The Muffin Man
It is often said that experience is the best teacher, but in the context of our beloved UI'SU, it is obvious experience has not taught us anything. This is not shocking. As a generation of intellectual unionists, we obviously prefer to identify the root causes of our problems and then proceed to repeat them. Not to cast aspersions, but in our case having a sense of sight has not automatically guaranteed having insight or foresight.
Last semester, we blamed the freshers for being naive and gullible, lacking the knowledge of the proper order of things on campus and being a strong factor influencing the various inadequacies affecting the general student body, whether consciously or unconsciously. This time around, we will be pointing the guns at those who have been here for a while and still choose of their own free will to be uninvolved. In our staylites, we have a crop of individuals who are guilty of being unrepentant, of repeating the same mistakes their predecessors made.
Ordinarily, freshmen constitute the bulk of active voters among the UI'SU populace. They are the ones who largely determine who wins an election. However, even then, the major decision-makers and office holders are all returning students. So while we can blame the freshmen for voting in the wrong choice during elections, we can also blame these returning students for being the wrong choice during elections. This would not have been the case had it not been for the fact that some of these stalwarts have chosen, rather foolishly, to sit out every critical political decision-making process affecting the student body. These ones leave the fate of the union to others, leaving others to decide even their own futures on their behalf.
By extension, they become impediments to effective decision-making. This is because when things later go sideways, they are the ones who groan the loudest. Their brilliant and supposedly better ideas are not contributed when the situation is still developing; they only criticise when the situation has matured, when the concrete has been set. This is what happens every election cycle. These supposedly “experienced” minds do not run for offices, attend congresses, engage the leadership of their student body or even vote during elections. Rather, they offer up several different excuses ranging from class to exams to tests or just plain lack of time. These are the kind of individuals who are integrated into the Nigerian society, contributing to the rather large number of apathetic masses.
As for the staylites who chose to remain active in politics, these ones are guilty of employing the same counterproductive techniques the ones before them used. They become puppet masters, tweaking the feelings and ambitions of the freshmen and, by extension, the rest of their constituents to suit their own desires and ambitions. They become godfathers, the ones who decide what gives and takes.
You hear them talk, saying things like, “We got that candidate into the office.” “We secured that hall for him.” And these are assertions that raise the questions of what the candidate managed to accomplish in that office and whether or not he/she was even able to sustain the goodwill that got him into that office. It is at this point that the conversation then becomes a difficult one to have. This is because apart from mobilisation and influencer efforts, it's just vibes and inshallah for most of these “godfathers”. They never utilise the proper mechanisms to get these candidates that they supposedly secured these offices for to be more accountable to their fellow students. There is never a case where they have openly offered constructive criticism. All they offer after elections is silence all round.
In the midst of all these, most staylites are guilty of one more sin. And this is the sin of being arse-lickers. For the average freshman, the terrain is still new, and it is difficult to know who is who. So while the average freshman is still formulating whose ass to kiss, these stalwarts have already perfected the formula. Rather than use their years of experience as students to figure out new ways to make lives better for their fellow students, they would rather use that experience to advance their own personal and career interests. This is further proven by the kind of allegations that float around during election periods in which certain candidates get accused of only running in order to have their CV look good. In order to make their own person look good, they grovel at the feet of their fellow students, promising them heaven and earth just to get elected, only for them to become haughty, cold and distant when they are eventually elected.
Overall, the diagnosis is still the same. The bulk of our student populace is constituted of students who do not know to be involved and do not bother to be or those who just choose to sacrifice the interest of the general for their own personal objectives. Either way, the cycle of irresponsibility and relative lack of concern for actual student oriented unionism continues. In the end, these issues are still on us all.
