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 want 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!
Pa Ikhide 
Reblogged this on visionvoiceandviews and commented:
Ikhide takes a hide…
Ikhide don vex!
Reblogged this on FEATHERS PROJECT and commented:
“If you think I am being harsh, ASUU is a body that works really hard to be disrespected.” – Pa Ikhide
My mind completely. Whenever I attempt to lecture some recalcitrant fools called students on the shame we have brought on ourselves through this bunch of thieves who cannot even perform any test on an Amoeba or write any poem worthy of international recognition, I am always viewed as being too radical and unappreciative of moronic and retarded preachers of doom called lecturers.
If ASUU had any vision they would leave the government to its nonsense and focus on engaging private sector themselves. Government has been disturbing my private sector friends for money to revamp the University system and we would really like to directly engage the Universities but they are so proud and they don’t listen to us when we tell them the kind of skills and training we need. It is very sad.
when I went through the official list of staffs on ASUU website, I was embarrassed, the kind of clothes my grandfather wears to the farm are the kinds professors wears to take official photos.
I’m a member of ASUU. I consider myself highly liberal. Although I can recognise a limited number of these subjects he has typified, I cannot recognise myself or most of my friends who are members too in his portraiture of ASUU membership. He admits to generalisation by omitting the word ‘most.’ Even with that word he would still be guilty of gross generalisation. It is his passion.
[…] as that of thugs. Of course, with an apology against generalisation). This piece is titled “ASUU is on strike again. Who cares? SMH” and can be read here […]
The lingering strike is as a result of the unwillingness of government which incessantly and insincerely bemoan the quality of education without the will to solve the problem that leads to the absymal state of our education. A government which signed a four year old agreement but had not refused to start its implementation and has the temerity to incessantly sponsor useless jambores, publicise falsehood about achivements in power sector, roads that are still deeply in dilpidated state across the country, sponsor post party crisis-ridden mini-convention with public money to neglect of funding public education, deceitfully engage praise-singers, doubtful students for solidarity visits and unsubstantiated statements against the last hope of the masses, ASSU who are begging that public universities be properly funded so that the children of the poor who currently have no shoes may one have shoes for their legs, as some of us including this writer who went to schools in the sixties without shoes, but who because public education was adequatelyfunded then is now by God’s grace a lecturer. How much comes from the various taxes being paid today? What of the various other charges like buying forms at exhorbitant rates to apply for non-existing government jobs? Do we need to ask how much oil theft costs the country daily? What about the frequent visits by large number of government officials to overseas countries? Could not these monies being used to frequently hosts party members, talkshops, make investment solicitation journeys and the attendant estacodes, etc, be saved to save public education with the provision of adequate laboratories and other infrastructures that are absymally insufficient? How can a government who ought to have spent about 1
N1.2 trn from 2009 to date on providing infrastructures, by the token of the agreement it signs now come to say such will ground the economy when the money that have been spent on politicking is possibly much more during the same period, if it were doing what it is supposed to do, as at when due and the situation could have been different now. The religious and ‘opinion’ leaders being hired to praise sing the government and chastise ASUU for daring to say our public universities should be rescued from total collapse are themselves immoral, having sent heir own children to choice universities at home and abroad, some of who were on the staff on universities when theywere being made heads of the components of their groups and who were not sincere enough to hand over their students to others to supervise. what is more immoral than this?
Because we are generally lazy as people who do not want to intellectually interrogate the information we are fed with by the government, we fail to verify the authencity of such information and dance to toe the line of government possibly for pecuniary reasons and without any indepth research, yet we can conclude that those of us on strike are currently engaged by private universities, when at least half of the striking university teachers perform other duties because of their various appointments and researches they are engaged in. So what could more immoral than falsely accusing persons of offence they did not commit? Can the private universities which do not run so many of the courses as obtain in public universites absolve all of us? Do they even have the capacities to absolve all of us? I think moral leaders we must verify facts before speaking on them or making allegations.
