Ikhide Ikheloa: ASUU is on strike again. Who cares?

by Ikhide Ikheloa

keep-calm-and-enjoy-asuu-strike

If you think I am being harsh, ASUU is a body that works really hard to be disrespected. Read the message on the website from the president, Dr. Fagge. It is unprofessional, coming from an educated don, grammatically challenged and in need of a weed whacker, not just a professional editor.

The Academic Staff Union of Universities of Nigeria. ASUU. ASUU is on strike again. Who cares? They are thugs, they are always on strike, nobody seems to know why, except that it involves being paid a boatload of money by their counterparts, those thieves euphemistically called the Nigerian government. ASUU. My contempt for that body of narcissistic thugs knows no bounds. There is really not much one needs to say about how these rogues in academic robes have colluded with any government in power (AGIP) to defraud and rob generations of beautiful children what is their right – a good education. To say ASUU is on strike is to state the obvious, they are nearly always on strike, even when they are at work, they are on strike. Their members want to have sex with every child that walks into their pretend classrooms, when they have satisfied themselves, they pimp their helpless wards, yes, they do, to their friends, constipated generals and pot-bellied rogue-politicians who have too much money in their thieving pockets.

If you don’t believe me, Farooq Kperogi has a disturbing piece here on the sexual harassment epidemic in Nigerian universities. You read that piece, and when you have stopped shuddering, you understand why fully less than 10 percent of Nigerian university dons have children living in that mess called Nigeria, let alone inside the filthy chicken coops that pass for classrooms from preschool to the tertiary level. In those criminal hovels, children of the poor and dispossessed are trapped and mis-educated by those whose children are being nurtured in the West. Their children will come back home from North America and Europe on holidays to the pretend suburbs of Abuja and Lagos island, wave a Cold Stone ice cream cone at the wreck built by their thieving parents and berate Nigerians for being wretched Nigerians. They often travel First Class. Ten percent? I made it up of course. I am a Nigerian intellectual. We are lazy like that. It could be less even.

Follow me, let’s go to the silly website of ASUU right here. Let us visit their officers, all of them mean looking men, except for one harried looking token lady who has the cringe-worthy patronizing title of “welfare secretary.” I am sure she does important things for the #OgasAtTheTop of ASUU. Maybe she is responsible for making pounded yam and bringing water so the men could wash their filthy hands. SMH. Yes, Nigeria is the patriarchy from hell, in Nigeria, misogyny reigns even in the 21st century and even among the men of the ivory tower. Hiss. Here’s ASUU’s list of  men “leaders” and one token woman: Dr, Nasir Isa Fagge, president, Bayero University, Kano, Professor Biodun Ogunyemi, Vice president, OOU Ago-Iwoye, Professor Ukachukwu Awuzie, immediate past president, IMSU, Owerri, Professor Victor Osodoke, financial secretary, MOUA Umudike, Dr. Ademola Aremu, treasurer, University of Ibadan, Professor. Daniel Gungula, internal auditor, MAUTech, Yola, Dr. Ralph Ofukwu, investment secretary, FUAM, Makurdi,  Dr. (Mrs.) Ngozi Iloh, welfare secretary, University of Benin, and Professor Israel Wurogji, legal advisor, University of Calabar. All the men and one woman have horrid looking pictures of themselves on the website, except for Professor Wurogii, ASUU’s “legal advisor” who either is too lazy or too busy to provide one. He is perhaps genuinely afraid for his life – not from the SSS but from irate abused students who have spent the past decade trying to get an education from these thugs.

If you think I am being harsh, ASUU is a body that works really hard to be disrespected. Read the message on the website from the president, Dr. Fagge. It is unprofessional, coming from an educated don, grammatically challenged and in need of a weed whacker, not just a professional editor. Somebody actually wrote that letter, proofed it and approved it for world consumption. ASUU should go hang its greedy head in shame. You go past that obnoxious letter written in the syntax of the 60’s cold war, and desperate for a reason to empathize with these guys, you root around for what it is they want (we know what they want, lots of money and in dollars please!). You find “Memorandum of Understanding, MoU that led to the truce in January, 2012. Government is still playing the ‘deception game’.” You truly want to do some serious research and contribute to the “debate” about “money, mo money for oga professors dem.” Nope, the link is broken, you can’t download anything. These people are not serious.

ASUU’s website is a dump, one that clearly advertises the mediocrity and incompetence of a body of people that only wants to be paid. If you cannot maintain a simple website, why should you be trusted with the education of children? If you cannot provide on one page, a simple summary of what the issues are and what your ask is, why should you be taken seriously?  Click on all the pretend-links on the right hand side and weep for our children. If you can get two to work, you are lucky. When it works, it is unreadable, consisting of mostly dated material (try the one on conferences, SMH). This is not the first time I have called ASUU’s attention to that disgrace of a website. There are some on their roll that truly believe that in the 21st century, websites are an inconvenience. It is a distinctly Nigerian phenomenon, one that I have been blogging about for years now (Viewing Nigeria through a web of broken links).

The dysfunctions in the Nigerian educational system are well documented on the Internet. You must read Okey Iheduru’s heartbreaking experience as a Fulbright scholar in Nigeria.  If my rant sounds very familiar to you, it is because you have read me over and over and over again on the ASUU wahala, since 2009. ASUU does not listen. I now believe that ASUU has earned the right to be banned. I personally believe in employee unions and collective bargaining, I don’t support bans, but these thugs are pushing my patience. It is a body of carcinogens inflicted on the children of the poor. As if poverty is not enough. ASUU is an irrelevance that Nigeria should get rid of. Until then, I say continue to ignore their blackmail, it should make no difference given the products of their laziness. We have writers that cannot tell an adjective from a noun (and sometimes win big Nigerian prizes for that honor), engineers that threaten to build things that would collapse on the innocent and now, get this, a postgraduate student of the University of Lagos, Nigeria hopes to win the Nobel Prize by  trying to prove proudly, through the use of magnets, that homosexuality is unnatural. I would not be shocked if his “academic supervisor” is a member of ASUU.  That my people is my generation for you. We are today’s intellectuals, today’s politicians. From Aso Rock to the moldy hallowed halls of Nigerian universities, we have MBAs, master bull artists who say all the right things to the masses and do all the right things – for themselves only. Our children do not attend public schools in Nigeria, our families treat their rashes abroad. When all of this is over, history will record that democracy came to Nigeria to prove once and for all, that we are incapable of governing ourselves. And of course it is all the white man’s fault. Na today? Hiss.

PS. And yes, I don’t need any patronizing lectures about how I am generalizing, prattle, prattle, prattle, we all know that not all ASUU members are self-serving thugs, we all know that not all our students are being abused in Nigerian classrooms. I am too lazy to put “most” in front of my sentences. Do it yourself!

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Read this article on xokigbo.wordpress.com

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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