We all know one of the most tender pressure points in the land of the free (a.k.a America) is Race. In politics, welfare, opportunities, life, everything; even in academia. That’s why, as a Nigerian (where absolutely nothing works in our favour, not even our sameness of race) what I’m about to describe seems like a complete case of first world problems. But I realised that it does not have to be. It actually quite relatable, just not on race levels.

Check it out:

Black students on a campus (Evergreen State College) in Olympia, Washington called for a Day of Absence/Day of Presence protest to demand more inclusion of People of Colour and other minority groups on campus. The way that protest is set up by the organisers, all white people (enjoyers of White privilege) who wanted to be part of it were to vacate the campus for a whole day while only the minority groups remained – Day of Absence. Ostensibly, so the White people could spend a day enduring the feeling of neglect that the minority have so far been subjected to. Then on the Day of Presence, everyone will be back on campus to have a discourse and maybe sing Kumbaya after.

But, it turned out a lot of White people did not understand this. A professor called Bret Weinstein helped the protest protesters echo their thoughts to one of the protest organisers, Rashida Love. He fired her an email, asking her to put phenotype aside (you know since he’s the intellectual biologist that sees no colour and he knows that throwing a big scientific word for race in would intimidate her) and let them reason things out or something like that.

https://twitter.com/TweetGamewashed/status/867881332809936896

The black kids took a wind puff of this e-mail and needed to blow off (on) his head. They staged a quick protest at his office that started with taunts and chants; graduated to someone throwing some water at him and then to yanking off his glasses and dropping it. It finally ended with Campus Police and two other security agencies threatening arrests and brandishing maces. They dispersed the students. No tear gas though.

Speaking of tear gas.

Nigerian students have many problems. But race ain’t one. Strikes are though. The ultimate differentiation between the rich kids and the poor ones (let’s call this class privilege).

The oppressors here are Governors, school administrators and the generality of those in authority whose kids do not have to go through the shit storm they make the poor kids endure in the name of getting an education.

For example, Governor Ajimobi (who has the most exquisite bunch of girls as kids. One of them, Abisola is so privileged, she’s friends with Kelly Rowland and those twins who do something for the Kardashians at their store, Dash. Another one of his daughters, I forget her name, is rumoured to have called LAUTECH students unruly for staging a protest in front of her father, Mr Constituted Authority. But it’s only a rumour). and Governor Aregbesola (no parenthesis will be long enough to explain the follies of this man, so we’ll move on) currently lead Oyo and Osun States respectively. Both states own LAUTECH.

LAUTECH where students have been on strike for almost a year now. First, for eight months because the authorities failed to pay for anything including lecturers’ salaries. That was resolved and they resumed. Now, they’ve been back on strike (for whatever number of weeks going on ad infinitum) because those teachers now refused to teach allegedly because they are still being owed.

Whatever the non-logical explanations anyone has for this bastard situation, you’d think that LAUTECH students are cooped up somewhere coming up with the most creative ways to get their voices heard and ultimately themselves back in school (sorry if this paragraph suddenly took the tone of victim-bashing. It’s not. It’s just what you’d think).

Of course, we leave out the part where they plan a Day of Absence/ Day of Presence. LOL. Can you imagine that LAUTECH students, in whatever number of days it took for the teachers to stop teaching after the first strike action was called off, decided they wanted to show faculty what it felt like for them to be the ones to take a strike action #Day of Absence? LMAO.

First, no Day of Presence will follow for them to even discuss lessons learnt because those teachers would just snooze off the rest of the semester and show up on exam day with questions set by Aries, the god of war. Howboudat for a day of presents uh?

So let’s say the students, tried to stage an angry, biting but still peaceful protest expressing their anger about the strike action? Oh, they did already. And this is what came out of that:

We all got really pissed after that clip was released and there was a lot of backlash for Governor Ajimobi. He may never find his way up to top ten on any governors ranking ever because of it but he’s still in office. So is Aregbesola who has since gone on to appoint his cabinet members more than two years after he got into office and with less than 2 to go (with an explanation that he did want to appoint them while he was in a financial mess that left him unable to pay workers’ salaries. Spoilers: far as we know, he still can’t).

But after we got pissed, and made memes, we moved on. That’s why it’s possible that those students are back on strike now.

This is not a “what if LAUTECH students can protest the way those students in Olympia are protesting” for several reasons principal among which is the fact that they can, given the opportunity. The opportunity being that our rich and privileged class won’t order police action on the student protesters or even ignore them totally. The opportunity being that most of those in authority aren’t sadly way beneath even Professor Whine-stein intellectually and so can actually engage in a dialogue with equally bright students.

This is a “what if those American stuents found themselves in this shtick that LAUTECH students are in?”. Say students of a phantom Trump University were made to lose several days (because we can’t even dare say months) of school because Chancellor D.J.T failed to ensure that lecturers were promptly paid?

Let’s start with the fact that no sane and profit-making news outfit would decline covfefe of their daily protests – from the respective governors’ offices to homes of Deans and Faculty heads. The sit-outs that will grace the National Assembly gates and Osun and Oyo Houses of Assembly are the sort that will get Richard Quest back in Nigeria because even CNN thrives on ratings.

The countless biting commentary authored by students and the trolling of the governors, their wives and kids as they enjoy their own privileged lives would have made for great academic discourse at Harvard or at least a hook in another Queen Bye politically-conscious track.

To be fair to the students, this was good though

Why on earth are LAUTECH students not yet making money off the social ventures they could have started from the chaos by now? Because those American students would have already. The mugs, the websites. Oh Lord the Tees (because who doesn’t love a graphic tee mocking a bespectacled constituted authority?)

Honestly, I’m pretty certain by now, those American students would have forced the authorities to pay all arrears and even sopme advance to the school just to get the menacing students off their backs.

But of course, that’s America, the land of the free.