President Goodluck Jonathan
Mr.
President, please do not mistake this piece for an attack on your
person because it is not. Neither would I want you to see me as one of
those attention-seeking people because I am not. Of course, Sir, I am
also not the son of any governor, senator, local government chairman or
any political office holder, otherwise, I would have no business
writing such an open letter to you because it is against my family’s
ethics to ‘talk while eating’. I am the voice of one crying in the
wilderness of educational misery, saying, “Prepare the way for either a
future of political stability and economic boom or prepare for worse
than what religious extremists are meting out to our country now”.
As I write on this sultry day, I am
completely at a loss to know what to make of my future from here. If
this were just the case, it would, probably, be an insignificant reason
to go on the rampage with the sword of the pen. But, I write on behalf
of the millions of dreams that are getting squashed by the day as the
total shut-down of our universities persists. I write on behalf of the
future of the several hundreds of thousands who have been privileged,
amidst the stiff competition for admission, to grasp tertiary education
but may end up worse than their disadvantaged counterparts, since they
may never finish, much less finish on schedule their educational
pursuits. The handwriting on the wall, clearly now, more than ever
before foretells a dangerous twist to the continuing imbroglio between
your administration and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).
I do not know if the public keeps the date as much as we do but it is
well over 65 days already and I cannot help but wonder if anyone really
cares what becomes of our street-wandering undergraduates. If I had a
next life, I hope to never be a Nigerian or be born with a silver spoon
because the poor are really just ‘on their own’ as long as our
government is concerned. Mr President, in three simple words, “We are
tired”. We, the students in the federal universities, are always at the
receiving end of every impasse between ASUU and the government and all I
can ask for now is that you and your think tank reconsider your stand
on the matter. We can only bear this much!
I am not ASUU’s spokesman but it is only
logical that I expect your administration to honour the 2009 agreement
with the Union so normalcy can return to our campuses and of course, our
disenchanted academic lives. Personally, I have spent more years than
is required to have my first and second degrees and yet I am grappling
to take a Bachelor’s degree out of an institution that only recently had
an internal strike because you would have our name ‘rebranded’. Mr
President, every day this strike continues, more dreams die and more
future riff -raff are born. It is my firm belief that children still do
bear the sins of their fathers and even when you are no more, posterity
will remember your progenitors for good or ill based on how you handle
this national educational crisis we suffer now. It goes without saying
that for 14 years that your party has held sway over the affairs of this
nation, we cannot boast of a Nigerian university (not a single one)
amongst the first 2000 in the world. This is more than enough reason to
release the requisite fund for the upgrade of our educational
infrastructure as well as the welfare of the future’s moulders. It will
only be emphatic to say that we can get out of our educational system as
much as we invest in it and though investment in educational is long
term, it is also long-rewarding. Your administration will only be
breeding poor intellectuals, who will, in turn, produce another
generation of mediocre graduates and in 10 years, what do we have, sir? A
national carnage! Our unborn children are in jeopardy of being societal
scum even before their conception. But you can change all of this!
The greatest weapon of mass destruction
is to put a teacher who knows nothing before the students. This will be
the case if your administration does not honour the 2009 agreement with
ASUU such that lecturers’ welfare gets taken care of.
Mr President, the one second of your
time which I asked for is almost up but I am optimistic that if you give
utmost diligence to putting an end to the incessant strikes that have
been plaguing our tertiary educational system as much as you do to
security matters or party issues and conventions, we would not be where
we are today: struggling to maintain peace in our land.
I reiterate my advice, sir. Honour the
2009 agreement with ASUU so we may return to our lecture rooms and pick
up the pieces of our scattered semesters. So I can round off my first
degree programme and go on to patriotically serve my fatherland. So, I
can focus on growing my baby company to maturity and provide jobs for
the teeming unemployed youths. So, I can get married, give my mother her
first grandchild and keep my late father’s name as his only son. So, I
can fulfil my dreams of helping young people reach the zenith of their
potential through my writing, public speaking and role-modelling. Mr
President, help me and my fellow undergraduates live decent lives even
if our parents are not among the top one per cent who squander our
national earnings in the name of political office holders. Would you do
this for me, for us, for Nigeria’s future? I hope you do. Thank you,
sir, for giving me a second of your time.
•Oyeniyi, an undergraduate student of the University of Lagos, wrote via prince.oyeniyi@yahoo.com
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