By Sunny Awhefeada
Unfolding events in the last six or seven months only confirm that Nigeria is under the asphyxiating grip of barbarians. When Nigerians went to the polls in 2015, they unwittingly let a clan of barbarians into the seat of power and the dreary consequences are there for all to see today. Nigeria seems to be packing up. The barbarians that we let loose on ourselves have ridden roughshod over us and are now manifesting their full savagery.
We have been badly bruised, physically and psychologically and, I dare say, we are about to bow and cringe! But this must not and should not be. We must crave a resurgence of nationalism and constructively vanquish the barbarians and reclaim our beloved country. Yes, our beloved country that the barbarians have denuded of hope, honour and glory. I wept two weeks ago, when in a class of young people in their late teens and early twenties, I used the expression “beloved country” and they protested vehemently that there was nothing “beloved” about our country. In shock, I called out to my colleague who shares affinity with them in age and sentiments and his response was a wan smile devoid of enthusiasm for Nigeria. It then dawned on me how hopeless our condition has become.
The ongoing industrial action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has more than anything else brought to the fore the deliberate attempt of the present oligarchs to undermine Nigerians. The details of what led to the crisis are already too well known. What needs reemphasizing is the avowed intention of those who now run and ruin Nigeria to ground the country. The Federal Government set out on a back and forth game hoping to wear out ASUU and incite public outrage against the university dons.
The government did negotiate with ASUU and arrived at documented agreements it refused to implement not necessarily for the benefit of ASUU, but for the good of Nigeria. The Federal Government has renegotiated and renegotiated and renegotiated the same agreement and now running out of tricks and mischief, government apparatchiks have fully appeared in the toga of barbarism.
A few weeks ago, when the strike entered its fifth month, President Mohammadu Buhari, now famous for making fantabulous statements which he forgets the next second, told ASUU that enough was enough and requested those who knew ASUU members to go and beg them. Just after that, the doleful education minister, Adamu Adamu gave himself the messianic timeline of resolving the crisis in two weeks with the media reporting that President Buhari asked Dr. Chris Ngige the pugilist labour minister to stay away off the matter. Another minister, Ngige’s junior, was on national television to ask parents to beg the striking university lecturers and that he was ready to kneel before them to call off the strike. Such harebrained pedestrianism and cheap populism! The hopes Buhari’s “enough is enough” rekindled and the euphoria Adamu’s self-given “two weeks” inspired, became ash in the mouth of Nigerians when the two weeks elapsed and nothing happened.
Taciturn Adamu became hoity-toity overnight bristling with bestial hostility. He accused ASUU of bad faith and pushed too many untruths into the public domain. He told the world that the Federal Government has met all of ASUU’s demand except two. Which of the demands were met, he couldn’t say. He told the world that the Federal Government has spent trillions of naira in the education sector and that there was no more money. He capped his tantrums with an injunction asking Nigerian students to sue ASUU and that members will not be paid for the period they were on strike. Some hours after Adamu’s uncultured submissions, words got out that the Federal Government was adding sixty thousand naira to professors’ salaries. Laughter instead of anger rang out in many quarters. The kind of sad and painful laughter that brings tears to the eyes! Government officials in their desperation to undermine the excellent work done by the Professor Nimi Briggs-led committee went to town peddling fibs to discredit the very committee it set up to negotiate with ASUU.
The Federal Government has been inchoate and confused in its handling of the ongoing strike. Bereft of ideas, government officials first adopted buffoonery and now barbarism. The stance of government is that there is no money to meet ASUU’s demands. But government should be told that there is no money because too much is being stolen by people in government so that Nigeria is fatally haemorrhaging.
We are daily confronted by humungous and widespread pillaging of our patrimony with government doing nothing about it. Yet, the trumpeters of the present regime unashamedly insist that corruption is being fought. Media reports on corruption in just one week are enough to sink the economy of some countries.
From the $22 billion of Excess Crude Account wasted by wasteful governors in 12 years, to the $100 million taken by some of them to prosecute Ekiti and Ondo elections, the $ 33 million illegally paid to the Azura Power Company, a consultant demanding for N22 billion to review a 12-page document, the claim that a consultant was being owed $418 million when the real amount was $68 million, among others. The echoes of the hefty N109 billion stolen by the Accountant General of the Federation will soon recede and permanently be dimmed and nothing will happen to him. What is daily stolen through debt servicing, oil subsidy and crude oil theft is enough to jumpstart the entire continent of Africa if well managed. Yet, government shoddily and recklessly says there was no money to fix our universities in line with ASUU’s patriotic and redemptive inclinations.
What is playing out right now is barefaced philistinism. That is why a minister would say that great men do not go to school, but stay at home, eat amala and gbegiri and write examinations and pass. He, unblinkingly, said it was a virtue. Blind sophistry and crass casuistry! How did we get here that barbarians now rule our country! Nobody needs further discerning to see that nightfall is here. Many medical doctors have fled Nigeria. University dons are about to do same. Another era of brain drain is just around the corner.
There are insinuations that Adamu, knowing that insurgency has destroyed education in the North, is orchestrating the collapse of education in the South by destroying the university system. Nigerians must stop this. The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and civil society must range on the side of ASUU to reclaim and redeem Nigeria. Patriotic Nigerians must strengthen the hands of ASUU to ensure that our universities do not sink. Sinking the universities as the barbarians are plotting will be the final nail on the nation’s coffin. We must not allow savages to undo our nation. We must align with ASUU in solidarity. Did Buhari not once say that Nigeria was the only country we have and that we must stay here and salvage (not savage) it together? Did Buhari, some years ago, not wax uncommonly eloquent commending ASUU for its patriotism and mocking and telling then President Goodluck Jonathan to listen to ASUU and redeem the university system? Did Adamu also not write an essay lauding ASUU and asking the Jonathan administration to revive the universities? Ironically, Buhari and Adamu are now in the saddle. Nigerians should compel them to do what they advised a few years ago
