Moses,
You dont need to to demonstrate the
'scholar's restraint and fidelity to empirical facts ... the label of scholar or academic...the (sometimes) cumbersome standards of a scholar's analysis... the idea that one must provide citation for everything, even the obvious'
to write responsibly.
You dont need to tell lies that you have not investigated, such as-
'Their children will come back home from North America and Europe on holidays to the pretend suburbs of Abuja and Lagos island, wave a Cold Stone ice cream cone at the wreck built by their thieving parents and berate Nigerians for being wretched Nigerians. They often travel First Class.'
You dont need to descend to the level of such sexist drivel as -
'Let us visit their officers, all of them mean looking men, except for one harried looking token lady who has the cringe-worthy patronizing title of "welfare secretary." I am sure she does important things for the #OgasAtTheTop of ASUU. Maybe she is responsible for making pounded yam and bringing water so the men could wash their filthy hands.'
You dont need to engage in ridiculous hyperbole-
'Their members want to have sex with every child that walks into their pretend classrooms, when they have satisfied themselves, they pimp their helpless wards, yes, they do, to their friends, constipated generals and pot-bellied rogue-politicians who have too much money in their thieving pockets.'
You dont need to make meaningless insults your trademark or you become the thug you claim others are-
'ASUU is on strike again. Who cares? They are thugs, ... My contempt for that body of narcissistic thugs knows no bounds.'
You need to educate yourself on the issues and the history of ASUU and not celebrate your refusal to be informed, making claims without any effort at justification-
'The Academic Staff Union of Universities of Nigeria. ASUU. ASUU is on strike again. Who cares?...they are always on strike, nobody seems to know why, except that it involves being paid a boatload of money by their counterparts, those thieves euphemistically called the Nigerian government.'
The Ikhide self delusive 'I Am a Social Critic Critic' stance can be so ridiculous.
My experience of his attempts at social criticism is rehashing what is known without depth of engagement with the issues and with a vitriol that is not justified by an effort at informing himself.
I am not able to see Ikhide as making a contribution of worth on this subject.
If you want to read serious meaningful critiques, one should read the Farouk critique and other reasoned statements.
The fact that a person insists on shouting in a market of ideas, mixing sounds he has picked up from other people as he distorts those sounds, does not mean the sheer act of shouting should be appreciated as a contribution.
His rant has motivated debate, but he would do better to write responsibly.
thanks
toyin
On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 4:42 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
"Having made that point, let me also say my membership of ASUU does not blind me to its follies and weaknesses. I rage and fume regularly. And, again, I am not alone here. Several people are in agony over the internal anomalies that are daily eroding ASUU's moral capital in a country bereft of a civil society vanguard that could speak truth to power. However, speaking truth to power ought to commence with speaking truth to oneself. I have often wondered why the ASUU-NEC is not wise to the need to make ASUU a national conscience that agitates for transformations within and without, rather than being satisfied with the perception of the body as being solely concerned with strikes and salaries (the mistake you've apparently also fallen into; and, it would seem, due to no entire fault of yours). There are rampant incidences of rogue lecturers, discrepancies in teaching schedule of individual teachers, scandals involving grades and ladies, low quality teaching, digital illiteracy, etc. Yet ASUU-NEC is content with the body's status as a government nemesis which lacks the moral weight of a Nemesis. If we eventually succeed in forcing the government to engage its responsibilities, will our gains not be frittered away through the black hole of our internal contradictions? "
---Adeshina,How is this different from some of the points Ikhide has repeatedly made? Is the difference not merely one of style and rhetoric? Ikhide finds the scholar's restraint and fidelity to empirical facts (some call it crude empiricism) burdensome. I have no problem with that. He has always disavowed the label of scholar or academic, so why hold him to the (sometimes) cumbersome standards of a scholar's analysis? For goodness sake, even for scholars, the idea that one must provide citation for everything, even the obvious, is ridiculous and is often the subject of tussles between authors and reviewers. Ikhide uses strategic hyperbole, literary flourish, strategic generalizations, and other tools in his literary toolkit to offer his take on the crises of higher education in Nigeria and on ASUU's strategy of struggle. That's his style. I believe it is called literary/poetic license. Get over the style and discuss the substance of his post. If we're as intelligent as we claim we are, we'd know by now that Ikhide has a robustly provocative style, whether he is discussing Meja Nwangi's novel or ASUU. It is not for everyone, but some of us like it, as it is a delightful exercise in punchy, polemical brilliance, and a welcome relief and break from the boring, stifling strictures and protocols of scholarly writing and analysis. If you don't like his style, invent yours and use it to discuss ASUU. This game of latching on to atmospherics to avoid dealing with valid substantive critiques of ASUU's failings is almost worn out. It has become predictable and sterile. The other day it was Okey Iheduru who was the target of some uncouth defensiveness laced with some combative jibes. Why is our first instinct, when confronted with critiques of ASUU, to attack the messenger and repeat familiar and tired attacks on government and politicians? Where is our capacity for self-critique?As many Nigeria-based colleagues will tell you in PRIVATE, the ASUU model of struggle may have outlived