By Tony Afejuku

Let me begin what I am dwelling on now with a sincere apology to my readers who must have expected me to continue the debate on women and widowhood in your country my country our country. I am not in any way breaking my promise in this regard. My train of thought and focus steadily is what it is and remains what it is.

I have no doubt that all our debaters and would-be debaters will understand and believe me and let the water of patience keep on flowing in their patient mind whose language of patience will persuade them to remain committed to this column, whose every phase and phrase they already are familiar with. Dear, dear readers and debaters, our subject is kept in abeyance because of General Buhari, our president, whose most recent propaganda against ASUU is drawing me to return with love to the thought of the loss of our public universities that ASUU is insisting must never be lost – no matter what – to the vampires, vultures, tarantulas and scorpions in political power. Their smell and smell and smell offend us immeasurably.

I am not a Muslim but in the Sallah season, this past Sallah season, I in particular engaged in contemplation and meditation, as never before, in the true spirit of Eid-UI-Adha-Mubarak in my further attempt to find the meaning of life. My moments of contemplation and meditation sailed the world over and ended down the river of my mangrove homestead. What I tried to find – or better, what I found was purely in human terms. And Buhari helped to underline this in what I have interpreted his Sallah message to ASUU to mean when APC governors visited him in Daura, his home-city in Katsina, his home-State. A sober occasion-and-moment our president, the great military general and a goodly good Muslim, to boot, used, for no convincing reason, to descend on ASUU in a supremely brilliant psychological manner! What an original thinker and political genius Buhari is! Instead of using his religious licence to preach peace to ASUU and to commit himself to reconcile with the union and to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, he harrowed our country’s most patriotic union cruelly and un-religiously to demonstrate that he is a man and personage of power.

For him the meaning of human life lies in power and its possession by the one who possesses power that he has employed to torment us most cruelly since 2015 when he was shot into his Rock of Power. He should keep on harrowing everywhere in Nigeria cruelly and tragically. Sooner than later he will understand as he has not transparently understood it that power is not a permanent friend. Let him enjoy his tough-and-go power while it lasts, and use it to bury ASUU. But can he? The answer is an obvious NO in capital letters – except of course, he wants to use fleeting power and its fluke to flummox and bury God. Again, I ask: can he? The answer is a resounding capital NO!!!

Now, what is ASUU’s offence? What is ASUU’s crime? Everywhere in Nigeria and beyond Nigeria everyone knows what ASUU means to our time and generation. ASUU is the true conscience of your country my country our country. The union disdains any government or persons that want to kill, sacrifice and alienate our public universities – the light of our modern education and society, from the reach of all but from especially the reach of the poor and downtrodden.

For decades, as everybody knows, ASUU, in thoughts and deeds has endeavoured to persuade, encourage and cajole different governments and political leaders to nurture our public universities for the betterment of our society. The union has in various ways and guises been intimidated, harassed, lied-against, blackmailed, denied comfort, oppressed and exploited. And things have reached their head point in Buhari’s regime that is pointedly the most anti-human regime in our country’s life and existence. This is the only regime that has ceaselessly head-butted different unions and organisations that it has entered into official agreements with. And with ASUU in particular things have really come to a head – I re-state it again.

In 2009 ASUU entered into a validly valid agreement with Buhari’s government’s predecessor. He and his campaign goons sold the electorate, including ASUU, wondrously marvellous ideas about how to rescue our education, universities and hospitals and health care institutions and security establishments from their respective states of asphyxiation. This was in 2015. He committed himself that year during his presidential campaigns in Nigeria and in London to honour ASUU’s 2009 agreement with the central government/regime that he would succeed. Based on his campaign manifesto and avowed promises he seemingly won the presidential election. But since he became president the asphyxia still remains. The union’s rights have never been protected in any way. How many times has the union not gone on different kinds of strike since President Integrity came on board? The tension between the union and the Anti-corruption General remains high. More than several times he has employed propaganda against the union. The actions of conservative and ultra-conservative acolytes, elements and presidencynologists in his presidency provoke bitter battles between ASUU and his regime where integrity and anti-corruption words are now mere words and jingoes worth nothing and are devoid of the jingles of patriotism.

His Daura propaganda against ASUU is an unjustifiable tactic which makes us grasp better his un-profound contradiction as a military tactician and political thinker. His Daura “Enough is enough” threat to ASUU is a propaganda and blunder that cannot but provoke further the striking dons, supremely supreme patriots of your country my country our country and not their country as they tried to proclaim and claim it for themselves. Our dons will be hundred percent right to be irritated and provoked to prolong the current strike for centuries without any longing to worship the deity of hunger.

This is especially so in view of the fact that the Professor Briggs Committee General Buhari belatedly set up to engage ASUU in further negotiations to rescue our universities from total destruction and extinction has finished its primary assignment or about to finish it. Clearly, Buhari’s propagandism against ASUU is a horse that won’t run. Buhari is the problem (and opium) of our universities, not ASUU.

In any case, Buhari is not, was not, the author of his “Enough is enough” propagandist lampoon of our striking lecturers and professors. He seems to be too physically powerless and impaired to say everything attributed to him. Someone, a parasite and definitely one of his misleaders and impairers, feeding sumptuously on his impairment, slipped that portion of the offensive document, that was tactically and psychologically out of place, into the address he presented to his Sallah guests.

Our president who cannot convincingly give an impromptu speech, and who is more often than not shielded from public view, glare and gathering could not have said what he said. He is too far from Nigerians, including university students, whose reality and real existence he does not really know. Buhari’s conscious attitude and unconscious propensities are totally different from each other and cannot be reconciled. Thunder!!!