A lot of messages and phone calls have reached me since my essay on no-work no-pay appeared here on Friday, 23 September 2022.

Everything being equal, I shall devote time to let my readers and the general public keep and have a sumptuous taste of the pudding (and other puddings).

For now, I am yielding my canvas to Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano whose esthetic faith is not strange to the moral as well as the political sensibility of any intense follower of this column.

Professor IBK in his follow-up submission to my essay of 23 September further enlightens the reader on the subject of “No work, no pay” with particular attention to the nature of the sloganeer of the slogan. Who is the sloganeer who also is the chief sloganeer, or, more appropriately, the sloganeer-in-chief? You can ask me the question again and again.

Now before I offer you IBK’s writing let me let you peruse the impression of Samson Eguavoen of the University of Benin. His brief colourful indignation of ripe, positive music daringness heralds the Bayero University’s professor’s scrutiny of the sloganeer and messenger and pawn of our withering oppressors’ “no work, no pay” policy.

Samson Eguavoen. The lawless are busy quoting and resurrecting laws to justify their lies, lies and more lies. Brigands of Baboons moving cacophonous rancour-riddled “No work, no pay” gambit. Let the word bear witness to the kind of coffin they have nailed for education in their country, our country. They will end up in their manufactured coffin.

IBK. Dear TA – Your fascinating piece on the ridiculous compound word “No-work-no pay” struck me as a comprehensive critique of a policy and intent to denigrate manual and intellectual labour. The word or term harbours logical and performative contradictions.

Here’s how: for university academics, their “work” is not measured by the clock in or out of the workplace. They’re not “daily paid” workers, those who work an 8-hour timetable or work schedule.

Although a university lecturer might be required to give a two-hour lecture per course unit, the time it takes each one of them to read up a source, take notes on the source, reflect on the relevant points for the class, and explicate the issues extempore, cannot be done in an hour or more.

It takes continuous training, improvement, and varied and varying tactics of classroom delivery. In other instances, lecturers are required to publish research papers in high-end journals, write books and monographs, and do community service in the form of “institution building” and attendance at seminar sessions, Senate, faculty, and departmental meetings, etc. What’s more, even when on strike, lecturers have necessarily to grade student papers and exam sheets, submit the results to the relevant officials, create “consultation hours” for the students, hold dissertation meetings with the supervisees, and read a ton of books in their career life.

In a way, then, the malicious “no-work-no pay” policy does not take into account that teaching, at least in the university, is not a manual but intellectual labour, which has no place for the traditional “clocking in and clocking out” policy. To this extent, then, it is simply a political tool to whip and humiliate university academics.

By the way, what can we say about a professor who has spent three or more decades building the institution, producing hundreds of students, training, in all those years, thousands of manpower units and people for the country, only for a parasitic state machine or a parasitic official to throw the “no-work-no-pay” jargon of a policy at the face of a venerable professor simply for reasons of expediency and vicious malice. The policy is in truth meant for controlling and disciplining workers who work on an assembly line, where every worker on the production line has a structural function in the flow of goods.

Indeed, the policy (which really we cannot and should not justify under any circumstance) is the natural thought of state officials or industry bosses, slave drivers, who depend on the hourly paid workers – but not lecturers and academics who work within mental and intellectual circuits. In fact, the fact that the “no-work-no-pay” policy is applied to university academics is a strong indicator of the intellectual poverty of Mr Ngige, the Labour Minister and high state officials who cherish the policy.

Enlightened state or university officials such as Vice Chancellors know very well that the policy is a primitive throwback to 19th-century industrial brutalization and emasculation of manual workers. In the case of its application to/on the striking ASUU lecturers, it’s intended as a vengeful, malicious and petty-minded attack on intellectual labour, university autonomy, and freedom of association and strikes for good causes and positive actions and acts.

Now how do I react to Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano’s thoroughly thorough submission? It is a brutal submission of a brutal scholar who never shies away from saying what needs to be said with the force and persuasiveness of truth. He and Eguavoen (and other readers I shall usher here as time goes by) possess courage that never wavers – courage that renews itself time after time and charmingly smiles to deliver verdicts of truth in the true spirit of people and scholars and activists of truth.

I should add, significantly, that Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano employs his peculiar manner of de-construction to de-construct Ngige, the bitter labour minister whose ASUU obsession is crushing whatever sense of fairness, justice, cleverness, un-petty-mindedness, anti-mediocrity and conflict-healing his now un-healing medical mind and training has betrayed and poisoned seemingly beyond redemption.

The details Ibrahim Bello-Kano piles and lines up in his submission to underscore my initial essay he is in perfect agreement with reveal Ngige’s petty-mindedness and intellectual poverty of ideas and of truth and facts which call to question his critical judgment and medical large-heartedness and training in medical school that made medical compassion relating to doctor-patient relationship a cardinal aspect and ingredient of high medical education and of clean professional practice.

Of course, the man has since stopped practising medicine, which he has replaced with the politics of oppression and of debasement that detests compassion and solid society-lifting ideas and progress that is progress.

Another of course: he wants to destroy ASUU and our public universities that hold the key keys to our private universities. Can he? Let him do the worst of his best and the best of his worst; let him create and encourage as many divide-and-rule unions as possible in our universities; let him proscribe ASUU; in the end, we will see what we will and shall see.

IBK (a professor worth his salt and who knows his onions) and company are ever prepared to do their duty to their Union and to their country. All saboteurs and Judases in the land who have betrayed our people, masses and compatriots in whatever guise shall and will be treated the way saboteurs and Judases should or ought to be treated – after their de-construction and further deconstruction. Swine! I say everything I have said here as a truth and peace activist. For now, the rest is silence…

Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Thunder!!!

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.