HOW NOT TO SERVE NIGERIANS

Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu

If the recent rancorous encounter between the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, and the National Association of Nigeria Students (NANS) is a yardstick for new and revitalized student unionism in Nigeria, then there is the hope of a new Nigeria. NANS president, Comrade Sunday Asefon, in a very brilliant and strategic encounter with the minister told him within a few minutes what the direction of student unionism will be and how those who run our government must serve Nigerians.

Now our students go through their tertiary education without any experience in fiery student unionism. Apparently, respected and vigorous student unionism that gave various military governments a run for their money ended with the era of Omowole Sowore. Sowore has not stopped fighting the government. His life is bound with a free and changed Nigeria. He most likely developed this fiery heart from his very active days at the University of Lagos as the union president.

My son who graduated from the University of Lagos recently, for the five years he spent in that university, no thanks to various ASUU strikes, and the Covid lockdown may not be able to spell "student unionism". He and his other colleagues were made to sign an undertaking never to belong to any union. And they never did. How can democracy grow and thrive if students are locked out of contributions to the national discourse? When such avenues were denied, the students took to cybercrime. Their attention shifted away from academics because they have no avenue to express, test, and demonstrate what they learn in class.

Governments in our clime hate to be critiqued, rather they prefer the silence of a graveyard because such ice-cold situations enable them to steal the nation silly. Whereas many who participated in the independence struggle in Nigeria and won independence for the nation from Britain began their activism from their students’ days. Now we have dead woods in our governments, men and women who have not seen the act of holding rulers to account, whose only interest is what they can loot. How sad for Nigeria. But hope is rekindled in Sunday Asefon. One can only hope the NANS president and his new team will not allow themselves to succumb to the gods of naira and dollars.

What qualified Mallam Adamu Adamu to the education ministry? I read a fiery article he wrote in 2013 urging the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) not to give up on its strike against the government of President Goodluck Jonathan. It was beautiful prose and backed up with vital statistics on Nigeria's need to heavily fund the education sector if she was going to catch up with the developed nations. When I read that piece recirculated recently on WhatsApp during the recent face-off, I thought Adamu Adamu was a professor of education from a prominent northern university.

My search has since led otherwise. Mallam Adamu Adamu is an accountant and a very gifted writer. But again what qualifies him for the education ministry? What is his experience in education, a vital sector that Nigeria needs very badly to survive in this era of the knowledge economy? Perhaps his well-written 2013 denouncement of the Jonathan administration on tertiary education was done to prepare his master's entry into power and his own corner at the education ministry.

But that is not it. Adamu Adamu was a Lead Writer at the New Nigeria Newspapers. He came into journalism after a career as an accountant. Thereafter he left journalism to be then General Muhammadu Buhari's Special Assistant at the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF). Also, he was a columnist with The Daily Trust newspapers. He has come a long way with President Buhari. Perhaps, if you say it was Buhari's predilection for nepotism that got Adamu Adamu his current job, you might not be too off the mark. He is a loyalist of the president. But he was a critic of the Obasanjo and Jonathan administration. But why did Adamu Adamu change his very fine view on the funding of university education in Nigeria? Perhaps it's a product of his loyalty to Buhari. In this part of the world, service to the nation means nothing, loyalty to the boss means everything.

And how and where did Adamu Adamu get the huge foreign exchange with which he trained his son in a foreign university as alleged by the NANS president in the fiery encounter at the Federal Ministry of Education. "We saw recently on Facebook as you celebrated the graduation of your son who graduated from a foreign university. We are comfortable with that. Our parents are not rich enough to send us abroad. But what they can afford here, let us enjoy it. Give us what we need," the NANS president stated.

For example, it cost about 9000 pounds per annum to pay tuition fees for a student in a British university. Journalism is not one of the high-paying professions in Nigeria as to enable Adamu Adamu such luxury. Don't ask me, I'm a journalist too. But nobody has denied that Adamu's son attended university abroad. I have had occasion to also ask where and how did our president get the foreign exchange to send his three children abroad for university education? Why do our leaders send their children abroad while they leave the children of the poor with sub-standard education in Nigeria?

What's the rationale for an accountant in an education ministry. It can only happen in Nigeria where the president locked himself up for six months in order to pick his ministers, and when he so picked them, he picked the likes of Adamu Adamu. Adamu Adamu, apart from this qualification issue, will have to learn the meaning of the word "minister". The British borrowed a lot from the Bible which also depend on the Greek language with which the new testament is written.

The word "minister” is translated from the Greek word "daikonos". A daikonos is a servant, he carries out orders. This is why the civil servants begin their letters with "I'm directed to…" They are ministers to serve the people that elected their bosses. Thus Adamu Adamu is meant to serve Nigerians. But in the recent encounter with the NANS executives, Nigerians would have loved to see a display of servant attitude by the minister. Adamu Adamu and all the ministers serving with him in Buhari's government as well as all civil servants must understand this truth. They are appointed to serve the populace.

The reason our problems are not solved in this country is that those who are elected or appointed to serve us think they are our bosses. I was so elated when after the minister walked out of the meeting, the word jumped out of the mouth of the NANS president, " You see our problem when the man we pay his salary walked out on us,” amidst loud chants of “solidarity forever.”

Those words brought back to memory my own years as part of the student union parliament at the University of Lagos. Thereafter, a woman rose up, calms the students, and made after the minister. I knew they were going to beg him to come back. I mean beg, because the gods of Nigeria must always be appeased so Nigerians can breathe. Only recently, the cousin of the Emir of Kano, Isa Bayero threatened that except Allen Onyeama, Chairman of Peace Airline, crawl to the emirs’ palace to prostrate to the emir for daring to follow a vital business principle in running his own airline, he was going to bring the roof down in Kano.

At any rate, when the meeting reconvened the students insisted they were not going back to the ministry of education, instead they met at the National Universities Commission. That perhaps is some lesson for our ministers that power actually belongs to the electorates. Even if leaders have rigged themselves into power, power still resides with the people as they exercise it through various pressures.

The NANS president promised the Minister of Education that #Endsars peaceful protest will be a child's play if the government does not end the ASUU strike on time. Indeed Nigerian students are finding their voice again.