THE Muhammadu Buhari administration will end its sojourn in the Nigerian political space as one that has visited the country with many mouthwatering feats. The end of its constitutionally-allotted eight years has appeared in the horizon and people have resigned to enduring the remaining seven months. It is worthy of note that such feats by the Buhari administration would be told by members of the president’s All Progressives Congress (APC), their irrepressibly loud-mouthed political platform. Then we would hear them from their supporters who are in various forms, shapes and sizes; and in many internet platforms. We would also hear of the Buhari administration’s numerous positive exploits from visitors to those specific places the controllers of the affairs of various government agencies want them to see. Through that too, such people would read and be told about the meaning of and reason for the exploits.
One venture for which I expect the Buhari administration to get mountainous praise and huge ovation is the “Home Grown School Feeding Programme.” The children being fed would gladly tell of the delicious meals they had been enjoying for the past years. The school children would delightfully recall their sumptuous lunches. And I expect them to retort to any negative opinion that they had good meals including during the COVID-19 lockdown. For the lockdown feeding period, even benefitting parents too would join the happy chorus, praising the Buhari government. The Minister of School Feeding is reeling in satisfaction.
The federal government through the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Hajia Sadiya Umar Farouq has judiciously spent our money on this singular scheme of bounteous benefits. As we can see, children no longer want to leave schools because they would miss the sizzling meals. School Feeding Programme will earn Buhari the praises and ovation which he said were not coming from those who are supposed to loud it. He should just wait a little, his children are eating, and the praise singers are waiting on them.
There are exploits and achievements from this federal government; but from most of the palpable indicators available to the ordinary man on the street, there are much more in the debit side of the government’s book than what can be seen on the credit side. At the grassroots, there are cries of insecurity and inflation. There, people are used to decrepit infrastructure – especially roads, and would not care. There is no middle class anymore – in Nigeria, you are either rich or you are poor; so, there’s no talking about people in the middle class. Then there are the rich, who have built so high a wall around themselves that the people outside the walls are wondering what might be going on in there. If the people who are supposed to be the ultimate beneficiaries of good governance are positively impacted, they would not need a sermon or explanation or exhortation to know that life is better than what it was before the sermon and the advent of the preacher.
These musings, by my estimation, form the basis upon which the Minister of Labour and Productivity, Dr Chris Ngige, has been acting of recent. When Minister Ngige, the House of Representatives leadership and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) met recently, the minister could not tuck his child’s hands in his cloth. He had to speak in his self-induced opprobrium against a suggestion that the angry university lecturers might mobilise against his darling political party. When Ngige was walking out of (and on) that parley, the first he held with ASUU after they had been to court, he came within the whiskers of hitting Professor Emmanuel Osodeke. Ngige was in a rage. He forgot that it is not likely that a matter that has been to the court and back has gone beyond friendly redemption. Ngige might be also bluffing, because he knows too well as a ‘titled Igbo man’ that when the handshake has gone beyond the elbow, it has become a wrestle. Or, could it be that he was feeling entitled as a titled Igbo chief who has found himself in a high government position?
The same distinguished senator of the Federal Republic, Dr Chris Nwabueze Ngige, has lashed out at a former ASUU president and a former chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Attahiru Jega. Professor Jega had observed that the style with which our erudite Ngige was going about the solving of the ASUU conundrum was awkward and unproductive. Jega had been there before and observed, as an elder and experienced trade union leader, that Ngige is not helping matters. “He has turned this into a personal quarrel between him and the Minister of Education on one hand and between himself and ASUU on the other. While many other people are trying to find a way of addressing the this situation so that students can go back to school and ASUU can go back to work, he is busy creating challenges.”
The Minister of Education, Dr Adamu Adamu came into the picture because he also walked out on the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS). Its leadership (regardless of how discredited the body might be) had taken their case to the minister. Hardly had Sunday Asefon, who led NANS to the parley, made his case than the “honourable minister” tongue-lashed them, warned against bringing him to such a meeting and walked. Adamu, rather than seize the moment and make sense to the students, chose to walk out on them in a furious rage unbecoming of a member of the Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council. He walked and left the students confounded. He walked out and left an indelible impression.
This administration has set a record of enduring the longest ASUU strike. It’s a wonderful feat to stand up to those stubborn lecturers. When the strike started on 2022 Valentine’s Day, it was jocularly viewed by some as a Valentine gift to students. Some said it’s valentine to relax, frolic and… just frolic. Eight months from then, some students have become wives and husbands and some wives are expectant mothers. These events would all form the pieces of the graffiti that would eventually outline the Buhari administration. Buhari’s government is rounding off, they don’t care whatever happens after they’re gone. The owners of APC do not like Tinubu, so they have ceased to be acting with circumspection.
Perhaps, they have failed to realise that Buhari had killed the goodwill he rode on to the Nigerian presidency. By their attitude, Ngige, Adamu and Hajia Sadiya Umar Farouq don’t show how they would help the campaign for APC in the 2023 elections.
Now that everything has been amicably settled by the Court of Appeal, we would see our lecturers back in classrooms, happy and willing to break their neck for their students. But, is this the end of ASUU? Will its members serve in the 2023 elections? what would happen to the various roles of lecturers outside teaching?
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