When Lecturers Turn Punchbags: The UNIZIK Case -By Abdulkadir Salaudeen

One should wail over a country that has its education bastardized. One should pity a country that compromises its standard of education. One should also mourn a country that separates manners and character from knowledge. A country that even turns its teachers to punchbags has declared a war against development. Such a country will not be able to dream of development let alone develop. 

If Nigeria were a country, we may begin to investigate the general backwardness that now characterizes it from the perspective of manners and character of those that were/are elected to govern it. Most of them are obviously educated and wield different kinds of certificates. Some of them even speak well polished grammar but with catastrophic outcomes in state management.

If teaching is a profession and teachers are professionals, it is both logical and factual to conclude that those ruling us today were taught by teachers. But to repay these teachers’ generosity for making them what they are today, Nigerian rulers package poverty in the name of  salary to reward for teachers. They mockingly tell these teachers that their reward is in heaven.

While previous generation of students, who are now rulers today, punish teachers from their vantage position of power (as policy and law makers), the present generation of students, not yet in power, are in a hurry to turn their teachers to punchbags even as students. They could not hide their disdain for teachers who are more or less humiliated beings (at least in Nigeria). This gives a hint of what the future of teachers would likely look like in the future. The present is already frightening.

Can anyone imagine that a student could have the gut to slap a lecturer? This question belongs to the past. It is an appropriate question to ask students in the 1970s, 1980s, and maybe 1990s, and the answer would be: “is he or she mad?” Because it is unthinkable, I mean unimaginable, that a student would slap a lecturer. But to Gen Z students, slapping a lecturer is not just imaginable, lecturer can be slapped for fun. And the best the lecturer can do is to try all his best to prove to the world that he or she is not at fault.

This is my interpretation of Dr Chukwudu Okoye’s reaction to that  spoilt and mannerless “kid” from Nnamdi Azikwe University who turned him to a punchbag. She fought hard as shown in the viral video and tore the lecturer’s cloth for interrupting her while recording a video in the university hallway. How was she interrupted? Because the lecturer gently tapped her as he managed to walk through the narrow hallway and said “excuse me.”

Many commentators expressed annoyance; not at the student but at the lecturer. According to them, “the lecturer should have beaten her to stupor. He should have taught her the lesson of her life.” But Dr Okoye, in my opinion, should not be blamed for his attitude and composure for three reasons. 

One, since lecturers are disdained by government, he might not have the backing of the school authority except he could prove beyond reasonable doubt that he is the victim not the victimizer. Two, he might be too feeble to fight the student due to hunger—courtesy of unpaid salaries. Many lecturers started receiving their January salaries on the 41st of January and one could not be sure if Dr Okoye had received his salary or not when the student turned him to a punchbag. Lastly, wouldn’t it be disgraceful for Dr Okoye—an elderly man with visible grey hair—to fight a mannerless “kid”—A female for that matter?

Though the UNIZIK management promised to investigate the matter with the seriousness it requires, I advise the management to suspend the student in question (if she had not been suspended) pending the outcome of the investigation. No one should conclude that this can only happen in the South or Southeast. Victimization of lecturers by students is not peculiar to any region, ethnic or even religion. It is a general thing across the country. 

While the student in question is apparently from the South and maybe of Igbo extraction, she is mannerless not because she is an Igbo but because she lives in a country where teachers are not valued. I wrote about a Yoruba student from the University of Ilorin who brutalized her female lecturer on this page sometime in 2021. He was immediately expelled by the school management. 

Just last month in Kano State Polytechnic, a Hausa female student sent a thug—her boyfriends—to torture a lecturer whom she alleged was an obstacle to her academic aspirations. The lover thug brought a cutlass along with him with which he macheted the lecturer who sustained serious injuries.

I have written quite a number of articles to argue that tertiary education is not for all and sundry. Knowledge acquisition in tertiary institutions is too serious an endeavor to be allowed to be ridiculed by quacks and the mannerless who, due to lack of home training, will always misbehave like kids even after attaining the legal age of majority (adulthood). Knowledge acquisition in higher institutions is not meant for spoilt kids who are mistaken for adults. For, they lack the character to be students and it might be too late to inculcate in them the necessary character that naturally comes with knowledge acquisition.

Governments, at all levels, should make teachers look respectable and honourable by making teaching profession appealing. Teachers and lecturers cannot look wretched and famished with sunken eyes and cheeks; they cannot be seen in tattered cloths and worn out shoes and expected to be respected by Gen Z students (especially when they look far better than their teachers). As it is, Nigerian teachers are too wretched to be admired due to poor remuneration. It is one of the reasons they are disdained and brutalized by students.

I join other well-meaning Nigerians to condemn the  brutal treatment of innocent teachers and disdain for responsible lecturers who are the brains behind the success and development of the modern world. If Nigeria were a reasonable country, not a shithole, it will recognize its intellectuals as the powerhouses of development. It will, as a country, prioritize their welfare and protect them from abuse.  

Abdulkadir Salaudeen 

salahuddeenabdulkadir@gmail.com