The fact remains that public universities and indeed public education are poorly funded and as such they lacked the prerequisite infrastrctures, equipment and conducive learning environments compare with Ghana and other African countries where most of the Nigerian elite class send their children at the expense of our public universities. Until public universities are properly funded and equipped, there cannot be talk of quality education, ‘toeknism’ represented by N10b which already belongs to the Nigerian tertiary institutions will not save our education. How can government take money from TETFUND to fund universities, when they are part owners of the money with the colleges of education and the polytechnics. N87b and not N92b being talked about is expected to be used to pay earned allowances from 2009 to December, 2012 and it is meant not only for the academics but for entire staffs of Federal universities who had already earned them and it is meant for 61 universities, so how can N30b solve such problem and for that long period of time, what again is the big deal? People should urge government to fulfil the agreement it freely and voluntarily signed except we want to remain hypocrites and let our education die. There is no big deal going to classes, but public education will be the worse for it as it will remain perpetually underfunded. However, posterity will not forgive us if we fail to conclusively ensure that our public education is appropriately funded. Those demonising us, whether they be religious leaders or otherwise should sit and do a rethink, do thorough and unbiased research and see whether they will still truly canvass their current position on the strike. If N1.2trn were to have been spent from 2009 to date and the government took N100b from TETFUND for the purpose, judge by yourselves whether it is ideal to rob Peter to pay Peter, not even to pay Paul? It should now be clear that the much touted N100b is just less than 10% of what should have been done to upgrade public universities from 2009 to date. Is this fair for the future of public universities, the hope of the poor masses like our children and our Nigeria? The strike is a sacrifice to save Nigerian public education from total collapse. Some are suggesting the proscription of ASUU, forgeting that the military did not succeed in doing so, much more so that our constituion guarantees us the right to associate freely. Will the government proscribe other nationwide professional or staff associations. Let them go to Ghana, where they delight to send their children for university education, it was the academics there that fought to make their university educaion what it is today.
Thank you.
Am so touched by this post, you can imagine a senior lecturer who placed a debit entry as a credit entry and angrily left the class when the students exclaimed.
“When one with honeyed words but evil mind
Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.”
That is my message for Ikhide. Definitely readers should agree with me that this is coming from a jaundiced mind
Re: ASUU is on Strike Again. Who Cares? SMH
By Okechukwu Nwafor
I was shocked to read an article of the above title on 22nd September 2013 by Ikhide Ikheloa posted on his blog ‘IKHIDE’. What was really perplexing, to me, was not only the fact that this spurious diatribe came from a blogger and journalist of Ikhide’s standing, it is the fact that his vitriol was couched in opprobrious, offensive and despicable language that forces us to draw a compelling parallelism of Ikhide versus lecturers, who is more ‘thug’ than the other? When I read the article the second time, it was obvious to me that the fires of disgust that oozed from Ikhide’s pen threatened to cast his long journalistic career in ignominy. Quite contemptible, I thought, that Ikhide’s seeming journalistic promise would nose-dive shockingly into a reckless act of horrible invectives. The question I struggled is what would have disorientated Ikhide so suddenly that he would deploy such decayed languages as “thugs”, “narcissistic thugs”, “rogues in academic robes”, “mean looking men…” to address the cream of Nigerian academics and intellectuals?
The danger of this kind of article is that it has the capacity to mislead, to hoodwink, to hide the nitty-gritty of genuine struggle, to obviate authenticity, to circumvent authoritative principles and rubbish impeccable personalities subsumed under a collective. You lose no sleep when ‘thugs’ are guilty of generalisation but when journalists of Ikhide’s pedigree are guilty of unjustifiable and indefensible generalisation then you have cause to grieve over an impending insomnia.
It is important to puncture this balloon of empty deceit Ikhide has blown by reminding him that those he called ASUU are a group made up of so many characters you would ultimately summarise as the good, the bad and the ugly. Even in Ikihide’s clan and household I am sure that he harbours the good, the bad, and the ugly. This is akin to an Igbo proverb that says that every fence must harbour lizards in its wall. It means that you can never fence out the lizard. I stand to be corrected if ASUU is made up of saints only. I am a realist and wouldn’t live in a fool’s paradise if I argue otherwise. But what we must establish is the fact that ASUU as a body is not made up of all thugs. And that ASUU as a body does have genuine agitations.
First, what worries Ikhide is the sexual abuse in our universities prompting him to conclude that “ASUU members want to have sex with every child that walks into their pretend classrooms”. This kind of pronouncement is highly suspicious. If ‘some’ academic staff are guilty of sexual abuse, does that condemn a union to the same crime? What is clear is that Ikhide has allowed his charged emotions to becloud the kernel of argument in the ASUU struggle and many of the responses in his blog dealt with this. I would be unusually extravagant with words if I repeat these points here. Succinctly put, the fact of ASUU struggle is clear: the standard of living of an average lecturer during the military era was so poor that lecturers could not afford to buy a pair of shoe. It was a result of genuine agitation in the form of strikes that dragged the military and now the epileptic democracies to increase their salaries to what it is today. Yet it is still ranked among the lowest in Africa. Ikhide please go home and get your facts right. While ubiquitous postings abound on the need for infrastructural development in the Nigerian universities, I will clarify Ikhide on other institutional and autonomy matters concerning ASUU subsequently.
Second, Ikhide worries about ASUU website and angrily charges the reader: “Follow me, let’s go to the silly website of ASUU right here”. Now Ikhide goes on and condemns the faces of ASUU officials in the website by saying that the “men are mean-looking” while the only woman “has the cringe-worthy patronizing title of welfare secretary.” He did not spare the womenfolk here and went ahead to say that this only woman official of ASUU “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”. Not only did Ikhide showed utter contempt for Nigerian women by this singular statement, he lends direct credence to the controvertible debate of women objectification. It was indeed a pity.
