True we have not heard from our Roadside University in recent times. As the unemployed say sometimes to ward insult from a potential employer, “na condition make me take this kind money for this kind job.”
It has been difficult to retain staff at the university since some have gone to teach in the Primary Schools. Have you seen some of them recently? Have you seen the equipment they have in the laboratories? Plus the state government provided iPads for all! Already packed full of new educational material along with government propaganda!! Seeing, as they say, is believing. Only those with faith in human possibility/capability (CAPOSSIBILITY) stay on in the university system. What with the corruption of the federal ministry of education and the threat of ASUU strike!
But, in spite of limitations of one type and another our Research Centre struggles on. Its most recent publication is (nobody remembers that the centre had never published anything) “The Role of the Jobless, the Unemployed, The Unemployable, in a Capitalist Economy.” It is a handsome publication, neat and beautifully presented 52 pages with references, op.cit notifications, and so on. It is a researcher’s research publication. The pamphlet is a joy to read.
The acknowledgment, the preface, and the introduction are all packed into a three-part beginning containing acknowledgment, preface, and introduction. The author’s assistant professor aka ass. Prof Ted Croosoe and Dr. Itẹsiwaju Oluwaranti thanked God Almighty, who helped them, in spite of the efforts of enemies of day and night, to finish this work. To God be the glory.
Dr. Oluwaranti thanked the Lord for remembering his parents who survived to receive his first salary, which he gave them without taking a farthing. It was their deserved reward for bringing him up to write this book. Finally, they get into the substance of the book with the question: how do researchers avoid the pitfall of solving one problem by creating another? Leaving that question hanging in the air like all brilliant academics are wont do, the authors go on to expose the hypocrisy of all capitalist economic systems and their resulting educational infrastructure. They do not reveal that the jobless, the unemployed, and the unemployable are part and parcel of capitalism being at the nexuses of its functionality. Whatever that means!
The body of the essay begins by linking the foundation of the justice system to the existence of the jobless, the unemployed as well as the unemployable. The link is that these people hereafter referred to as the JUUs, are the people who go into petty thieving, vagrancy and drug peddling. They are available to be arrested, tried, and sentenced to serve terms in prison. They then provide statistics for crime control and the law and order system in the country. But the picture is not complete until we have placed the statistics of small-time criminals side by side with the statistics of big-time criminals.
It is difficult, according to our authors, to find JUUs who are ready to confess that they moved from being JUUs to being petty thieves, vagrants, and drug peddlers, that is PTVDP. But some conscious criminals are not unwilling to pass on the responsibility of their criminality to their betters in society.
The authors go on to link the inability of the injustice system to get hold of the big men criminals leads them to the justice system. This is the most difficult part of the book. The earlier part of linking the petty thieving to the required criminality of the capitalist system is bad enough. When we add the non-criminality of the big men in society, the matter becomes rather very difficult. First of all, big men (never women) are never caught to confess to being criminals. In fact, rather than answer your questions, they refer you to their lawyers who frighten you and threaten you with hellfire and volcanic lava if you don’t leave their client from your muck-raking so-called research. In spite of their failure to prove the connection between JUUs/PTVDPs and small-time criminality and big men non-criminality, our authors have no problem linking the two groups. Once they have created the connection, they are able to claim that capitalism needs these people for the completion, of their justice system.
Using AI it is possible to take out JUUs and PTVDPs and work out the effect of these absences in the justice and injustice systems of capitalist countries. It must be pointed out that the authors did not say they carried out such an exercise. Nor did they provide an algorithm with which they were able to carry out such an incredible exercise. Altogether, the pillars on which the theoretical basis of the essay sat are totally rickety and far from provable. All the same, it is the first effort of our university and we must support it. At least, we have something that we can show our sponsors and supporters, the roadside plantain and maize roasters who sell their products with groundnuts/peanuts. We cannot afford to disappoint those who supply the documents from wrappings of plantain, maize, and groundnut that constitutes our library stock. We can promise that next time we would do better especially when we would have been able to sell say a thousand or two thousand copies of the book. Plus it would have been quoted several times by assprof. in his inaugural lecture, which is still to take place. It would also be the basis of the promotion of Dr. Oluwaranti to senior lectureship. In a way, our own Roadside University is growing from strength to strength.
Our contribution to knowledge might, for now, be shaky and not yet firm, but nobody is going to say we have not raised critical issues in the scholarship on capitalism.
Until our intellectuals raised the matter, others sold to capitalistic system did everything to hide the issue. From henceforth, concerned academics will take their time to address the issue of the jobless, the unemployed, and the unemployable whenever they raised this matter in their seminars and international conferences.
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