STUDENT unionism descended to a depraved level recently when some persons claiming to represent Nigerian students conferred an award on a politician battling allegations of drug trafficking. So anxious were the leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students to honour Buruji Kashamu that they could not wait for the conclusion of his ongoing legal challenge against plans to extradite him to the United States. Who will rescue the once vaunted Nigerian students movement from charlatans who have lost the plot?
On the face of it, the conferment of the (meaningless) award of Golden Man of the Year on Kashamu would have been just another exhibition of the patronage-for-title syndrome that is so common in the country. After all, the recipient is a freshman senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (though a tribunal nullified his election on Friday) and likes to be known as a philanthropist. Except that he has long been accused of being a drug baron by the US Justice Department and is in court fighting to clear his name and an extradition motion. Under the law, Kashamu is presumed innocent since no court has found him guilty of the charges and he has always vigorously protested his innocence as a victim of mistaken identity. Yet, it is egregious for NANS, once the arrowhead of public morality and probity, to dignify a public figure with such a cloud hanging over his head. Decorum dictates that the recipient should be first allowed to prove his innocence. But Tijani Usman, President of NANS, in justifying the award, said: “We are fascinated by his large-heartedness even in the face of distractions.”
He had voiced such self-serving drivel three weeks earlier when NANS joined other hired groups to threaten protest marches in defence of Senate President, Bukola Saraki, who is facing corruption-related charges at the Code of Conduct Tribunal. NANS’ infamy did not start today. NANS factions have been used by state governors as hired supporters. Indeed, the new generation of student leaders bears no resemblance to the heroic generations of the past that played critical roles in the nationalist movement and the struggle to enthrone democracy and good governance since then.
While earlier student leaders were urbane, informed, articulate, intensely patriotic and idealistic, today’s student unions have been infilterated by uninformed youths, cultists, materialistic “professional students” who spend years on end as perpetual undergraduates in order to continue to do business in the name of student activism, and political contractors, ever available as mobilisers of rented crowds. Corruption has seeped in from the larger society and devalued student activism.
The objective of a students’ union or government is to represent fellow students within the institution and externally. Experts say that because of their youthful exuberance and the general lack of consequences for holding radical views, students are well placed for vigorous activism and idealistic struggles. They have been pivotal in revolutionary changes in France, Thailand, Tunisia, South Africa and in South Korea, where they played the leading role in the overthrow of military dictatorship. Students led the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, staging demonstrations across 400 Chinese cities to demand basic freedoms.
Nigerian students should reclaim their glory from the unserious fellows that have taken over many unions. Student activism flourished here before independence and the West African Students Union that was founded in London in 1925 was the training ground for some of the country’s leading nationalists. Nigerian students were active in the anti-colonial struggles up till the late 1980s. Undergraduates and secondary school students, along with labour activists, led the opposition to the proposed Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact in 1961; students mobilised in support of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa, and Nigerian students were active throughout the 28 cumulative years of military rule, resisting dictatorship and oppressive policies. The titanic struggle for the actualisation of the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential election result is replete with the heroics of Nigerian students. Our campuses, once host to robust debates, seminars and notable scholars, local and international, where students fielded knowledge and ideology, now boast gang wars and crass commercialism.
Nigerian students need to restore real democracy to their unions and end the craven betrayal that saw NANS deployed in 2005 in the third term project of former President Olusegun Obasanjo. The same Obasanjo, as military head of state in 1978, had begun the process of oppressing and emasculating student unions after the Ali-must-go student protests that badly shook his government.
The road to redemption should begin with restoring compulsory student union dues and mandatory subventions by each higher institution. This once prevalent practice will restore the financial independence of student unions and reduce the (now prevalent) trend of unions being available for hire by corrupt vice-chancellors and politicians. Student leaders and bodies that have opposed the chicanery and mercantilism of NANS leaders have the option of creating new platforms. Students, as canvassed by a former NANS president, Lanre Arogundade, should not be bound by the corrupt activities of a central leadership. “Nigerian students do not have to operate under a NANS that neither stands for, nor defends their aspirations,” suggesting the formation of alternative platforms.
That is a way to start. When principle and morality take flight among leaders of tomorrow, then a country’s future is very bleak. Students should be the face of innocence and incorruptibility, not clients and stooges of the unscrupulous elite. Nigerian students should wake up and stop those destroying a glorious heritage in their name.
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