Let me address this internet stench that disorients Ikhide. Internet is a means of communication. Yet it is not the only means of communications. It is just a minute part. If ASUU has not put maximum concentration on the internet, it does not mean that all ASUU members are fools and analogue members. The manner of concern Ikhide expresses over this website shows that he would soon become a ventriloquist, like the colonialists, in a cause he does not need to develop a Stroke over its invention. ASUU did not invent the internet and it is their choice to either deploy it in disseminating information or choose other ubiquitous channels that would readily reach the Nigerian masses. They have been doing that effectively since the inception of the strike: going to churches to educate people, to opinion leaders, to individual stakeholders in every state, to their students (who have started demonstrating against the political class), among others. Indeed these medium of information dissemination proves more efficient than the internet because most of the above mentioned are far from the internet world. If Ikhide could denounce bloggers like me because we belong to the body of Nigerian academics then it is clear that his intention in this blog post was ultimately mischief-making rather than informative blogging. He forgot that ASUU branches have their respective websites through which they communicate their members, including facebook pages and blogs. He can check ours at Asuu Nau facebook.
Coming to what Ikhide describes as “the dysfunctions in the Nigerian educational system” I will argue that ASUU must be exonerated from this feckless submission for certain reasons. Most remarkably, the autonomy which ASUU has struggled to attain is still far-fetched. As long as ASUU lacks full autonomy this dysfunction may continue. And what do I mean by this autonomy. First is the mode of election of Vice Chancellors. Ikhide may be angry to know that the mode of election of most Vice Chancellors in Nigerian universities is flawed. ASUU has little or no input in a situation whereby the political class has the final pronouncement in the selection of Vice chancellors. Second, ASUU has virtually no input in the recruitment of most of the lecturers on campus (the same cream that constitute ASUU members).
In a nation where mediocrity has virtually eclipsed excellence and integrity, merit has systematically disappeared, or made to disappear. For example, in many universities, the Vice Chancellors abuse the process of recruitment of lecturers and most employment are done on the platform of kinship ties, political compensation, Abuja connection, Politician X candidate and Politician Y candidate, Senator A’s letter head or Senator B’s Letter head, or either Minister D’s direct phone call or Minister Q’s phone call, among others. In one university a security man who could not write his name has been employed as a lecturer while in another university a girlfriend of one Vice Chancellor was employed and she has never entered the classroom for fear of embarrassment. Now why should Ikhide blame ASUU who have gone on strike so many times for the government to grant them the autonomy to insist on due process involving interviews and level playing ground for these recruitment processes? The answer is clear: the Igbo proverb again which says that “a disorganized clan is the gain of corrupt titled men”.
So if ASUU goes on strike for this anomalous process to be corrected Ikhide would, just like the moping sheep, refuse to connect to his senses to escape engulfing danger. Then the danger will ultimately consume him. No doubt, at least, to elevate my senses above Ikhide’s sheepish senses, I can admit that, according to Ikhide, “We have writers that cannot tell an adjective from a noun… engineers that threaten to build things that would collapse on the innocent…” But rather that subscribing to Ikhide that he “would not be shocked if the “academic supervisor” of the above is a member of ASUU” I would rather argue that I would not be shocked if the academic supervisor is a member of the political class’ dubious recruitment process. The Igbos again say that if one genuinely intends to search for the root of murder then one must trace it to the blacksmith who moulded the iron weapon. So Ikhide must spare ASUU and channel his vituperations to the political class who moulded the iron weapon. It is important to emphasise that Ikhide’s sorry conclusions does not obviate the fact that among ASUU members are strong intellectuals who have studied in the best universities in the world and whose impact in the Nigerian academic world have made Nigeria proud. Needless to mention names but that will be an assignment I will give Ikhide and if he still refuses to drain his blood of this poisonous venom of ASUU-hatred-syndrome, then we must forcibly conscript him and restrict him permanently to a sanatorium where justice will be done to his wildness. That will at least convince him that ASUU can tame the untameable.
Dr Okechukwu Nwafor is a former fellow of the Center for Humanities Research, (CHR) University of the Western Cape, South Africa and a former Research Associate at the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Global Change (ICGC), University of Minnesota, USA. He now lectures at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.
penncils@yahoo.com
you forgot to add member of asuu
I have been searching for the right words to express my thoughts on the disgusting filth of a union called ASUU, and their longthroat-wey-dey-give-tortoise-dysentery desires, no, what’s the more serious word that bears more weight than desires sef? Hmmmm. Pa Ikhide, you have succesfully expressed my emotions. Obu lu
Ha! ha! Very funny – and very naive and jaded too. The body politic produces noisome and unseemly substances, among which are politicians.
[…] blog of university facilities in utter disrepair). I have weighed in on numerous times, since 2009 (read my last rant here). The situation is dire and both ASUU and the federal government are fiddling. Meanwhile Nigerian […]