The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, Calabar Zone has faulted the proposed Student Education Loan of the Federal Government describing it as a calculated move to make struggling Nigerian students perpetual debtors.
Addressing a press conference in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State capital on Monday, the Zonal Chairperson of ASUU, Dr Happiness Uduk, said it was disheartening that the people who attended schools on scholarship, enjoyed meal subsidies, bursary awards among others were the ones making some of these obnoxious policies adding that the union would not relent in opposing such policies.
Uduk in a statement jointly signed by the eight union Chairpersons reasoned that instead of giving loans for students’ education; FG could use the money for interventions in higher institutions.
She added that such a move would bring about a positive turnaround of events that would make the institutions self-reliant with highly subsidized tertiary education in the country.
Uduk said “It is disheartening that people who attended schools on scholarship, enjoyed meal subsidies, free laundry services and bursary awards are the same running our economy today. Their Children are on scholarships in the best foreign universities in the world but after siphoning our economy, they turn around to impose a strangulating Education Loan on taxpayers’ children so that they will be enslaved and remain indebted to the country forever.
“They do not mind the devastating effect of this scheme on the country such as depression, suicide, and colossal loss of intellectuals.
“To this end, we vehemently condemn the idea of Education Loans and state clearly that using the money for intervention in higher Institutions will bring about a positive turn-around of events that will make our institutions self-reliant with highly subsidized tertiary education in Nigeria.”
The ASUU chairperson called on the Federal Government to come to a renegotiation table and reconvene a committee to review the agreement reached by ASUU leadership and Prof. Nimi Brigs-led Government committee with the view of adjusting the document according to the current economic realities to have an acceptable salary structure for university lecturers.
She also condemned the indiscriminate proliferation of universities in Nigeria without adequate funding by both the Federal and state governments noting that the 2020 ASUU-FGN Memorandum of Action (MoA) which stressed the need to review the NUC Act to make it more potent in arresting the reckless and excessive establishment of universities be fully implemented.
“We urge the President Tinubu-led administration to refrain from further proliferation of universities and rather consolidate on the already existing ones. What we need are universities that are adequately equipped and empowered to address the challenges confronting Nigeria not glorified schools,” She said.
Russia is ready to negotiate with all parties involved in the war in Ukraine, but Kyiv and its Western backers have refused to engage in talks, President Vladimir Putin said in an interview aired on Sunday.
Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most deadly European conflict since World War Two and the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
There is, thus far, little end in sight to the war.
The Kremlin says it will fight until all its aims are achieved while Kyiv says it will not rest until every Russian soldier is ejected from all of its territory.
“We are ready to negotiate with everyone involved about acceptable solutions, but that is up to them – we are not the ones refusing to negotiate, they are,” Putin told Rossiya 1 state television.
An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Putin needed to return to reality and acknowledge it was Russia which did not want talks.
“Russia single-handedly attacked Ukraine and is killing citizens,” the adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted.
“Russia doesn’t want negotiations, but tries to avoid responsibility.”
‘NO OTHER CHOICE’
Russian attacks on power stations have left millions without electricity, and Zelenskiy said Moscow would aim to make the last few days of 2022 dark and difficult.
“Russia has lost everything it could this year. … I know darkness will not prevent us from leading the occupiers to new defeats. But we have to be ready for any scenario,” he said in an evening video address.
The Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff said there was still a threat of air and missile strikes on critical infrastructure across the country.
Russian troops had shelled dozens of towns and positions along the front line, it said in a Facebook post.
Zelenskiy, referring to a strike on the southern city of Kherson on Saturday that officials say killed at least 10 people, vowed, “We will find every Russian murderer”.
Putin accused the West of trying to cleave Russia apart.
“I believe that we are acting in the right direction, we are defending our national interests, the interests of our citizens, our people. And we have no other choice but to protect our citizens,” Putin said.
Asked if the geopolitical conflict with the West was approaching a dangerous level, Putin said: “I don’t think it’s so dangerous.”
Putin said the West had begun the conflict in 2014 by toppling a pro-Russian Ukrainian president in the Maidan Revolution protests.
Soon after, Russia annexed Crimea and Russian-backed separatist forces began fighting in eastern Ukraine.
“Actually, the fundamental thing here is the policy of our geopolitical opponents which is aimed at pulling apart Russia, historical Russia,” Putin said.
Putin casts the conflict in Ukraine, which he calls a “special military operation,” as a watershed moment when Moscow finally stood up to a Western bloc that he says has been seeking to destroy Russia since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Ukraine and the West say Putin has no justification for what they cast as an imperial-style war of occupation.Putin described Russia as a “unique country” and said the vast majority of its people were united in wanting to defend it.
“As for the main part – the 99.9% of our citizens, our people who are ready to give everything for the interests of the Motherland – there is nothing unusual for me here,” Putin said.
“This just once again convinces me that Russia is a unique country and that we have an exceptional people. This has been confirmed throughout the history of Russia’s existence.” reuters.com
There is probably no “indigenous” Lagos family that is more famous than the Tinubu family. But, although the family is now clearly culturally Yoruba, its ethnic provenance is traceable to what is now Borno State, according to Lagos historians, underscoring the historical and sociological inaccuracy of notions of ethnic purism in Nigeria.
