…AND ONCE AGAIN, ASUU!
To this day, I have not been able to tell anyone the answer he gave me, off-record, which he refused to repeat on air. In short, he had castigated teachers and advocated openly and shamelessly that any parent who could afford it should send their children to private school, or abroad. He had conveniently forgotten […]
To this day, I have not been able to tell anyone the answer he gave me, off-record, which he refused to repeat on air. In short, he had castigated teachers and advocated openly and shamelessly that any parent who could afford it should send their children to private school, or abroad. He had conveniently forgotten to even dignify me, his interviewer, whom he knew as fresh from the classroom as lecturer in Mass Communications at Bayero University, Kano.
Had he repeated that statement on air, perchance he could have been lynched when he returned home, I had thought at that time. And I wondered, at that time, how could these be our ‘elected’ leaders? Even if this was one’s opinion (that teachers are God-forsaken), why would one so unintelligently blurt that out to a journalist? Now I know better.
There is no profession more honourable than teaching. Not even politics, wherein the prefix ‘honourable’ is automatically assumed the moment one wins an election, is rigged in, or rigs himself, into a Council, a House or Villa. Sometimes the prefix comes in a political appointment package, bereft of any election. Yes, teaching is honourable. And teaching is divine. In fact, all the Prophets of God were known to have been teachers. To wit, the disciples of Jesus (Prophet Isa alaihis salam) used to address him as ‘Teacher’.
Teaching is in itself educating and rewarding (even if not in cash). And contrary to what many say, teachers get rewarded in the here-and-now in the satisfaction of imparting knowledge to others, and in the respect they earn from those taught, whatever position they may come to occupy later. And, among teachers, university lecturers are a special breed. One does not usually become a Graduate Assistant (junior teacher) in a university unless one was quite sharp up there, (not that it matters anymore in our Own Dear Native Land).
Being too savvy has its demerits in Nigeria where brains have mostly been a burden, not an advantage. Bright people elsewhere usually end up as academics; bespectacled and bald to the end of their lives, helping their nations in research and development. Sadly in Nigeria, many of these would-have-been professors usually end up doing something else since, for the most part, teaching is a temporary vocation before something more ‘concrete’ comes up. It used to be said that, when someone wanted to marry, the potential in-laws would ask whether the suitor was a ‘worker’ or a ‘teacher’. A teacher was persona-non-grata.
Education apartheid has existed from time immemorial, and across all climes, but the way it is in this country is evidence enough that the children of the low are not expected to aspire high, or to compete with the children of the high. This vote-of-no-confidence began first at the primary school level, before it reached secondary school, before much later it reached the tertiary level. If the elite parents had only sent their children to private Nigerian universities, it would be said that they were acting true to type. But to send them abroad is the greatest vote of no confidence in our educational system, because it is true today as it always has been that there is no way children of the poor can compete in the unfair way our educational system is structured.
During the last quarter century, the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU) stood alone in the gruesome fight against military dictatorships. When all other bodies, unionised and corporate, had been thoroughly compromised by subsequent military juntas, ASUU alone had stood incorruptible. It stood tall; it was courageous, combative, above board. Much like its then President, Attahiru Jega, now Vice Chancellor of the nation’s best university, Bayero of Kano. (Many still await Professor Jega’s memoirs as ASUU President, not least to confirm or disprove perhaps the greatest ASUU apocrypha: the tale of Six Million Naira gratification offered in those legendary Peak Milk cartons, but which were returned to sender untouched).
In those days, one would not attend an ASUU meeting or lecture and come out without learning something. Such gatherings were a school in themselves. As a junior academic I had once sat, as ASUU prepared for another battle with those khaki dictators, and listened to a speech by Professor Eskor Toyo, who was himself introduced by another erudite scholar, the late Mallam Shehu Umar Abdullahi (may his soul rest in peace). When the Toyo speech was over, most of us junior lecturers were so stunned by the erudition, the delivery, the mastery of the subject matter that we just sat there mouth agape, unable to even applaud. We could only mutter what Allah has said in the Qur’an: Wa Fawqa Kulli Thee Ilmin Aleem: (And Above Every Possessor of Knowledge, There Is One More Learned).
Now, therefore, why would universities in Nigeria bestow an honourary doctorate degree on a person whose children are studying abroad? Almost all the Nigerian elite; politicians, generals, traditional rulers, aspire to wear an academic gown, and to have that appendage, (Dr.), attached to their names after any other titles they may earlier have had.
Many observers, unlike me, may have missed something very significant from all that fanfare. Simply, all those hounourable-graduants, without exception, donned their (our, my) academic gowns on top on their khaki uniforms, alkyabba or babbar riga. For that moment in time, those pseudo-honourables have subordinated whatever other titles and lives they led to academics. They trust our honourary degrees, these elite, yet they do not trust us with teaching their children. What incongruence!
The military dictators of the past (and some civilian dictators of the present) always vowed to ‘deal’ with us academics. Does it make any sense then that they would come down their high horses to receive honourary degrees from us: we the ‘intransigent’, we the ‘inflexible’, we the ‘hot-headed’, we the ‘Lenin left-overs’, we the every-thing bad? Or have we forgotten ‘Wal-Bani-Wal-Baka’, a term coined by a ‘brilliant’ former Education Minister, who was himself just a few months earlier a lecturer, to invoke the ‘No-Work-No-Pay’ Principle?
The great Chinese philosopher (and perhaps Prophet) Confucius is quoted in Analects to have said: “A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.” ASUU was not fighting for comfort: it was fighting a dictatorship that made the renowned social scientist late Professor Claude Ake (who died in a plane crash near Lagos in 1996) to have stated: “In a meeting of one hundred people, one with gun is majority.”
To be continued