In the frenzy of election season, most Nigerians are blissfully unaware that their country is at war yet again. In addition to Boko Haram, ISWAP, bandits, herdsmen, IPOB and Oduduwa separatist agitators, and the ubiquitous “unknown gunmen”, President Muhammadu Buhari has managed to open another theatre of conflict with the Nigerian intellectual community.
It’s a war of attrition. Buharists are taking no prisoners. They are using public university lecturers under the aegis of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) as the fulcrum of attacks with which they hope to decapitate the Nigerian intelligentsia and neutralize the last vestiges of opposition. Buhari, it seems, is bent on going out in a blaze of “glory” with the head of John the Baptist as trophy.
After baiting ASUU into an 8 month-long strike (by refusing to honor a subsisting 2009 agreement), the regime arm twisted the lecturers back to work with a judicial process that at best looks dubious. Then, they set up by fiat two alternative trade unions to break ASUU ranks – against the letter and spirit of extant laws. Now they are going for the kill by paying the lecturers half salaries and insisting that under the “No work no pay” principle, the backlog of emoluments accrued during a strike will not be paid. It doesn’t matter that government itself engineered and prolonged the strike with a woeful attitude to negotiations.
Here is a government led by a president who is more famous for his absences from work than for any achievements in office. Upon return from his 10th medical trip abroad recently, President Buhari had reportedly chucked up 237 days of medical leaves in seven and half years. That comes to nearly 32 days each year.
The Nigerian president is probably the only world leader today who gleefully shops abroad for services he does not trust his own ramshackle healthcare system at home to deliver. These trips have not only been made at substantial public expense (aviation costs alone are estimated at well over N1 billion), they are a source of endless embarrassment to every Nigerian with the exception of the president himself. And in all of that, the Commander in Chief has drawn his full salaries and allowances.
A man with such an employment record is a nightmare for HR and business mangers worldwide. Not to mention that he has no moral platform to invoke the “No work no pay” rule when someone else is involved. There’s no better definition of hypocrisy, double standards and self-righteousness.
It is now clear that Mr. President is neither righteous nor a man of enviable principles. Principled people live by example. Here, principles are abused and laws manipulated solely to serve narrow, narcissist interests.
In truth, there’s little surprise in all of this. During Buhari’s earlier incarnation as military Head of State between 1983 and 1985, he showed exactly the same attributes. Three convicted drug traffickers were executed on the strength of a decree enacted to take retrospective effect! Buhari insisted on a death penalty which was not stipulated at the time of the offences. Loud public outcries fell on deaf ears. Guardian newspaper journalists, Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, were similarly detained and tried for 11 months under a law forbidding the publication of “false statements likely to bring the government or officials into ridicule or disrepute.” It is the modern equivalent of medieval laws which sought to punish “offenders” for “insulting or embarrassing the Emir.”
Since 2015, Mohammed El Zakzaki of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, Nnamdi Kanu the Biafran separatist agitator, Sunday Igbogho of the Oduduwa Republic and even Governor, Samuel Ortom of Benue, are among many others who have felt the blunt force of Buharism – a form of primitive despotism disguised as democracy.
By the time Buhari & Co. are finished with our public universities, the children of those who cannot afford private or foreign university education might have become Almajiri. And no one will be aspiring to be a lecturer or academic for another generation or two. This seems to be the only discernible objective of Buhari’s scorched earth policy as ably implemented by Dr. Chris Ngige and Adamu Adamu – ironically two men with claims to membership of Nigeria’s intelligentsia.
The president wants to “teach the lecturers a lesson.” He wants to show who is in charge even if that means sacrificing the fate and future of an entire generation of Nigerian students and children. There is now ample evidence that President Buhari has no capacity for alternative viewpoints, compassion or negotiation.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, private universities authorities (mostly proxies and cronies of government) are keeping silent in the hope of gaining more studentship applications from the dismantling of public universities. Others who know the dangers of fully privatizing education are just too scared to speak.
Even more strangely, Yemi Osibanjo, a professor of law, senior advocate and pastor, is serving the Buhari government as Vice President. Professor is supposed to be the voice of reason among the hoard of mercenaries in power. But we have a VP who has acquiesced to the decimation of his primary constituency. In this conspiracy of silence, the future of Nigerian society is being stolen before are very eyes. How does Prof. Osinbajo sleep at night?
After weaponizing poverty, Buhari and the APC are now moving against the capacity of citizens for independent thinking. If we let them, we and our children are finished. No society has prospered by denying the children of the poor, the vulnerable and the working class a fair opportunity to rise. But in Nigeria, this appears to be a fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy.
There is little surprise that a soldier who struggled to earn a high school certificate is always nervous in the presence of PhDs. The real surprise is that there are several “highly educated” men and women who cannot stand up to him at cabinet meetings to stave off this embarrassing and senseless onslaught. They would rather hold their peace (and keep their jobs) even if that means the liquidation of everything society holds dear.
In urging the lecturers to go back to work in October, most Nigerians reasoned that the Buhari years were almost over anyway, and so it would make more sense to negotiate with a reasonable government coming in next May. The fear is that by then most Nigerian intellectuals would have joined Buhari’s growing army of 133 million extremely poor citizens. It’s a long, dark night.
