UNITY WITHIN, UNITY WITHOUT BY OMOLE IBUKUN

(My genuine advice to the newly-elected leadership of the Great Ife Students’ Union)

```FOR A UNION FREE FROM IN-FIGHTING!
FOR A UNION THAT’S FIGHTING TO BE FREE!```

Elections have come and gone, but unforgettable beautiful manifestoes remain to be executed; and the position of proscription that the union is coming from requires that the new union leadership hits the ground running, as they have won the mandate of the majority of the politically-active Great Ife students. Given the fact that leadership is not a position, but a task to carry out an action, necessity therefore demands that the critical state of the Great Ife Students’ Union should be salvaged with immediate effect, without waiting for any honeymoon formalities.

Policies of this university’s management have divided the Great Ife Student community over time and this necessitates a need for a UNION that actually unites students. Students who can easily afford the cumulative cost of survival on campus have been separated from the majority of students who can hardly survive because of high cost of living, high fees and the recession hitting most working class families in the country.

 Students who can survive the poor academic conditions of congested lecture halls, high student to lecturer ratio and unavailability of learning facilities in our laboratories and libraries, and still perform with an average academic excellence through the rituals of ‘La Cram, La Pour’, have been separated from majority of students who become victims of mass failure because of these academic conditions. Students who can afford to keep silent in the face of deprivation of their democratic rights to expression, association, assembly and peaceful protest, for fear of suspension, rustication, union proscription or school closure, have been separated from majority of students who are ready to express the needs to have their rights respected peacefully and meaningfully. Students who can afford quality accommodation with all necessary utilities and means to transport themselves to campus, have been separated from majority of students who squat or live in deplorable accommodations on and off campus, where there is no deserving consistent power and water supply nor healthy sanitary facilities, where congestion and pest infestation is the order of the day, for whom transportation to class is practically unaffordable, and for whom security of their lives and properties can no longer be ensured (with bullying, fighting, gang-fighting and other cult-like anti-social vices on the rise).

The campaign has not ended. The new leadership must seek to win over the ‘minority’ that they couldn’t win over during the pre-election campaigns; this time around not with words and promises but with actions and programmes. It would be a big mistake for the union leadership to try to seek alliances with political blocs and political cabals, and believe that would guarantee them a smooth administration and solve all the challenges before the administration. While it is impossible to not have opposition, the union leadership must accommodate all forms of opposition within the student community, as that opposition is a vital part of any UNITED UNION. Intellectual and qualitative opposition ensure the union is balanced with equivalent reaction to every action, and ensure the presence for the friction necessary for meaningful work to get done. The new leadership must therefore not use their words or actions to repress any opposition but must accommodate all oppositions as a challenge to perform to meet the higher desires and aspirations of mass of students.

The unity of a union as a pressure group should not be seen as a necessity to compromise with the university management at every turn, but the university management (though not our personal enemies) represent an interest of profit-making opposite to our welfare interests, and must be treated as such by putting the necessary pressure of them to do the right thing. How do we go about this job of putting the university management in check and putting the university management on their toes, peacefully? What made Great Ife great is not violence, it is our vibrancy. It is not about our many talks about negotiations or diplomacy; it is about how much we have put those diplomatic negotiations into productive practice.

 The greatness of Great Ife is in our collectivism, our intellectualism and our ability to mobilize our mass, our numbers for a certain just cause of rejecting oppression and injustice. The fear of that mass mobilization and our collective will, collective wisdom and collective strength is the pressure that we successfully put on the university management. That has always been the diplomacy of Great Ife. The ability to exert our student power from below through physical mobilization and political radicalization has always been our leverage in negotiations, not empty suspicious concessions.

Meanwhile, manifestoes are proposals on how a students’ union leadership intends to carry on an administration, the direction of how such proposals are executed must be given by a united congress of students. Unity can only be built through this participative and democratic platform of a general congress of students. Unity should not be built at the cost of abandoning principles and turning your backs on the mass of students who are suffering the drastic effects of the underfunding and corruption in the education system. Unity must be built with the mass of students who suffer these realities, who struggle with these realities; because we are the ones who can make any real change possible.

THIS IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD. A CONGRESS OF STUDENTS MUST BE CONVEYED AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE, AIMED AT UNITING THE WELFARE INTERESTS OF ALL TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE GOAL.
 ALUTA CONTINUA,VICTORIA ASCERTA

(Omole Ibukun Ayodele aka. Hon. Ibk is the National Secretary of the Education Rights Campaign and a penultimate year student of the Department of Civil Engineering, Obafemi Awolowo University. He can be contacted on 08172748666)