Violence is not student activism

THE resort to violence and wanton destruction of property in the name of student protests requires a strong response from school authorities and the government. Recent outrages include rampages by students in Osun State and at the Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti. While student activism and peaceful agitation are legitimate activities in institutions of higher learning worldwide, lawlessness cannot be tolerated, least of all from those expected to become leaders in due course.

When students resort to arson, vandalism and physical assault, they transit from youthful exuberance to criminality. The laws of the land should apply to such deviants: they should be identified, arrested and prosecuted in the courts.

Lawlessness was in evidence last month at ABUAD, when some students who flouted the institution’s regulations and were duly excluded from taking the semester examinations, went wild. They damaged buildings, vehicles and other infrastructure in an orgy of violence. Assessing the damage at millions of naira, the institution alleged that the students looted shops and attacked innocent persons. But this was nothing compared to the mayhem wrought in Osun State by students of the Southern Nigeria Institute of Innovative Technology, Ifewara, who vandalised school property and burnt some structures. Female students of the college reported that they were violently evicted from their hostel, their phones, laptops and other belongings stolen before the mob set the main female hostel ablaze. Their grouse? They claimed to have found out that courses being run at the school were not accredited by the National Board for Technical Education. Did that warrant the violence?

Also last month, borrowing from their undisciplined seniors, some secondary school students in Osun State reacted to a reported decision by the state government to restrict payment for the West African Senior School Certificate Examinations to only a fraction of pupils, rioted in Ile-Ife, crowning their vandalism by setting fire to the building housing the state-owned Orisun FM radio station. Similarly, a protest over amenities at the Yaba College of Technology, Lagos, turned ugly with a group allegedly inflicting damage on property. The police need no prompting before moving in to apprehend offenders or to prevent crimes being carried out.

Student activism and protests have a chequered history everywhere and have often been forces of progress. Youthful and idealistic, students, through lecture boycotts, occupations, rallies and marches, have influenced progress both on the campuses and in the larger society. A strike lasting two years at the University of Paris in 1229-30 is regarded as the earliest significant student strike. It led to reforms at the university and in clerical administration of education. In May and June, 1970, four million students from over 450 universities, colleges and high schools, staged street protests across American cities to protest the US invasion of Cambodia and the Vietnam War, part of the pressure that eventually led the government to withdraw from the war.   A student strike in Hong Kong seeking greater political freedom attracted global attention in 2014 and was remarkable for its peaceful, orderly conduct despite skirmishes with police much later.

Our students need not be violent and lawless. The quality of student activism has diminished greatly over the years. Today’s students should familiarise themselves with the legacy. When Ladipo Solanke and others founded the West African Students Union in London in 1925, they created an intellectual and activist vanguard whose members played leading roles in attaining independence and after throughout the sub-region. Sadly, the idealism, patriotism and global world view that marked Nigeria’s student movement have given way to mercantilism, gangsterism and political prostitution. Nigerian students are more likely to stage protests – often violently – over bread-and-butter issues than the burning economic and political issues affecting society, unlike their forebears in the pre-independence and post-independence eras who were in the vanguard of social justice.

While we urge the students to change and be law-abiding always, we insist that crime should be punished. Students who engage in arson, assault and destruction of property should face the full weight of the law. Failure to punish crime fosters impunity. Pleading for the miscreants as the governor of Ekiti State, Ayo Fayose, recently did for the 21 ABUAD students facing trial over last month’s mayhem at the school is cheap politics, not the preservation of law and order that governors swear to uphold.

While holding the students to account, however, we believe that government at all levels has not been responsible either. By failing to provide adequate facilities and entrenching poverty through corruption, waste and incompetence, students, their parents and guardians have been pauperised. Students who live like the destitute; who lack good food, toilets, libraries and committed and regularly-paid lecturers cannot be expected to agitate for idealistic causes.

Parents should mould their children to be law-abiding and shun violence even when they have a legitimate grouse. There is a need to re-examine the administration and funding of higher institutions. Too many misfits are being appointed vice-chancellors, rectors and principals. Many state governments lack the capacity and resources to run multiple higher institutions, yet they insist on doing so with negative consequences on students, their parents and guardians.

As errant and violent students are brought before the law, incompetent, corrupt and oppressive school administrators and proprietors should also be flushed out.