Former South Africa President, the late Nelson Mandela, once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
That is incontestable considering that it is only through education that countries have been able to experience revolutions, inventions, innovations and economic turnaround.
Mandela also said: “It is through education the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”
Nonetheless, in the country, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has always resorted to strike to press home its demands. ASUU strike could take months to resolve and even at the end, there is no certainty that the government will keep to promises or agreements made. The union ASUU is ever ready to wield its ‘weapon’ whenever the need arises. At present, it has a running battle with the Federal Government on welfare and other demands.
Sadly, students are left to bear the brunt. Some go to learn trades or do menial jobs, which undermine their mental capabilities. Others are left to sit at home doing nothing.
For more than 50 months of industrial action by ASUU since its first strike in 1999, public tertiary education and even the overall education system have greatly suffered.
Many students moved abroad to seek uninterrupted quality education, some dropped out of school and refused to continue schooling due to the constant frustration of industrial actions. The rest are left to waste years of their youth while waiting to endure till they finally graduate from the system far older than they had earlier planned.
A great number of unemployed youths have fallen out of the employment age bracket overtime. Social vices have spiked.
The nation produces half-baked professionals with no adequate exposure to standard learning facilities.
The leaders of tomorrow cannot formulate policies that will further rescue the nation from poverty and economic depression, even if they can do so, there is no adequate education to further lead the nation to full economic development through inventions and innovations.
The Federal Government should therefore rise and act with utmost urgency to its responsibility and make education the highest priority in all its policies to save the future of students and sustain the growth of the nation.
- Eshanokpe is a 400-Level student at University of Benin (UNIBEN)