MARKET WOMEN ABUSE OF FEMINISM: UNHOLISTIC APPROACH. In our parlance, the appellation,market woman is generally suggestive of an uneducated, loud-mouthed, uncouth local petty trader that is evidently bereft of sophisticated ideas on any issue beyond her wares. When the other day a former minister referred to a serving minister of the federation as acting like a market woman, I didnt quite get the pejorative connotationof that statement until I saw the uneducated analysis of Ms. Felicia Sanni, a self-styled market woman, of the ongoing ASUU strike on TV.Desperate situations call for desperate solutions and there is no doubt that the crises that are presently bedevilling the higher education sector in Nigeria are such that require some unorthodoxprescriptions. For more than three months now, public universities have been shut down due to the inability of the feuding parties to reach a compromise. The battle line is well-known: ASUU is demanding that government fulfils an agreement it reached with it in 2009on how to save the nations universities from collapse. On the other hand, government is proposing a piecemeal selective approach. That is what has created the debilitating impasse.We have argued on this page that education is too vital to the survival of any nation that it should be treated as a subject beyond politics or evasive polemics. It is not deniable that Nigeria is presently not doing enough, by world standards, in the funding of her childrens education. As far as the government is concerned, there areother competing items for the limited funds available but that is where the question of priority comes in.Closing the campuses down for too long is bad for the simple reason that even if government decides to assume its responsibilities today and meet all the demands of ASUU, as legitimate as they are, the lost academic ground will never be recovered and the bad image that the nations educational system hasfallen into will take a much longer time to redeem. That is why many Nigerians of goodwill, including yours sincerely, have been pleadingthat all parties should find a middle ground and end the strike.It is therefore regrettable, to say theleast, that rather than sit up and tackle the problem squarely, all thatseem to be taking place are crude name-calling and some uncanny stratagem designed to paint the other side black. The other day, the government alleged that ASUU is politically motivated in calling for the repairs of our dilapidating campuses. Such claims betray serious misunderstanding of the depth of the rot that our educational system is in. In the same vein, it should be clear to anyone now that Nigeria is not as rich as she is supposed to be due toseveral factors such as the expanding corruption, oil theft and the lingering insecurity that has imposed a war-like economy on thenation, irrespective of the baseless official claims of all correct.The whole thing took a dramatic dimension last week when a group of women, obviously hired, going under the name of market womenstormed Abuja, feigning the prolonged closure of the universities for their asoebi outing. They lounged into some stupid rationalisation of the crisis at hand. From the statement made by their spokeswoman, Ms Felicia Sanni, it is obvious that they have no idea of what the problems on our campuses are all about. Typical of amarket woman, she gloated that,We have seen their secret, how canstate universities be demanding equal salaries with federal universities, they want to close Nigeria down, if we protest they sayAmerica, America is over 360 years since it gained independence, we are just 53…The President has grown grey hair overnight due to incessant strikes… She added that,We all know what they do with our year-one daughters in the university. We equally know that they sell hand-outs and handbooks. Really?She sounded like a puppet under the pull of some rough strings. The sad part is that whoever engaged her didnt quite brief her well. The solution to the crisis on our campuses cannot be resolved through an Area Girls abusive approach. Neither is the blame allotment that one-sided. Such may work in the crude Nigerian partisan politics arena but it is totally off the mark when we are dealing with issues about the future of our children. The way she made her case based on faulty factual declarations is yet another reason why we should invest a lot more in education. It is quite obvious that ignorance is a disease worse than cancer.Our concerned mothers ought to have been told by those who sponsored them that a university degree without the requisite competence and skill will not fetch their children jobs neither will it prepare them for self-employment, a worse outcome than the present annoying stay-at-home. They shouldalso have been educated about the fact that Nigerian employers do not yet discriminate between graduatesfrom a state university in the villageand a federal university in the city. What is more, professors are not just local or even national commodities, they are actually international hot cakes and all universities strive for universal status.My good friend, Dr. Reuben Abati, in trying to undermine the spontaneous character and the legitimacy of the last fuel price hike the other day alluded to some rioters at Ojota who were handed over designer T-shirts, supplied with jollof rice and wine as well as serenaded with high quality pop music as incentive for rallying against the government. Someone must have learnt a trick from that episode and decided to rent some chubby-looking women, obviouslyempowered beyond their wildest dreams, to embark on an Aluta against ASUU. I must say here that there is really nothing new about that as we have been dealing with shameless crowd renting since the Daniel Kanu concessioned three-Million-Man March of the heady Abacha days. It is probably now the turn of market women, be they at Kokori or at Abuja. Same motive: Kudi.The market women have threatenedto deal with ASUU ostensibly on behalf of Mr. President whose expanding grey hair they found worrisome. They certainly want himto look a bit of an a-young-e. Good. But uneasy, they say, lies the head that wears the crown. From the tone of their threat, I wont be surprised if these market women force their way into our classroomsand laboratories and start to pontificate in place of those professors whose secret they have since discovered.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 21:46:18 +0000
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