The great philosopher and personage of letters were so much engrossed in the problems of Germany and Europe (and the world at large) to the extent that he devoted his time, ruminations and scholarship to finding solutions to them.
In fact, the problems of his immediate society and sub-continent of Western Europe (and of Europe generally as well) occupied his attention completely to the extent that he “divorced himself from everyday life” in his commitment to producing works that would help solve the social and intellectual crises and problems of his time.
I see Professor Friedrich Nietzsche in a number of our public universities’ lecturers. Indeed, over the years the various officers at the national and numerous branch levels of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have traces of the essentially positive Nietzsche in them with respect to their patriotic commitment to proffering solutions to the crises and problems facing our universities and country: this country your country my country our country.
At different times, or from time to time, or time after time our universities’ lecturers who have lived with the sordid realities as with the intellectual problems negating what our universities should truly behave passionately demonstrated through their writings and activism what our universities have been experiencing especially since modern un-adulterated and un-contaminated political foxes, hawks, serpents, vultures and vampires sucking the blood of our universities (and country) came to power.
In every peculiar sense everyone, every Nigerian, who patriotically can read and write and understand passionately and patriotically what they read, knows what our lecturers in our universities through their consistently patriotic Union are talking about and clamouring for. But because very many of them are too timid to resist the intimidation of the foxy and ruthless political powers that be they prefer not to know or understand that our lecturers’ vehement expression of collective feeling or outrage against the modern fiends in power is to halt and amputate the fiends from amputating the valuable values of our country which our universities promote.
Once the highly un-patriotic decisions of our lives and realities which they have blatantly contaminated and adulterated succeed fully in contaminating and adulterating our universities with values that are not values they will end up amputating them, and our universities will die. And once our public universities die our nation will also inevitably die. Without public universities private universities that many of the owners of blood or questionable money have established, are establishing or want to establish will be mere mockeries of what universities should be.
Inevitably, sooner or later, their private universities and private dreams will perish because their ego will compel them to perish academic standards and other standards of value that every ideal university universally promotes. This is not at all an exaggeration. And those who may be or are against ASUU have ceased or are ceasing to understand ASUU’s mind which does not and will never abandon a solid cause of solid public good and value. I am still feeling Nietzsche in ASUU’s cause: “As soon as you feel yourself against me, you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion!” Nietzsche uttered these words in one of his posthumously published statements. It mirrors graphically the pains, passions and conditions of our universities’ lecturers who since 2009, for example, have endured contaminated and adulterated conditions of service which the generality of Nigerians may only be conscious of now through badly or poorly made petrol.
Now let us imagine for one minute what badly or poorly produced students in our universities will do to our country in the short or long run. The development of un-refined or un-fine refinement of our university students by lecturers, whose remunerations in every respect and whose working environment, intellectual and non-intellectual, have been adulterated and contaminated will, from every point of view, compromise and complicate our wellness as human beings and as a nation. Our polluted universities will be everlastingly polluted out of credibility and sustained value and international reckoning if ASUU retreats from the current boundary of its pertinently patriotic activism and struggle on behalf of us all.
I doubt if any group of professionals has been a victim of its professional passion, thoughts and intellect and concern and problems of its body and soul as every committed member of ASUU has been. I think and believe strongly that this is the right time, the correct time, the ample time for our lecturers in all public universities to glue themselves together, as never before, to do their duty to themselves, to their Union, to this fatherland, your fatherland, my fatherland, our fatherland. Our lecturers must say a HUGE and RESOUNDING NO to the foxes, serpents, hawks, vultures and vampires that are sucking our land to replenish their hearts of fiends.
We must say NO and NO to their fiendishness, we must say NO and NO to their diabolically wicked, cruel claws, fangs and teeth and tongues and hearts. Yes. “One has to speak with thunder and heavenly fireworks to feeble and dormant senses,” lacking in virtue and goodness. We must pollute, contaminate, or adulterate them with our virtue and goodness of fire and thunder-works of patriotism.
Thus speaks Afejuku echoing his un-impossible master.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.
