By Oluwabukola Kehinde

Education is light, only when it illuminates and leads its faithful out of wilderness dabbed ignorance. For education to achieve its vision, there is a need to have experts, scholars, teachers, and intellectuals on ground to execute the task.

Teaching is a noble enterprise when it is managed and controlled by professionals who are trained and nurtured by university professors. If teaching is believed to be a noble profession, then what has gone wrong with it the contemporary Nigerian dispensation?

Strictly speaking, teaching has become a privileged way of taking ten per cent of the national cake. The university and other higher institutions caused the problem we faced in our contemporary society. Intellectualism has been drastically compromised in higher institutions.

The process of engaging graduates as faculty members in the universities, for example, has been undermined at the altar of politics. Only those who-know-who-know- somebody at the “top” are allowed to take up appointment in higher institutions of learning. Yes, they only have their political “daddies” at the top, without anything upstairs.

Funnily enough, university professors bow to the top guys and their requests without objection. Are these so-called professors not compensated with political appointments outside the walls of the university?

I was shocked when a frustrated, ill-treated fellow lamented: “Interviews are purposely designed for the downtrodden because education for the poor shouldn’t give him the sense of entitlement. For the poor, the handwriting on the wall says:

Say No To White Collar Jobs

And

Espouse the Green/Pink Collar Jobs

Just as Ezra Pound rightly puts it: “Criminals have no intellectual interests”. The production of revolutionary youngsters in the universities would pose a great threat to the criminal acts of the ruling class. To curb the occurrence of such threat, these criminals have decided to cripple the university system and structure by stocking and imposing lazy, ill-equipped and uncultured individuals (we can’t regard them as intellectuals or scholars), turning deaf ears to the complaints of lecturers and making effort to exterminate the only indomitable union capable of checkmating the activities of government.

It is messianic to think ASUU can be raped and murdered in a broad day light; it has overcome all forms of threat and turbulence in the past.

For ignorant wailers, ASUU is not a market women union where there is more talks and less thinking. ASSU is a companion of erudite, sapient intellectuals whose faith in truth is not shaken by politics, religious bigotry, and ethnicity.
Kehinde wrote in from Kano