ll impoverish their parents, kill education, and anchor policies that promote insecurity of those who are not born to rule in Nigeria. For as long as they can access little crumbs that fall from the table of failed school cert politicians, they can dissipate their youthful energy in pursuit of villainous political mission.
Oh, We Cry For a Revived NANS leadership which can reincarnate the vibrant, eloquent and vociferous advocacy of old NANS leaders like the martyr, Kunle Adepeju, Segun Okeowo, etc who reputably anchored the pressure against government aberrations in that earlier generation of truly great Nigerian Students.
For now, let’s bench out arms on the balcony of history, and watch if NANS can sustain their threat against ASUU who birth them, breastfeed them, give them academic teeth to crack the bones of intellectual knowledge, and who sit in justice over fairness of leadership in Nigeria.
In Nigerian history, NANS was the fearful Tiger of advocacy for human rights and justice, especially in Nigeria and racist countries of the world! I recall the great ideological weapon of intellectual warfare that we launched against President Shehu Shagari and Cowboy American President Ronald Regan during the American invasion of Grenada in 1982. Those were the days and epoch when NANS was the real biting Tiger. But, today, in this current and failing generation of Nigerian youths and NANS, they have become the Toothless Tiger!
It’s not too late for the Tigeritude of NANS to be reawakened from its snoring sleep…
Nelson Fashina is Professor of English at the University of Ibadan (UI), Ibadan
