If not, how can a peaceful protest by students against astronomical hikes in school fees lead to suspension in this global age of democratic rights of expression? Laughable indeed.
If not, how can a peaceful protest by students against astronomical hikes in school fees lead to suspension in this global age of democratic rights of expression? Laughable indeed.
When the culture of peaceful protest against wrongs takes flight, the university system becomes a garrison — a commandist structure of no rights. A graveyard of intellectualism and freedom of expression, where the culture of disagreement and resolution is banned.
Won’t the VC, a professor, and his colleagues be afraid and ashamed of themselves if, after increasing the school fees, there’s not a single protest by any student? That they are training automated robots to be automated, “Tuale, all correct sir” graduates of the school?
The UI VC should please spend a night at Sango Cemetery where there’s graveyard silence and morbid peace to experience the type of university they are trying to run. Why even Sango Cemetery sef, when there’s a beautiful and more convenient, big fully AC mortuary in UCH where the VC can spend a night to enjoy the morbid peace he wants in UI?
Other professors who support the ridiculous suspension of these three student activists should also take their turn as a research trip. Research comes in different practical ways beyond classroom lectures.
I think this should be a compulsory retreat for VCs and other university administrators who always mismanage simple protests because they want to impose the absolute peace of the graveyard on their campuses.
Not all retreats should be held at 5-star hotels. A night of retreat in the mortuary or graveyard won’t be a bad idea — to know the difference between managing active human beings and passive dead bodies.
It’s funny to know that UI has a well-established Conflict Resolution Centre, where graduates and “overgraduates” and corporate staff of companies are trained. So what are they teaching them about conflict resolution mechanisms, with this their one-way outdated iron-hand suspension & expulsion approach to dissenting students and staff?
Petulant VCs and university administrators profit from conflict escalation because university funds will be wasted on hiring their lawyers (SAN in most cases), bribing some “2-for-kobo” media practitioners not to report the unreasonable illegal expulsions in order not to embarrass them or escalate the crisis. Give them 100 press releases — they won’t use them until when “alarm blows” finally, then they start publishing them as headlines.
The university CSOs become fatter, like overfed American pigs during student crises — eating regular hot Amala, Abula with goat head and orishirishi — because more money must be budgeted to their pockets for “security, surveillance and strategy.”
They will also start assembling cult boys for protest-breaking and attacks on principled student activists. Of course, DSS and police will be writing daily alarming fake security reports to extort the university for money. (Please read ‘Cry for Justice’ — a publication of Great Ife Students’ Union under Legacy, Lanre Adeleke’s presidency, aftermath of the cult attack on campus that led to the bloody killing of five students including Afrika.)
I’m also talking from bitter experience, having been expelled and re-expelled three times illegally by three VCs who adopted the same old jackboot method of crisis escalation. Over 90% of the pepper soup and cold beer-induced security reports written about me were fake and very stupid to believe.
Snail & beer joints at Enu Owa and Diganga Hotel, Ife, used to be their centres to enjoy the university’s free money. Thanks to radical left organisations — especially DSM, CLO, the old radical CDHR, successive generations of Great Ife students, great ASUU comrades, the old radical NANS, and my tireless team of radical lawyers including Alao Aka-Bashorun, Femi Falana, Gani Fawehinmi, Olumide Fusika, and Segun Sango — for bringing me back to school on each occasion to finally graduate.
An injury to one is an injury to all. UI students should rise up to defend their suspended colleagues because they spoke for you and are still speaking for you. Your old generation of UI students had done it before, and you too can — and must — do it now. Any fund reduction and welfare benefits gained from the protest are for all without exception. If not, you are all in danger of losing your freedom and right to education.
I watched and rewatched the minimal close-circuit peaceful protest against the fee hike by a handful of courageous students who had the right to do so. Nothing provocative or strange about the protest to warrant this garrison tactic by UI authorities.
Like a High Court Judge once asked OAU’s lawyer, “If students didn’t protest peacefully to show their anger against what they considered bad, you want them to start beating up their lecturers and Vice Chancellor? …I have jurisdiction on this case which the university could have resolved peacefully without the aggrieved students coming to court.”
As the court pleases!
I hope the university system won’t get to the point of Alapansanpa masquerade tactics of conflict resolution due to unending mismanagement of simple protests by students and workers.
I join all discerning Nigerians of good conscience to demand the unconditional reinstatement of these three student activists.