its effectiveness. Is it the loss of moral capital? Is it the law of diminishing returns setting in without a corresponding willingness to rethink tactics and strategies? Is it the acute perception problem plaguing ASUU? Is it its focus on the nebulous issue of "funding" to mask a more pecuniary (nothing wrong with pecuniary, just be honest about it) agenda? Is it the inattentiveness to the problems that the excerpt from Shina's post captures brilliantly? Is it the fact that ASUU's rhetorical arsenal is stuck in the 1990s when in fact any honest observer would testify to significant improvements in remunerative and infrastructural conditions? Is it the failure of ASUU to recognize that it needs to EARN the trust and support of a public weary of strikes that result in new allowances and income improvements which threaten to create an academic aristocracy (Fanon calls it "labor aristocracy") and further the distance between gown and town? Again, nothing wrong with this, but it comes at a cost, which is that, economically you're getting closer and closer to the politicians and bureaucrats you critique and further and further away from the mass of Nigerians. This must be recognized and mitigated by appropriate rhetorical and organizational measures, which ASUU has failed to do. ASUU takes the Nigerian public for granted and fails to see how angry folks are with its antics. The other day, the national president of NANS was interviewed on Saharareporters and said clearly that while Nigerian students support ASUU's demands for infrastructures that ease student life, they DO NOT support ASUU's demands for more allowances and improved perks. This sentiment is widespread on social media among students. This is a problem for ASUU. Clearly it has lost Nigerian students because it has failed to incorporate their interests into its strategies.What is ASUU doing about poor instruction in our universities, which students routinely complain about and which produces poor graduates? A lecturer may be forgiven for dictating notes, not taking questions, and not engaging in a discussion, in a class of 300 students, but in a class of 30 or 20? Don't ask for evidence; I experienced this firsthand. How about the failure to make learning audio-visual? Are these all the fault of government, of greedy politicians? How about poor research that substitute opinions and newspaper reportorial protocols for rigorous scholarly analysis? Is that also government's fault? Is that the result of "poor funding"? A Nigeria-based scholar can be excused for not citing dated material and for not engaging with the latest literature of her/his field because of lapsed or non-existent journal subscriptions, etc, but can they be excused from conducting basic original research? What's the excuse for simply going over familiar territory, for reinventing the wheel or replicating an existing work? What's the excuse for not even attempting to contribute something new conceptually or empirically, for not providing a new insight or a new perspective? I know several serious Nigeria-based colleagues whose work I read with excitement, so the practice of blaming funding and the government for rampant academic laziness ought to stop.The more I comment on this issue, the more I am reminded of James Scott's idea of hidden and public scripts. Serious Nigeria-based colleagues have exactly the same concerns about the Nigerian higher education system as some of us do. For obvious reasons they will not go public with these concerns and critiques. If I were them, I'd do the same. And even those who defend, parry, and rationalize ASUU's failings and other institutional problems on this forum may be more candid and self-critical in private. One of the most profound things I've heard in private from insiders--colleagues in Nigeria--is that perhaps up to seventy percent of those in the Nigerian academy have no business being there. The brain drain of the 1980s and '90s created vacuums that were apparently filled by accidental academics. In their quest to analyze where and how the rain began to beat us (apologies to master wordsmith Achebe), several colleagues have traced the deepening rot to this seminal moment of regression. Another Nigeria-based colleague told me that the problem has worsened of late, since VCs have been foisting ill-qualified job candidates on departments and programs with little or no deliberative input from those programs. I agree that this may indeed be the root of the problem, but isn't this clearly within ASUU's portfolio of struggle? What hiring best practices has it advocated and pushed through the system? Is ASUU willing to support a thorough intellectual/academic audit of its members--of those responsible for educating our young ones, whose future the Union claims it is fighting for? How about empowering these critical stakeholders through a system of anonymous student evaluations? Is ASUU willing to go along with that?So, bottom line: ASUU has put itself above the scrutiny and accountability that it advocates for politicians and bureaucrats, and that is sad. A union cannot claim to be fighting for the restoration/reclamation of a battered higher education system and then allow itself to be held captive to an outmoded template of struggle, or continue to uphold positions and loyalties that perpetuate the rot in the system. If most of ASUU's membership will not acquiesce to reforms and innovations that hold them accountable, improve research and instruction, and make them earn their perks and the respect of the public and their students, then it is time to question their commitment to a vibrant academic culture and to the consumers of their products--students. These are the contradictions that Shina writes about in the excerpt above, which is also the take-away from Ikhide's rant.--On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 7:26 AM, <shina73_1999@yahoo.com> wrote:
"ASUU is on strike again. Who cares? They are thugs, they are always on strike, nobody seems to know why, except that it involves being paid a boatload of money by their counterparts, those thieves euphemistically called the Nigerian government. ASUU. My contempt for that body of narcissistic thugs knows no bounds.". Ikhide
Oga Ikhide,
I salute you!
