Unless, as it is said, the carriage of a messenger depicts the mindset of a principal, President Muhammadu Buhari should be sufficiently ashamed of the conduct of the minister for education, Adamu Adamu, in his meeting with the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS). A viral video clip of the meeting remains bad publicity for Nigeria and the Buhari administration.
The students, who were protesting the continued face-off between the Federal Government and members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), which has paralysed academic activities in the nation’s universities, had taken their anger to the minister’s office, clutching placards demanding a quick resolution of the crisis.
After some remarks and a few questions by the students, who were led by the NANS president, Comrade Sunday Asefon, the minister walked out on them, dismissing virtually all the issues raised by the youths with a wave of the hand.
That was arrogance and impunity taken too far by a public servant who was supposed to be answerable to the people. Adamu should have been relieved of his office by that show of indiscretion, in saner climes. But then, you may not need to go far to locate where the minister derived his crude guts from. Recall occasions in his early days in office when the President had made it a mantra to talk down on Nigerian youths, in some instances, describing them as being lazy. Adamu and other office holders may have read his lips at such moments and have been acting accordingly.
During the last strike by the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), the labour minister, incidentally, a medical doctor, Chris Ngige, had reminded them that the country had more medical personnel, such that it could do without them.
What seems to be the only medium of communication for government and its functionaries is command and control. When the late Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, sang that he had not known any other country other than Nigeria, where the citizens were ridiculed as being useless and undisciplined, many did not reason with him. Situations have eventually shown that the ebami eda, was prophetic, after all.
But the country seems to have been boxed into a corner by the sheer unresponsiveness of its leaders. The current youth crisis is one that may have defining consequences, if not carefully managed. It is like a time bomb that may explode in our faces.
The leader of the protesting students in Kano, Yazid Tanko Mohammed, captured the situation succinctly. “ASUU has been going on strike since 2009, and students are always the victims of the strike. We are not benefiting from the strike. Instead, we are always at the receiving end. Imagine, a programme that is supposed to last for four years will take up to six years. And the one meant for five years will take up to seven to eight years,” he said.
Just as the students suffer, their parents bear the brunt of having them in school, endlessly. And the society loses the most.
The current strike began on February 14 because of the failure of the Federal Government to renegotiate the agreement it signed with ASUU in 2009 and the replacement of the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) with the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), as the payment platform in the university sector, among others.
The teachers insist that IPPIS has never been implemented in any university system anywhere. Among its drawbacks, they say, is that it will shut the door against foreign scholars, contract officers and researchers needed to be poached from existing universities to stabilize new ones.
But the Federal Government insists that the payment system is for transparency and neither intended to trample upon university autonomy nor designed to subsume the university into the civil service.
These are issues that can be resolved with openness of mind and sincerity of purpose by the two parties, hence, the position of the students on the parties to find a speedy resolution to the crisis. They are not taking sides with any of the gladiators but rather seeking a way out of the logjam. For such patriotic young men and women to be snubbed by a minister of the fedration shows the premium government officials place on service to fatherland.
Nigeria has become a classic case of where the leaders do something the same way repeatedly and expect a different result. It has never worked anywhere. The logic, rather, is that one reaps what he sows. The #EndSARS protest of 2020 by the youths against the high-handedness of the police and sundry incidents of poor governance, was enough to have taught some lessons to the authorities. The impacts of the protest still resonate in areas it affected. The mismanagement of the protest by the government leading to the exercise being hijacked by hoodlums accounts for the rising insecurity in many parts of the country today. Anything nearer to that experience may pose more challenges to the nation.
What the government is doing by appearing not bothered while frustrated Nigerian students take over the major highways in protest of the ASUU strike is unwittingly exposing the innocent ones among them to what is not in them. The maxim is that the youths are the strengths of a nation. Other systems harness their youths, Nigeria toys with its youths and gambles with their future.
Treating the youths with levity has been the bane of Nigeria. We may take it or not but when we talk of the rising insecurity in the land, occasioned by the ravaging insurgency and terrorism in the North East, banditry in the North West, intermittent clashes in the North Central, kidnapping and ethnic nationalism in the South West and South East or militancy in the South-South, all boil down to the youth unleashing their anger on a nation that has abandoned them for a long time.
Former minister for agriculture and president of African Development Bank, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, came close to saying so when he observed in his recent lecture that 40 per cent of Nigerian youths are jobless, adding that they are discouraged, angry and restless, as they look at a future that does not give them hope.
Elsewhere, the latest labour force report of the National Bureau of Statistics indicated that unemployment among young Nigerians (15 to 34 years old) was the highest in the country, with 21.72 million, or 42.5 per cent of the age bracket, unemployed. These are potent hands that could be exploited by mischievous elements for untoward acts.