Chances are that, when you think of the late former Oyo State Governor, Abiola Ajimobi, your mind also recalls the 2017 “constituted authority” episode. As it happened, he addressed the students of the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology who were protesting the extended closedown of their school. Unwilling to condone their belligerence, Ajimobi launched into a tirade. After reminding them he was not responsible for shutting down their school for eight months, he scolded those student-protesters for not respecting “constituted authority.”
Although the flared tempers that heated up that encounter eventually simmered, Ajimobi would go on to wear the tag of “Constituted Authority” for the rest of his life. Even after his death, that intemperate moment was baked into his obituaries. A fleeting instance of a leader who had let his guard down in public metaphorised how public officials can be detached from the reality biting people whose lives they oversee, their cold dismissals of people’s impatience for their leader’s intervention and the lack of fellow feeling that makes one shrug off the pain of an eight-month school closedown.
On Monday, there was a rehash of that moment when Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, walked out on student leaders who had met with him over the ongoing strike action paralyzing activities in public universities. After the President of the National Association of Nigerian Students, Sunday Asefon, had heatedly blustered what ranged from an attempt to shame the minister’s morals to threatening that they would embark on protests “worse than #EndSARS,” Adamu isolated just one of his points as relevant. Then he made an undignified exit, becoming another constituted authority who could not stand the messiness of their job.
Ironically, Adamu was a columnist who once pontificated on issues like the one he confronted. In 2013, he especially intervened in the matter of perennial ASUU strikes and argued the imperative of saving the university system through adequate funding. He even had good things to say about ASUU’s efforts in this regard. Since he became education minister in 2015, ASUU has gone on strike under his watch five times. In 2020 alone, the universities were shut for about nine months! It is understandable if his perspective on university funding shifted when he got on the other side of power. However, walking out as he did says nothing about the insights he must have developed while in power. All we saw was self-importance.
Granted, the NANS leaders who confronted Adamu too gave a poor account of themselves. They came across as unprepared for the opportunity to speak before the minister. Apart from asking for their schools to reopen, they had no points to present beyond the “aluta” rhetoric that rouses their peers at protest grounds. Their brash approach would have been better served if they had come to the meeting with substantial contributions to the perennial ASUU vs. Federal Government debacle. There are enough insightful recommendations already adduced on the issue of ASUU strikes which they should have tabled before the minister. They could even have dug Adamu’s past columns on the degradation of our learning culture and the necessity of guaranteeing a quality learning environment.
The moral case they tried to make against the minister by accusing him of sending his children abroad while they were left to subsist within Nigeria’s underresourced academic institution fell flat. Whipping up that kind of sentiment does not go far with our leaders. They are too lacking in self-awareness and basic integrity for such accusations to shame them. In a country where even the president spends extended time in hospitals abroad while healthcare at home gets systematically degraded, those assertions do not move the dials of their conscience. They are aware of such criticisms—I am sure they read all about it on social media—but they do not reckon with your humanity enough to be affected by either your opinion of them or your scorn of their actions. Say what you like but they are too unshameable to care.
Now, we can argue all day whether a dialogical approach would have made a difference on Monday, but we would still get nowhere. Those NANS leaders should have known that what they got was an opportunity to present their cases to both the government and the public. With the television cameras rolling, it was their chance to demonstrate the value of education, the urgency of revamping it, and why the government owes us a strikeless future. It would not have solved the agelong problem of strikes overnight but it would have had a better value than reaching for low-hanging fruits of sentimentality and threats.
Now—and in fairness to those NANS officials too—if I were at a forum to meet a minister while my school has been shut down for the umpteenth time, I would have struggled with respecting constituted authority. For someone who lost about three years of her life to ASUU strikes, I understand the agony of sitting at home while some bureaucrats in high places haggle over which part of an agreement made eleven years ago they would fulfill. Watching them chip away the time of my life with their endless issues, I know I would have had to summon what is akin to a supernatural force to restrain me from pelting their constituted authority with stones. So, yes, the NANS officials were justified if they were enraged enough to be rude to the minister.
But here is where Adamu is totally at fault: he should have known better. For someone who dedicated a major part of his life to talking about Nigeria’s problems, reality should not have unnerved his constituted authority to the point he pulls a Johnnie Walker stunt. What did he see at that meeting that was strange that the best he could do was walk out? Was he shocked to see a set of student leaders who could not hold their own or the fact that they were overgraduates who infinitely recycle themselves into the school system just to hold off an uncertain future? If he was so easily stressed by the pressure of the situation that he turned tail, what should the poor students who bear the brunt now do?
Whatever was wrong with their approach, the truth is that those student leaders culminate the years of national woes that ranged from the poor education given to the children of the poor to keep them in their poverty to the redaction of the means to upward social mobility and to the failure of his government to make a significant breakthrough on the issue of strikes since 2015. What he experienced was a fraction of the frustration of a student population who—unlike Adamu’s generation—have never known a Nigeria that is not so entirely dysfunctional. The Nigeria they have always inhabited is one that starts to diminish you right from the day you are born, a country that haunts you like a bitter ghost all your life. You cannot exist in a society like that and still be well-comported.
Given his pedigree, Adamu should not have been surprised or annoyed to meet students who have been so impoverished by Nigeria’s degraded and decadent institutions that they could not give an account of themselves genteelly and leave Adamu’s mood unspoiled. He was alive during the days of “Alli must go” protests and should have expected what was coming. The generation that protested against then education minister, Col. Ahmadu Alli (retd.), were meanwhile schooled under conducive conditions. They are the ones that boast they ate a quarter of chicken on Sundays. The ones that met Adamu belong to a generation that has been so deprived they cannot afford their manners.
Adamu knew all these issues while he was a public intellectual and it is a puzzle he expected anything different when he confronted the rage of the casualties of endless ASUU strikes. He should have held himself together, laid out his cards and appealed for understanding. That he chose to walk out on them makes him out to be another cold and calculating constituted authority—a public official who loves the glories of his office, enjoys the privileges of power, consumes the rewards that accrues to his majesty but cannot withstand the heat of governing a complicated polity like Nigeria. One small stress like that, they head for the door.
Punch
