There are many indices of decay in contemporary Nigerian society, including infrastructural decay, the erosion of values, the declining fortunes of the nation’s football teams, and incessant students’ rampage in the nation’s tertiary institutions. It is high time the spotlight was turned on students’ rampage on university and polytechnic campuses as a metaphor for financial, moral, and management decay in the nation’s tertiary institutions. Recent violent protests on some of the campuses provide useful case studies.
It is important at the outset to understand the background to students’ protests in Nigeria. Historically, they were rooted in anti-colonial protests either against colonial policies or for freedom from colonial domination. For example, between 1940 and 1945, the West Africa Students Union, to which Nigerian students belonged, agitated for political reforms in all British West African territories. WASU also opposed the location of a military post in Nigeria in aid of the second World War. Similarly, at the dawn of independence, the National Union of Nigerian Students protested against the British government’s plan to establish a military base in Nigeria and to sign an Anglo-Nigeria Defence Pact in Lagos in November 1960.
Their mode of protest was civil and even “academic”: They employed hand bills, pamphlets and public lectures to educate the people about their demands. Essentially, at this period, the public good was the major concern of the students.
However, beginning in the mid-60s, the police and the military began to inculcate militancy in student unionism. The nature of protests began to assume some degree of violence as the police and the army took to assaulting and even killing students. The introduction of tuition by the military government led by then Brigadier Olusegun Obasanjo sparked the infamous Ali Must Go riot throughout the country, when the police and the military occupied university gates or campuses, sparking serious clashes with the students. Militancy had come to stay as an integral component of students’ protests in Nigeria. Even then, protests by and large were relatively peaceful unless the students were provoked by the police or the army. And all they did was throw any object they could find at the men in uniform.
Student demonstrations, as they were then called, remained peaceful in the 60s, when I was a student at the University of Ife and until the early 1970s, when I started teaching there. It never occurred to any student to damage university property as a form of protest, no matter the causes and severity of their anger or frustration. Admittedly, university students then were much older and more mature than today’s students and the demonstrations were largely motivated by pressing national issues.
By the early 1980s, a teeming population of younger adolescent students swelled the university campuses as states also began to establish their own universities. This would be followed by the establishment of private universities. The plundering of the economy by the military over three decades would combine with larger and larger student populations to put stress on existing facilities. In no time, available facilities began to deteriorate without repair or replacement.
A decade later, infrastructural facilities, learning tools, and welfare issues assumed centre stage as causes of disaffection between students and university authorities, while their lecturers turned their anger at the university proprietors. Now, fast forward to the 21st century, when the universities began to experience irregular and inadequate subventions, leading to declining library, laboratory, teaching, and social facilities. The strategy of increased tuition, used as a tactic for coping with declining subventions, aggravated, rather than assuaged, the students’ disaffection with the authorities.
In recent years, students’ protests have assumed a destructive dimension, which seems to defy rational explanations. Five recent cases will suffice. On February 7, 2016, some under-performing students of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, went on the rampage on a slight provocation by security officials, destroying property worth millions of naira.
Two months later, some mischievous students of Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, turned unfounded anger on the university’s critical structures. Against the entreaty of the Student Union Executive and the advice of some lecturers, the students went ahead to damage several structures, including the university gate, the Olusegun Obasanjo Multipurpose Hall, and the Students Health Centre.
They had claimed that one of them, who was knocked down on a motorcycle, had died because the Students Health Centre or the University’s ambulance was not well-equipped. The truth, however, was that the said accident occurred outside the university campus. Good Samaritans rushed the injured student to the nearby hospital in Iwaro, which immediately referred him to the Federal Medical Centre at Owo. Once the university learnt about the incident, the university ambulance was dispatched for conveying the student to Owo. The student got there alive, and the Owo doctors went to work on him. He, however, gave up late that night due to the severity of his injuries.
A similar rampage would occur a few days later at the University of Port Harcourt, where the students protested against the university’s policy that required the full payment of tuition fees before sitting for the semester examinations. The students took their anger on innocent road users, plying the ever busy East-West Road. They blocked it for hours, causing gridlock and untold hardship on road users, wasting man-hours and accruable revenue to them. It took the police several hours to break the gridlock, and two students were reportedly killed in the process.
Faced with a similar situation of “no tuition payment, no exams”, the part-time students at the Federal Polytechnic, Auchi, took their anger on the institution and its staff at the commencement of their examinations on June 2, 2016. In the process, they damaged over 50 staff vehicles and several buildings, including the computer laboratory.
Just last week, the students of the University of Nigeria at the Enugu campus took a similar course of action, but for a different reason. They protested against the inadequate supply of electricity, insisting that they would not attend lectures or sit for exams until the power situation improved.
In all the above cases, the institutions were shut down. In the case of AAUA, the students had resumed, but only after each one had paid the sum of N15,000 as reparation for the damage to university property. The students in the other institutions should also bear the cost of the damage they caused.
Beyond reparation, however, three key issues should be addressed. First, why do students damage university property, even when they know that what their universities have to offer are insufficient for the population of students in them? Why further diminish the capacity of already inadequate facilities?
There are two major reasons. First, students’ adoption of violence as a means of pressing their demands cannot be divorced from the prevailing political culture and moral decadence in the society at large. With rampant political, economic, and sexual violence, including political thuggery, terrorism, herdsmen massacres, and pipeline vandalism in the country, students have come to believe in violence as the best way to express their grievances. This is especially the case in situations where the administration is highhanded and apparently unsympathetic to students’ grievances or where major communication gaps exist between the students and the authorities.
Second, there are always students who like to foment trouble on their campuses, especially as examinations draw near or are ongoing. This category includes poorly performing students, cult members, and miscreants who act as stooges for politicians. Students in this category often work in collaboration with thugs and hoodlums in the neighbourhood to intensify crisis on campus. It is therefore the duty of the administration to find ways of identifying such students and of preventing them from holding the entire student body, if not the whole university, to ransom.
PUNCH
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