I suspect you must be having a wonderful time with the ruckus that your ASUU post is raking up all over the net. It seems to me that you go to this length sometime to shore up your reputation as an 'irreverent' critic-of African literature and African intellectuals. However, it seem that, even for me, this ASUU summation is irreverence gone too far and too off.
Two issues on my mind: first is your fallacious summation of ASUU membership as a body of thugs, and second is your reduction of the ASUU industrial action to a mere struggle for money.
FIRST:
1. I am an ASUU member. And I subscribe to this industrial action in the hope that some concessions, however meagre, can be seized and deployed towards the rehabilitation of the Nigerian educational system. Just like your vaunted claim of being part of a sterling educational system in the US, we are also here, right in the trenches of a degenerating system, making gigantic efforts to scrape the best we can from it. There are people here who love this system, who are giving it their effort and attentio; those who have fought and those still fighting. For us, teaching is a ministry, a spiritual mandate, that will not allow us to take advantage of those entrusted into our care. I confront young minds everyday in the line of duty, and I am daily afraid-as to what they'll turn out to become within the constraint of hopelessness and institutional decay. Isn't this enough to fight for? I suspect you hold your own duty to that kind of sacred standard that would make me want to entrust my child to your care. There are people here too, in their hundreds, who take their duty with solemnity-they won't sleep with students, exhort money from them, refuse to attend and teach classes, sell handouts, or commit other nefarious acts. I won't grudge you your responsibilities over there; yet I wonder what is responsible for this often unsavoury remarks about 'African intellectuals' and their abdication of their duty? As if nothing is ever happening? As if all 'African intellectuals' have sold their souls to Western imperialism and colonisation?
2. Having made that point, let me also say my membership of ASUU does not blind me to its follies and weaknesses. I rage and fume regularly. And, again, I am not alone here. Several people are in agony over the internal anomalies that are daily eroding ASUU's moral capital in a country bereft of a civil society vanguard that could speak truth to power. However, speaking truth to power ought to commence with speaking truth to oneself. I have often wondered why the ASUU-NEC is not wise to the need to make ASUU a national conscience that agitates for transformations within and without, rather than being satisfied with the perception of the body as being solely concerned with strikes and salaries (the mistake you've apparently also fallen into; and, it would seem, due to no entire fault of yours). There are rampant incidences of rogue lecturers, discrepancies in teaching schedule of individual teachers, scandals involving grades and ladies, low quality teaching, digital illiteracy, etc. Yet ASUU-NEC is content with the body's status as a government nemesis which lacks the moral weight of a Nemesis. If we eventually succeed in forcing the government to engage its responsibilities, will our gains not be frittered away through the black hole of our internal contradictions?
3. Yet, I am still an ASUU member, and would not do a wholesale demonisation of the entire ASUU body. This is why that summation appals me. By 'that body of narcissistic thugs', what do you really intend? I suspect you reference the entire ASUU membership present. But, since ASUU is a union body with legal continuity (and since your grouse didn't begin today), does your atrocious summation not also capture ASUU members past-Jeyifo, Osundare, Eskor Toyo and other intellectual worthies who have bemoaned and fought for what they believe the Nigerian educational system can achieve within the development dynamics in Nigeria? Or, maybe you intend just the leadership of ASUU? Even that would excuse your irreverent reductionism. By what stretch of the imagination can a body of thousands of intellectuals be called narcissists or thugs? That summation is irreverence gone too far and too bad. We may bear your literary criticism; this present summation flies in the face of logic and the empirical.
4. It is a logical and empirical fact that there ought to be more to a body than what you read about or perceive in its modus operandi(since you aren't part of the system you critique so trenchantly). Yet, you neglect that logical point and conveniently wrapped yourself up in a composition fallacy which fails to disambiguate the faults of the few from the attributes of the whole.
5. It should be an interesting research to ransack the deep recesses of your personal and intellectual history in search of that juncture where you picked your disillusionment with the 'African intellectuals'. I wonder how you'll describe yourself-an American intellectual? Does that save you from your own wholesale mudslinging?
