Politicians As Nigeria’s Worst Headache!

 By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Now, let’s face it. Despite all the empty (and, often, very exasperating) noise about being driven by patriotism and “desire to serve my people” that usually saturates the atmosphere at each election season, a careful, conscientious search on the political terrain can only yield about less than one percent (and one is being really generous here) of aspirants motivated solely by genuine desire to improve the lives of the citizenry and make society a better place. 

For the majority, the sole incentive is the golden opportunity politics offers them to gain access to government coffers and cart away as much free money as they could possibly grab before their tenures elapse. This is just the raw, plain truth – a simple case of organized banditry! Indeed, every politician in Nigeria is fully aware that most Nigerians know this. But they always bank on what I would like to refer to as the “collaborative passivity” of the citizenry. 

Nigeria’s Decaying Universities: Blame Govt, Not ASUU!

 By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

I have always had this lingering suspicion that apart from representing the deep-seated contempt that has come to define government’s attitude to the   welfare of public sector workers, its shoddy, often, disdainful, treatment of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and its demands for improved working conditions might have been carefully conceived as a long term project to continue provoking ASUU to embark on industrial actions until it fatally hurts its case before Nigerians.

The expectation, it would seem, is that as students continue to spend several months at home due to prolonged strikes, which might sometimes lengthen the duration of their academic programmes, parents and other stakeholders who bear the brunt of these constant disruptions will gradually review their sympathy for the teachers and begin to confront them as the problem instead of the government whose continuous reneging on agreements it freely entered into with ASUU created the mess in the first place.