One single factor that uplifts man from babarism and savagery to a pedestal that puts him in a good stead in conquering the universe, the land, oceans, air and the outer space is knowledge, nurtured and ceaselessly mediated by objectivity, empericism and facts. While the wise and the prudent will continuously seek knowledge, the savages will unrelentlessly constitute themselves into creepling and debilitating immobilism in the march towards knowledge acquisition. Consequently, they turn themselves into palpable enmity to humanity that is manacled and chained by ignorance and backwardness.
During the presidency of Ronald Reagan of the United States, the Space shuttle, Challenger, that was carrying the scientists for outer space exploration and research crashed. Reagan canceled all engagements for that day and addressed his fellow Americans from the Oval Office. One of the things he told the Americans that day was that America has never succumb to fear and that the crash of the space shuttle would not instill fear in America. A week later the Kennedy Space Research Center rolled up its sleeves and the space research continued with billions of dollars going into it. This is what the wise and the prudent will do but the fool does the opposite. He capitulates to inertia and despondency.
One abiding destructive phenomenon in the developing world is lamentation. They mourn over their exploitation and the oppresssion by global capital. Yet, they turn aside from the path of self liberation and freedom.
The United Nations recommends that a nation must spend a minimum of twenty six per cent of its annual budget on education. The West spends 35 per cent and above and the Third World spends three per cent and yet it will continue to bemoan its babarism and backwardness. This is a paradox! There are about fourteen million kids of school age that are out of school in Nigeria today. This figure is more than the population of more than three countries in the West African sub-region.
You spend more money on the security votes of the Governors and the allowances of the members of the National Assembly than you spend on education. And when the ASUU goes on strikes over chronic underlfunding of the education sector, some folks accuse it of insensitivity. Yet, when they meet their Senator whose monthly allowance is N13.5 million in the mosque or church, they hold him in sanctimonious reverence! Someone that should be pelted with sachet water! What is going on in many of the institutions of governance in Nigeria today is nothing more than structural and legalized stealing.
The situation in Nigeria today is so tragic. There is a phenomenal rape and dehumanisation of the Nigerian masses to a regrettable subservience and docility in such a manner that revolutionary forces and pressures suffer an imaginable atrophy and degeneracy. Not long ago, I overheard two state civil servants praising their governor to high heavens for paying salaries regularly, not minding the disastrous position of infrastructure in the state. Poverty when superimposed on ignorance leaves its victim traumatised, groping in the void of misery and hopelessness. This is why the masses today could not rise on these rotten Nigerian politicians, wage a sustained war on them until sanity is restored into the country.
Most of the revolutionary forces have committed class suicide. Bribe the top echelon of the crucial trade unions like the NLC, PENGASAN etc, and the government would have its way in any anti-people policy. This is indeed catastrophic.
But this is where the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has towered above others. It is incorruptible. It is resolute. It is a dogged and resilient fighter for the interests of the downtrodden masses in the acquisition of university education by their children.
It is pertinent to ask this question: What is ASUU? ‘The Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities(ASUU) is a trade union and a union of intellectuals seeking not only the socio-political and economic/welfare interest of its members within the framework of promoting the cause of university education in Nigeria, but the entire good of Nigerians and Nigeria.The ASUU was formed in 1978, a successor to the Nigerian Association of University Teachers formed in 1965 and covering academic staff in all of the Federal and State Universities in the country.’
If there is any public university of substance in Nigeria today, it is as result of the doggedness and resilience of ASUU in fighting successive governments in Nigeria to a standstill in the areas of better funding, research, teaching and community service.
The problems and the Precarious situation in which ASUU has found itself could be located in the nature of the leadership structure in Nigeria and the disastrous consequences of praetorialism and military adventurism in power. Out of Nigeria’s sixty years Post independence experience, university degree holders had ruled the country for only eight years, that is between 2007 and 2015 when Umoru Musa Yar’adua and Goodluck Jonathan ruled the country. This in part, could be one of the reasons for the non-chalant attitude to the funding of university education and funding of research in Nigeria.
Between 1981 and 1999 when the Nigerian education sector took a drastic plunge for the worse, the military was in power stealing and looting the resources of the country. Up till today, the 12 billion dollars windfall from the Gulf War in 1991 has not been properly accounted for. General Sani Abacha alone was reported to have personnelly stolen about five billion dollars from the till. No doubt, Military adventurism in power is the biggest disaster not only to the education sector but to the whole of the Nigerian economy. Between 1986 and 1999, thousands of Nigerian academics migrated from Nigeria to greener pastures abroad. Yet, while this was going on the military oligarchy was busy looting the treasury.
This is, however, not to suggest that their civil counterparts are any better. No, not by a long short. Orji Usor Kalu was convicted of stealing 7.1 billion from Abia State. James Ibori was jailed in the United Kingdom for the billions of Delta monies he stole. Joshua Dariye and Jolly Nyameh are currently in jail for the billions they stole from Plateau and Taraba respectively. An Abuja high court in 2018 ruled that Aliyu Oshiomole must be docked for the billions he was alleged to have stolen when he was the Governor of Edo State.
The bottom line is that both the military and civil fractions of the Nigerian elite work in concert in the ceaseless and sustained pauperisation of the Nigerian masses. And if the Nigerian masses are ever going to be totally liberated, they must first of all recognise their enemies. Their enemies are not ethnicity and religion. And neither is it their cultural and political divides. Their real enemies are the elite that have been stealing Nigeria blind over the years.
If there is any friend of the masses today, it is the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) that has been fighting relentlessly to give their children university education. One potent instrument of oppression and enslavement of a people is ignorance. The parents are enslaved because they are not educated. Again, the uneducated children will be slaves to the children of the educated elite. Hence, the circle of enslavement continues.
In order to break this unholy circle, ASUU has been in the forefront of saving the public universities in Nigeria from the destruction that befell the public primary and secondary schools in the country. People of my generation that attended public primary and secondary schools in the 1960s and 1970s would tell you of the high standards and proper funding of those schools in those days. Throughout my primary and secondary education, not once did our teachers embarked on strikes. Between 1980 and 1983 that I was in the University of Lagos, ASUU went on strike only once. A professor in the Obafemi Awolowo University who has been in the University for thirty years wrote not long ago that within this period the Federal Governments had stopped the payment of his salaries for close to fifteen times as a result of industrial unrest. What a national disaster!
If there is any friend that the masses have today in their struggle for total liberation from the clutches of oppression and manacles of babarism of the elite, it is the Academic Staff Union of Universities in Nigeria that are fighting day and night in making sure that their children acquire a university education. For far too long the government has been giving ASUU a bad name in order to hang it. Enough is enough. It is thine for them know their real enemies. Obey the UN today and let every stratum of government in Nigeria spend 26 per cent of its budget on education for seven years and let the nation watch the positive changes that will take place in that sector. Aluta continua.
Toba Alabi is a Professor of Political Science and Defence Studies at the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna
[email protected]
