Tag: Wike

I shudder to think what intensity of anguish Nigeria’s eminent vice-chancellors endured as they reportedly sat glumly through last Friday’s meeting with the supervising minister of education, Nyesom Wike. Mr Wike, as everyone knows, is a man of many parts. Bold, dogged and energetic, the Ikwerre, Rivers State politician has made a huge impression on his followers, and, as it is obvious, is also now making a monstrously bigger impression on many Nigerians. The vice-chancellors who attended the meeting with him would doubtless have left his presence dumbfounded by the quirkiness of university education that produced such an impertinent man who many years ago defied the force and natural inclination of nature to leave a notable mark on his local government as an administrator and grassroots mobiliser.

Not only was Mr Wike twice chairman of the now controversial Obio/Akpor local government, he performed with such distinction that he managed to win the confidence of Governor Rotimi Amaechi to become his Chief of Staff. Graduating with a law degree from the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Mr Wike also developed a well-honed style of politics that saw him become an implacable force in both local and national politics. He even evaded the censorious gaze of the avuncular Peter Odili, a former governor of the state, to win his support at the initial stage of his political career. And he also managed to fool the feisty and sometimes impatient Mr Amaechi to earn the juicy and powerful post of Chief of Staff and later director-general of the Amaechi re-election campaign. He has now seduced President Goodluck Jonathan, who more and more finds solace in the arms of fixers and enforcers serenading him with sweet talk and bombast.

It is important to understand Mr Wike’s background in order to find explanation for his hardline stand in the five-month-old Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strike. He has a law degree, is streetwise, aggressive and gregarious. But those who know him and have worked with him insist there is little in his character or education, not to talk of the logic and judgement that sets an educated man apart from an illiterate, to justify the degree he is brandishing. He is a practical politician who is effective and skilful in herding votes. But at bottom, he is a man who conceals his unimpressive intellectual endowment beneath a morass of public works projects. Such a man is more likely to resent his betters when they meet in forums that require logic, thoughtfulness, restraint and cultured language and diplomacy. Mr Wike precisely found himself at one such forum last Friday when he encountered his betters, vice chancellors and former university teachers whom he gloated over.

To a deep and lettered man, such a meeting would lead him inexorably to the veneration and modesty that the knowledge imparted to him in his university days should naturally elicit. But to one plagued by doubts and inferiority complex, such a meeting could only trigger in all its fury the resentment his intellectual failings have dammed in his angry soul over the years. Like former President Olusegun Obasanjo who under Gen Murtala Mohammed took perverse delight in purging the universities and demystifying the super permanent secretaries who mocked his inadequacies, Mr Wike has issued orders to his former teachers which no reasonable man should ever give and which even under the military no one could hope to enforce. Sadly, the Jonathan government is populated by many such upstarts who read politics into every dispute.

Acting on behalf of the Jonathan presidency, and after opening another war front in the president’s many battles, Mr Wike has ordered the deployment of policemen in universities to secure those who would heed the command to resume work. After all, of what use is power when it cannot be used? He has also ordered the vice-chancellors to reopen the universities, when in reality it was ASUU’s withdrawal of services, not the shutting of the campuses by school administrators, that paralysed the universities in the first instance. Those who fail to resume work, Mr Wike commanded the National Universities Commission (NUC), should be sacked, notwithstanding the fact that the universities have neither the resources nor even the available pool of qualified teachers to fill more than 40,000 vacancies already existing. In the opinion of Mr Wike, force should solve a problem that neither logic nor diplomacy could resolve in five months. As far as he understood, and based on the Kano meeting of the university teachers less than two weeks ago, at least 60 percent of them already indicated willingness to resume work. Of course Mr Wike’s foolish order and outburst are bound to unite the teachers once again, for they are nobody’s fools.

It is a worrisome indication of the incompetence of President Jonathan’s men that a crisis nearing resolution could be allowed to fester once again, thereby snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The president has himself not demonstrated brilliant statecraft, nor shown any indication he has the steady hands to propel the country to greatness. But by surrounding himself with devious and vacuous advisers and aides, he is more likely to take more wrong-headed steps capable of dooming his presidency. The president sees foreign destabilising agents, when nothing of the sort exists. Those who trouble him and the country are his ministers and aides. They are the ones who instigate him into hardline position, who alarm him with imaginary enemies, and fill his mind with anachronistic ideas of the powers and perks of a president. Thus they tell us that Dr Jonathan is the first president to engage the ASUU in 13 hours discussion, as if it is a regrettable thing, or as if his job is limited to effusing power without a corresponding acknowledgement of the burdens and responsibilities of office.

The few outstanding issues in the ASUU strike were the warehousing of the first tranche of promised financial interventions, making the agreement already reached ironclad, and paying salary arrears. I find it difficult to see how these should be a problem. Instead, Dr Jonathan, Mr Wike and other supposedly educated officials who snivel around the presidency think it is an affront to doubt the president. Were there not enough reasons to doubt the presidency before now? Had that office not been desecrated before, and is it not now being desecrated by the thuggish characters that deface its hallowed corridors? As an adviser, I would have asked the president to approach ASUU’s new doubts (not new conditions, by the way) with the kind of self-deprecating humour US President Barack Obama is famous for.

Answering a question on ASUU strike during his last media chat in September, Dr Jonathan said that in the heady days of the Ghanaian ‘revolution’ President J.J. Rawlings closed down universities for a long time in order to reorganise the education system. Though he added he was not thinking in that direction, it was embarrassing and insulting that his mind even wandered in that direction. If he thought nothing of closing down public universities because many around him didn’t have their children attending them, would he also close down private universities if he had his way? By now it must be obvious to everyone that we are dealing with a fascist government, not an elected presidency. (See box). They have begun to see external saboteurs and internal collaborators. They are bypassing a somnolent National Assembly and simply directly deploying the increasingly fascist police force to undermine the constitution and take away people’s rights.

In the weeks ahead, and as the political noose tightens around his neck, a desperate Dr Jonathan will attempt extraordinary measures to keep himself in office. For all patriots, this is the time to abandon neutrality, a time to stand firm against fascism. The challenge before us then is how to guide this rampaging, paranoid bull through the country’s china shop lest we all come to grief. Indeed, the hysterical Mr Wike has managed to run the Jonathan government into a cul de sac. But if history is a guide, it is hard to see the government succeeding in its self-destructive course of action against ASUU. Not only are there no university teachers anywhere to recruit, Nigeria is hardly the right place for any competent teacher to come and offer his services, let alone for pittance and with no equipment to do the job. We are close to an election year; yet, Dr Jonathan is toying with the electorate and displaying unparalleled contempt for the youth. But perhaps we should wait to see what talisman he hopes to mesmerise us with in 2015.