The longest-running industrial action in history began in 1914. Officially, it never ended, Parties in dispute, parted ways forever. Incidentally, it was also about education policies in England. A dejavu feeling? April 1, marks the 108th anniversary of the strike. The commencement date coincided with April Fools’ Day but the strikers were not pranking though they were just 66 school children, protesting the sacking of their beloved teachers and mentors, who incidentally were a couple.
April Fools’ Day began as early as 1564, and it was in France, not England. It was a forcible cultural imposition, designed, to make the unyielding, look foolish. Before then, April 1, used to be the New Year’s Day. When the enforcers of social order, reordered it, they needed to force the hands of those who stuck with the original arrangement. They were called April fools and the game of mind, became a global phenomenon, now being observed, practically across the globe.
But it wasn’t a laughing matter on this day in 1914 in Burston, Norfolk. The authorities superintending the local school had just dismissed two teachers, Kitty and Tom Higdon. No, the dismissed teachers weren’t deemed subversive because of stomach infrastructure, a political lexicon, coined by Mr. AyodeleFayose as governor to win the hearts of Ekiti electorate. The fired couple were demanding equality in qualitative education. They believed children of the working class English, should have better education, than what was offered by the authorities. The struggle of the Higdons as early as that time, against a repressive authority, is a testament that power and the authority that comes with it, has always been a victim of abuse. It shows that men have also, long, perfected the art of repressing genuine change, even when they claim to be administrators of change.
Exactly three months before Burston 66 and the Higdons went into the history book, another English, was consummating a wedding not required back in Nigeria. Sir Frederick Lugard on January 1, 1914, signed the Amalgamation Proclamation of 1914, that weeded North and South of Nigeria, into what was abinitio, a loveless marriage. A School of Thought believed the arrangement is divine. I would have conceded, save that Lugard was an open cultist, who engaged in bloody oaths, to keep the Queen’s empire together in parts of Africa where he served. The forced marriage is about celebrating 108th anniversary, just like the Burston strike action. But, while the latter is in history book as a precursor to the succeeding struggles that got the English education to what it is today, where even Local Government Councillors now seek to educate their children, directly or indirectly on the bill of our common-wealth, Nigeria, on the other hand, is in the history book as a country that keeps draining her best, into the cesspool of crime.
On February 14, varsity lecturers in Nigeria served what could pass for a dark Valentine’s Day. Today makes it six months and a week that federal varsities have been on a lockdown. Yet there was no pandemic. Or maybe, there is. The combination of a swashbuckling federal government, carrying on without requisite sensitivity and a bland varsity union, deserving of the one-way-traffic label, will likely pass for a pandemic for parents and students, who have been thrown into mental torture for the 25 weeks the strike has lasted. Or does pandemic do more than what both parties are doing in their ego-war? A typical semester usually runs for 12 weeks. Already, a session is lost to the unending ram(ming) contest. But to both parties, it is just a continuation of what in the last few decades, has become a defining feature of public university education, especially the one, under the direct supervision of the central government.
Tragically, a kind of see-finish (confident the enemy’s bark can’t harm) is driving the manifest bravado of the federal government in its engagement, with the striking lecturers. The English Parliament also manifested the arrogant aura, in the passage of the Education Bill of 1902, which gave the children of the working-class, access to education. You would think the men of authority had done them good, the same way Minister of Education, AdamuAdamu is dancing buga with his claim that the government he serves, has spent more than the lecturers were demanding, to properly fund the system. No, the passage of the Bill, was just to entitle the children to enough education, to be slightly better than labourers in factories, fields and domestic service. Christian educators like Tom and Kitty Higdon, would have none of it. They believed all children should have a better education than what many districts were offering under the education law. They took up teaching jobs in Aylsham, an agrarian area, in Burstonneighbourhood, and began internal and external advocacy, to ensure that the children would have a better education for better opportunities and better life.
Hear what history has to say, “In 1902 the Higdons began teaching near Aylsham, thirty-some miles from Burston. It was here, in this highly-agricultural area, that they organized an agricultural workers union and helped local workers make their way onto the local education committee. These committees were often dominated by farm owners who sought to be sure that students were educated sufficiently to work on local farms but not much more. With such limited education, workers and their children often lived in squalid conditions and they often took children out of school whenever seasonal cheap labor was needed, thus hampering their education further.”
Even the age that was thought to have ushered humanity into the famed “Free World” wasn’t devoid of oppressive band of men everywhere, including the equally-famed source of modernity. The denied children and their traumatized parents weren’t slaves or migrants. They were English, who were just unfortunate to be at the lowest rung of the ladder, in a heavily-stratified society. While it looks as if men had advanced way beyond the Burston era, Nigeria appears marooned in the past. 74 years after the first university in Nigeria took off in Ibadan, there is yet to be a definite position of law on the payment of salaries of striking university workers, Adamu said Buhari said no. But, it can’t be about how Baba feels. We run a constitutional democracy. There should be legal definitive, spelling out, the issue of strike, since it has sadly become a norm, for the system. The one picking the bill, should go ahead and seek proper legislative inclusion to the effect that striking workers in the future would not be paid, which should be the proper call. But government, right now, can’t in good faith, enforce a regulation yet in existence, regardless of the President’s feeling. According to the minister, that is the only issue, delaying an end to the deadlock. Ordinarily, it should be a no-brainer.
(To be continued).
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