By Canute Tangwa (April 28, 2005)
Because the Government and university authorities were waiting for the barbarians!
Aside: Waiting For The Barbarians is the title of a poem written by the Greek poet CP Cavafy. Once upon a time the celebrated Nigerian journalist Ray Ekpu used Cavafy’s strong poetic and poignant lines to capture vividly the posture and wait-and-see attitude of those who could make or mar in Nigerian varsities.
And now students of the Universities of Yaounde I and Buea are on the rampage clamouring for a number of changes in the university system. They have posted up a list of grievances that legislators, government and varsity authorities must address. Before the students took to the streets what was the atmosphere?
Paraphrase: Why isn’t anything happening in our varsities? Why do legislators, government officials, varsity authorities sit there without legislating on student affairs, without taking pro-student decisions, without attending to student problems?
Answer: Because the barbarians are coming today.
Question: What laws can our legislators make now? What decisions can government and varsity authorities take now?
Answer: Once the barbarians are here, they will pass laws and take decisions.
Question: Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual, to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Answer: Because the barbarians are coming today and they are bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Question: Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
Answer: Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
Question: And what is going to happen to us without the barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Paradoxically, the first salvo came from the Registrar of the University of Buea , Dr Herbert Nganjo Endeley who faced the music in the absence of the Vice Chancellor, Dr Dorothy Limunga Njeuma. He struck the nail on the head when he said in THE POST of April 29, 2005 (No. 0662): “Every student like every human being has grievances… One of the things all of us pray for it (sic) that we should have a university campus. That we should be able to lodge about 60-70% of our students on campus. Then we can give them a university culture. We cannot run a university system where 80-90% of the students are living in the streets. It does not work. That is why we are having the kind of reaction we are having right now….If it were a normal university campus, they will have a strike but they would not go to the streets, because their homes will belong in the campus”.
Conclusion: Informed minds had already seen ominous clouds gathering. This time, legislators, government and university authorities would be hard-pressed to say that students in our temples of learning were politically manipulated. A university culture is a package. Giving students a university culture entails an overhaul of the present university system. That is what it means from whatever angle you look at it.
Comments