AFAS Call off party: For what?

By Tijani Abdulkabeer

The University of Ibadan resumed a new academic session in February, but less than three weeks into the first semester, classes were suspended. The reason is not strange to everyone: University lecturers throughout the country embarked on a strike due to the government’s failure to meet its demands; including issues relating to the revitalization of universities and lecturers salaries and allowances. These were the very same demands that led to the nine months strike in 2020 but as usual, the government has a long history of blaming the economic situation on its failure to address the demands.

When the strike started, the greatest concern for students was not the suspension of classes, but rather the uncertainty of its duration in a country where government officials prefer to loot the nation blind, than seeing students return to classes. For eight months since February, students were stranded, all of us, in our respective corners. In a normal turn of event, the university should be rounding up with this current session, but because we have a government that lacks empathy, for eight months, students were clouded by the uncertainty of their educational and career advancement.

Fast forward to eight months after, we all are back in classes, but not with the energy we resumed with in February. But one would still expect that students place their full course onto their educational paths, especially since the abridged calendar showed eleven weeks for lectures, but here we are in the faculty of arts, in the midst of the abnormal semester, the students association is proposing a call off party for AFASites.

This party, according to the social director, is to “welcome students back to school as we know the academic activities will be heavy on us,” but hundreds of students like me who are just resuming after the long protracted strike sees this decision as another distraction. It offers a telling case into how students’ leaders shift frivolities into the forefront at the expense of our academic responsibilities. The whole motivation to focus on academics has expired. Many students cannot even remember most of the things they were taught earlier this year. What about the new students that have barely received a week of lectures when the lecturers embarked on the strike? Yet, they left this for us to battle alone and suddenly want to choose merriment.

This gets me wondering. Why is it that the executive council is pushing for a party? There was a strike — for God’s sake! — that was suspended conditionally with available indices showing that schools might be closed again. If this happens, by the time we resume again, these executives would perhaps want to justify another call off party for a reason yet to be known.

Ordinarily, the legislative council is supposed to be the one vetting every single activity of the association, but this is the result you get when the house is not premier in their style of legislating. It begs the question of the priority of these honourables as students’ representatives.

Like the social director, the president also claimed that the party is going to hold in isolation, since they are not going to be spending from the association purse. According to him, it is the reason why they did not present the event to the house for proper scrutiny. But in the real sense, an event like this comes with financial implications and as long as the association name is tagged alongside the party, then the association is involved.

The social director stated that the funds are coming completely from their sponsors, but as a faculty association that has a history of always playing the same script, that would be too difficult to accept as the truth. The case of the last administration is enough reason why you want to give that a second thought.

When we went on this strike, it sent a signal that we have serious leadership issues in this country, making it clear that the demands of the striking lecturers are too real, especially considering the way government officials mismanage public funds, but it becomes a complex one if students leaders like the executive council in AFAS are not picking lessons from the indices around. It should not just be the case of rolling out activities to be executed in office, but rather more of representing well the students’ voices that they stand for.