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.