Varsity lecturers’ contaminated and adulterated remunerations – Part 2

A question that any sincere follower of ASUU’s virtuously incessantly incessant strike should ask is this: What are the remunerations of our universities’ lecturers like? A follow-up to the question is or ought to be this: What is the true colour or worth of our lecturers’ salary? Let me attempt to answer thus: Once upon a time, our lecturers used to have this chant: “Our take home pay cannot take us home.” Now that chant is no more, something worse, something far worse than what obtained in the dangerous decades of the nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties and early twenty twenties of our political tarantulas has entered our universities and the land – this land, your land, my land, our land and universities, your universities, my universities, our universities. And tarantism has resurfaced in our public universities and everywhere about us. This tarantism has even been contaminated and adulterated by our political jobbers, hijackers and robbers who have compelled hunger to waylay our universities’ lecturers. 

On the roads, in the rivers, in the gardens (of meditation and contemplation), in the womb of day of radiant light and in the deepness of night our lecturers are being waylaid by hunger. And their contaminated wages, their adulterated remunerations cannot buy them a healing tablet or capsule when they are sick. The married ones among our lecturers have astonishing moods any time sickness visits their immediate families. Their extended families are un-attended to and in some cases have been alienated, if not abandoned. Now the unmarried ones often lament especially after mealtimes. Hunger tantalizes them after their meals that are not meals or meals that are beneath their status. Some fully established married ones also experience what the un-married ones lose sound sleep over. You better believe me.

This columnist does not exaggerate. He is not out to score any cheap point as our fiends in politics often do with their contaminated lies and adulterated smiles, to boot. And their contaminated and adulterated lies and smiles of deceit are more contaminated and adulterated than contaminated and adulterated petrol everywhere from Sapele to Sokoto and from Warri to Maiduguri or from Port Harcourt to Potiskum.
 
Let me say it loud and clear: lecturers in our universities are the poorest paid tertiary educators in the country, your country, my country, our country. Our universities’ lecturers are the best and the most outstandingly schooled and educated in the land. Ironically, however, they are the least paid. Polytechnic and college of education lecturers are far better paid than professors in our universities.
 
Our torturers in power, who are compelling our professors not to have, or not to enjoy, an easy sleep or yawn, keep on smashing the faith, wisdom and patriotism of our eggheads. Our torturers’ tarradiddle which has as well contaminated and adulterated their fiendishness for the worse has underlined to us that this is a bad country, a contaminated and adulterated country, for brilliant minds, for our lecturers and professors and for our youths who are hungry for sound university education, which the tarantulas are denying them.
  
Let me recall a recent chat I had with a public university professor who I met in one of our leading banks. This professor in the area of management sciences or studies is currently on a kind of leave of absence in Abuja where he is “professing” in a Federal government establishment where he and his fellow harvesters will never know hunger and unhappiness until they inhale their last air. “I am glad that I am out of the university hell.” “Why?” I asked. “My remuneration now gives me pride and joy. My remuneration in one month, outside other perks, is well above my almost one year’s salary when I was in the university.” 

When I prodded him further he spoke to me as somebody who has since left the forest of folly – which the university now to him is. “The first class degrees our universities are awarding now are hollow degrees. Even the Ph.Ds. given to indolent students being churned out now indicates the present level of the place I have bolted from, thanks to my townsman in politics.”  He cashed his one million naira to be spent for that weekend’s activities, that Friday’s activities, with his fellow rejoicers and harvesters at his new place of post-university fortune and left me with a going- forward nod. I interpreted his going-forward to be the going-down or down-going fortune-less fortune of our professors, whom he has left behind. He will not be in their company again.
 
Other things the now outside-our-university professor told me are things I will only divulge the day my wisdom should desert me.  Presently, I have no folly that should wing away with my creative and journalistic wisdom and un-wisdom at the same time.
 
Now let me draw my reader’s attention once again to Professor Friedrich Nietzsche: When he left Basle University on a premature retirement in 1879, he was amply supported by his university pension. He kept on writing and did not stop his concern for his country Germany and Europe. He lived fruitfully mainly in France, Italy and Switzerland well supported, as I have just said, by his university pension – until his death in 1900. Is there any university professor today who can be supported by his or her gratuity/pension for up to one year on his/her retirement from the university – Federal or State or even private? The answer is a fat no in a country and system where retirees don’t ever live to get their gratuities many years after retiring.

It is very dangerous and will be very preposterous for ASUU to suspend or call off this present strike without government’s guarantee to increase substantially and very substantially the remunerations of our lecturers and professors. And the government ought to begin the implementation of this demand and other ones before our university lecturers resume classes. ASUU should insist on this. The government must implement the payment of the very substantial remunerations that must in no way be diluted before ASUU returns. We do not want another piecemeal strike after the current one.

ASUU must not let its wisdom and integrity desert or fly from it. Those who are making appeals to ASUU should direct their pleas to the Federal Government to honour all agreements and everyone and everything it entered into with the Union. I am not asking for the impossible because mine is not an impossible demand or request. If it must happen or come through thunder, let it happen and come through thunder. There is beauty in the war of truth. Thunder! And all stakeholders, especially all students, should follow their teachers to the mountain-top in the promised-land. Thunder! So speaks Afejuku.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.