Tony Afejuku
The current strike embarked on by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has inspired me a great deal to give further thoughts and further thoughts to the question of originality as an idea or a quality which is essentially essential to the experience of survival in our difficult world. And as far as we are concerned our difficult world is this country: your country my country our country.
ASUU as a body of intellectuals has stimulated itself over the years of bane and pain to help and bail our tertiary institutions out of the quagmire, the awkward, complex, or embarrassingly embarrassing situation into which they have been plunged by the intentionally un-charitable helmspersons who call themselves or wrongly refer to themselves as our political leaders. But how can I, or, how can we call those who over-burden us with woes political leaders? Our Academic Union, among whom we find Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche, Einstein, Proust, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, JP Clarke, Wole Soyinka (the last named the only still living one) “linking the moral world to the philosophical knowledge of being” has creatively over time rejected the wicked and the misshapen, the dullards. And in the creativity of the Union is the Union’s originality.
This is one principal way in which we can view one original quality of ASUU that thrillingly created TETFUND to play a defined critical role to relieve fundamentally the financial burden to prevent our universities from being made collectively a long river flowing with tears. The TETFUND that ASUU originated has been turned since into what it was not intended to be by the Socrates and Plato thinkers who originated it. I hope Dipo Fasina and Assisi Asobie are reading this. They number among the ASUU greatly greats who gave us TETFUND that has since been bastardized.
ASUU has or must have been licking its wounds since its positively austere financial virtues as expected, as dreamed and as hoped for have not been retained in TETFUND. The universities would not have been what they are now and there would not have been strikes by the Union as we have now or as we have been having in our tertiary institutions if the little virtuous things that needed to be done were morally, ethically and correctly done. Things have come to a head in this particular democratic age of greedy greed.
The greedily greed people of ingloriously nasty and nastily nasty democratic power have treated our intellectuals and academics and non-academics and students darkly. In the fish and meat and in the water and drink our ‘democrats’ of openly sustentacular greed set before our dons and students are intermingled ashes and gobs of frog spit. Why should our university persons not re-invent and re-create themselves as spit-fires? Our dons rightly originated warning and roll-over strikes as patriotic spit-fires to alter the circumstances of their rightful destinies that some incompetent incompetents are wanting to torpedo.
Let me make head and ease my suspense of you. Our academic union long-schooled in adversity should get creatively active and imaginatively original again as usual. The Union of Unions that has since responded to the fraudulent IPPIS by creating UTAS (University Transparency and Accountability Solution) should record this age of nastiness and earlier and better future ones for posterity by originating what I am calling or inventing here as ASUU’s Quotabulary which should be a book of quotations of marbles and diamonds of un-matched words, phrases, sentences, essays of patriotic truths and sensibilities capturing super-qualitatively all eras and epochs of our country’s academic and intellectual struggles against “The poor, the wicked, the misshapen, the dullard” in political power in our world lacking in guardian arch-angels.
ASUU’s Quotabulary (which should similarly capture all negative pictures and lies and insults against ASUU, and strike-breakers) should be in volumes excellently edited by a group of editors time after time. It should be an encyclopedia or superior to an encyclopedia of the Union’s being that will be valuable and invaluable forever to past, current and future scholars and intellectuals and researchers within and outside our academe. The current struggle will be over sooner or later but whatever the case may be more struggles will come so long as we have dishonest and incompetent people, incompetent incompetents, I echo it again, in power.
Before now I chatted with several professors in our universities across the land with respect to the current ASUU-FGN imbroglio, my columns on it and other pertinent matters. Let me give you some samples with their kind and patriotic authorization. Clearly, I am naming them because they, among others, will qualify to enter the envisaged ASUU’s Quotabulary.
I love your nibbed graphics on the subject of nasty age/time created by mini adults and little Lilliputs who pretend to be taller than Goliath. When they speak, I sometimes pity them because I see them as back actors acting a badly rehearsed part in a drama of absurdities. They hardly can reason beyond the level of their scam and schemes let alone aspire to reason like rulers with the mind of gold as espoused by Plato. (Professor Austin Moye, a former ASUU chairman, University of Benin).
I’m angry with the whole shenanigans of government’s injustice to ASUU. Anyone familiar with your writing style knows that you are practically fed up with the system…. Your pen dripped much vitriol. O acolyte of multiplied vituperations! The powers that be must have been scared by your invocation of thunder […] I pray that something substantial and early enough is done about the botched 2009 agreement. (Professor (Mrs.) Mabel Evwierhoma – committed ASUU-ist, front-line critic and play-wright, University of Abuja).
Buhari, and most of the people around him, are not intellectually or politically sophisticated people. Buhari’s men couldn’t handle the economy properly. They’ve failed to modernize large parts of the economy and society. I’d be justified to call these people “peasants with some education.” ASUU’s struggle must continue…. [But ASUU must always remember this:] The adage that “power corrupts absolutely is just a rephrasing of Nietzsche’s wise remark that power is potentially capable of turning a nice, ethical, moral man into a monster of ambition, a parasitic leech feeding off the state machinery, and a dull, stupid man or woman…. We should be wary of the ascetic person, one who cherishes blind ascetic ideals but who wishes to have political power.
There was a certain man in Katsina who was famous for his ascetic ideals: prudent, unworldly, frugal, and sensitive against showy vulgarity. Then he became the President of a country. Within a few years, he has turned full circle, in the opposite way! Power is that power whispers into your ears the promise of immortality and your […] divine, if not your invincible, wisdom…. Thank you, nutritious columnist, for “nutrienting” ASUU into the hallowed space of the Gift of the Nutrient Salary…. (Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano (IBK), ultra-radical scholar and critic, and committed ASUU-ist, Bayero University, Kano).
The cited professors are among the several and many committed compatriots and comrades in our campuses who should be recorded in the annals of the Union’s envisaged ASUU’s Quotabulary. “Amorka” from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and the Chairpersons of ASUU from the branches and authors of pertinent posts sent to different platforms as well as authors of pertinent publications are always to be remembered. The silence of others similarly conveys the clarity and persuasiveness of their patriotic and aesthetic commitment to the moral sensibility of the ASUU national leadership. I say and stress this because not every silence is evasive; not every silence indicates non-commitment to super-worthy cause such as ASUU’s. From time to time this column will visit your authorized contributions even after all is well that thunder provokes – supported by sense that passes sense. Abi sense nor pass sense?