Second:
I feel so depressed that you only perceive the industrial action as only a struggle to be 'paid a boatload of money' in a case of thieves paying thugs who both neglect the consequence of their brigandage on the future of innocent children.
Pardon my moral ignorance, but is there something inherently wrong with requesting for money you have earned? The earned allowances framework is a consequence of an agreement government signed. What would you have done in a similar situation Sir?
Being a good soul, I suspect you would have mobilised the entire ASUU team to let government be, think of the 'future' of the innocent students and return to work-in dystopian laboratories where kerosene stoves replace Bunsen burners, where 'libraries' lack recent books and journals, where classrooms haven't been updated with multimedia facilities, where personal pockets fund researches.
When I read Prof. Aluko's pragmatic suggestions for ending the strike, I wondered how two friends could be so far apart in intellectual temperament. I wonder also whether Jonathan shouldn't have seen the worth of the Prof as the next Education Minister rather than a VC. Well, not all eyes observe.
Permit me to rest my case while I await the spell check and grammar lesson. I tremble at the inevitable, stentorian and dismissive 'nonsense' that is certain to come. I won't also mind the booming silence.
Adeshina Afolayan
*can't afford to cycle away since my six-year old bicycle is worn out for lack of repair. So I'm grounded as it were*
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTNFrom: Ikhide <xokigbo@yahoo.com>Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 08:49:57 -0700 (PDT)ReplyTo: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.comSubject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ASUU is on strike again! Who cares? SMH
The Academic Staff Union of Universities of Nigeria. ASUU. ASUU is on strike again. Who cares? They are thugs, they are always on strike, nobody seems to know why, except that it involves being paid a boatload of money by their counterparts, those thieves euphemistically called the Nigerian government. ASUU. My contempt for that body of narcissistic thugs knows no bounds. There is really not much one needs to say about how these rogues in academic robes have colluded with any government in power (AGIP) to defraud and rob generations of beautiful children what is their right – a good education. To say ASUU is on strike is to state the obvious, they are nearly always on strike, even when they are at work, they are on strike. Their members want to have sex with every child that walks into their pretend classrooms, when they have satisfied themselves, they pimp their helpless wards, yes, they do, to their friends, constipated generals and pot-bellied rogue-politicians who have too much money in their thieving pockets.
If you don't believe me, Farooq Kperogi has a disturbing piece here on the sexual harassment epidemic in Nigerian universities. You read that piece, and when you have stopped shuddering, you understand why fully less than 10 percent of Nigerian university dons have children living in that mess called Nigeria, let alone inside the filthy chicken coops that pass for classrooms from preschool to the tertiary level. In those criminal hovels, children of the poor and dispossessed are trapped and mis-educated by those whose children are being nurtured in the West. Their children will come back home from North America and Europe on holidays to the pretend suburbs of Abuja and Lagos island, wave a Cold Stone ice cream cone at the wreck built by their thieving parents and berate Nigerians for being wretched Nigerians. They often travel First Class. Ten percent? I made it up of course. I am a Nigerian intellectual. We are lazy like that. It could be less even.
Follow me, let's go to the silly website of ASUU right here. Let us visit their officers, all of them mean looking men, except for one harried looking token lady who has the cringe-worthy patronizing title of "welfare secretary." I am sure she does important things for the #OgasAtTheTop of ASUU. Maybe she is responsible for making pounded yam and bringing water so the men could wash their filthy hands. SMH. Yes, Nigeria is the patriarchy from hell, in Nigeria, misogyny reigns even in the 21st century and even among the men of the ivory tower. Hiss. Here's ASUU's list of men "leaders" and one token woman: Dr, Nasir Isa Fagge, president, Bayero University, Kano, Professor Biodun Ogunyemi, Vice president, OOU Ago-Iwoye, Professor Ukachukwu Awuzie, immediate past president, IMSU, Owerri, Professor Victor Osodoke, financial secretary, MOUA Umudike, Dr. Ademola Aremu, treasurer, University of Ibadan, Professor. Daniel Gungula, internal auditor, MAUTech, Yola, Dr. Ralph Ofukwu, investment secretary, FUAM, Makurdi, Dr. (Mrs.) Ngozi Iloh, welfare secretary, University of Benin, and Professor Israel Wurogji, legal advisor, University of Calabar. All the men and one woman have horrid looking pictures of themselves on the website, except for Professor Wurogii, ASUU's "legal advisor" who either is too lazy or too busy to provide one. He is perhaps genuinely afraid for his life – not from the SSS but from irate abused students who have spent the past decade trying to get an education from these thugs.- IkhideStalk my blog at www.xokigbo.comFollow me on Twitter: @ikhideJoin me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide--
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