The patriarch of the Tinubu family, historians of Lagos say, was a Kanuri man known as Momodu [it was most probably Modu since Kanuris tend to shorten Muhammad to Modu] Bugara who was also alternately called Momoh Abubakar, Momoh Bukar, or Alfa Ibunu. He was an Islamic scholar who migrated from the defunct Bornu Empire to what was then the Lagos Colony in the 1800s and achieved some renown in the Lagos society.
In the mid-1800s, he was employed as an Islamic spiritual guardian by Madam Efunroye Tinubu, a famous wealthy slave trader, power broker, and agitator in Lagos (who was later banished to Abeokuta by the Lagos Oba of the time). In time, the spiritual guardian fell in love with his employer, and they got married.
But the marriage didn’t produce children. Apparently, the childlessness of the marriage was a consequence of Madam Tinubu’s infertility because she consented to Bugara marrying other women with whom he bore children.
A mark of the cordiality that existed between Madam Tinubu and Alfa Bugara in spite of Bugara’s marriage to other women and having children by them was evident in the fact that Bugara’s children adopted Tinubu as their family name even though they didn’t share any filiation with Madam Tinubu.
I distilled these tidbits about the history of the Tinubu family from an insightful inaugural lecture titled “The Undertaker, the Python’s Eye and Footsteps of the Ant: The Historian’s Burden” delivered by Professor Siyan Oyeweso at the Lagos State University (LASU) in 2006. Oyeweso, one of Nigeria’s well-regarded historians who had an extensive academic career at LASU, now teaches at the Osun State University.
Professor Oyeweso quoted Madam Tinubu’s biographer by the name of Oladipo Yemitan as saying that while most people who bear the Tinubu name were children of Bugara who had no direct blood link with Madam Tinubu, scions of her former slaves and relatives from Abeokuta also bear it.
“During this association of Momoh Bukar and Efunroye Tinubu, the latter’s name was so pervasive and all-embracing that all within the household perforce assumed the name ‘Tinubu’,” Oyeweso quoted Yemitan to have written. “Included in this household were the children of Momoh Bukar by his other wives and Madame Tinubu’s relatives from Abeokuta who had joined her in Lagos and lived with her. Of course, a number of slaves also assumed the name.”
Nonetheless, based on my own knowledge of the people and sociology of Kanem-Bornu, Momodu Bugara was not Kanuri—at least not on his patrilineal side. He was most certainly a Shuwa Arab. Shuwa Arabs, who have been integral to the Bornu society for centuries and who number a little over a million in contemporary Borno State, are called “Baggara” [i.e., cattle herders] by Middle Eastern Arabs. I am certain that “Bugara” is the corruption of “Baggara” by Lagosians of the 1800s.
Although several Baggara people (whom Kanuris call “Shuwa Arabs”) still speak their dialect of the Arabic language, often called Chadian Arabic in the linguistics literature, many of them have intermarried with the dominant Kanuri people in Borno and have adopted the Kanuri language. The late Abba Kyari was a Kanurised Shuwa Arab/Baggara. For all you know, Abba Kyari and the “Bugara” line of the Tinubu family in Lagos may share distant ancestral links!
Now, why is this history important? For one, it helps to exemplify the complexity and syncretism of ethnic identity in Nigeria. For another it says something about the name “Tinubu” particularly in light of Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s declaration that he wants to be the next president of Nigeria.
When Professor Oyeweso delivered his lecture in 2006, Bola Tinubu was the governor of Lagos State. This fact wasn’t lost on Oyeweso.
“Mr. Vice – Chancellor, Sir, today, the current administration of Lagos State is headed by a Tinubu,” he said. “The Tinubu’s [sic] are also generally acknowledged as Lagosians. Another Tinubu headed the Lagos State Civil Service for five years. Others had distinguished themselves in journalism, security and community services, the organised private sector and in other walks of life.”
But this is where Oyeweso got it all wrong. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not a member of any version of the Tinubu family. He is neither from the original Abeokuta Tinubu bloodline, the “Bugara” pedigree, nor the slave line of descent.
Bola Tinubu is from a town in Osun State called Iragbiji, which is the headquarters of Boripe Local Government Area. His older sister is the mother of Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola, the current governor of Osun State. By several credible accounts, including from informants in Iragbiji, Bola Tinubu’s original name was Amoda Lamidi Sangodele.
Amoda is the Yoruba Muslim domestication of Ahmad (which underwent phonetic transformation from Ahmad to Amadu to Amoda). The vowels in the name (“o” and “a” were merely transposed.
Lamidi is the Yoruba Muslim domestication of Abdulhamid. As I wrote in my July 13, 2014, column titled “Top 10 Yoruba Names You Never Guessed Were Arabic Names,” because of Yoruba people’s fondness for the short forms of names, they often dispense with “Abdul” in Muslim names that begin with that prefix. So that leaves us with Hamid.
Now, there is something some people call the “h-factor” in Yoruba, which is the tendency for Yoruba speakers to unconsciously eliminate the “h” sound in words in which it is normally pronounced and to add it to words that don’t have it when they encounter a foreign language. So “eat” is often pronounced as “heat” and “heat” is pronounced as “it.”
Given this phonological characteristic, “Hamid” becomes “Amid,” but the interference of the “l” sound in “Abdul” also causes it to be rendered as “Lamid.” Like in all Niger Congo languages, it’s unnatural for words to not have a terminal vowel in Yoruba, so a terminal vowel is added to Lamid to produce Lamidi.
In other words, in his current name, only “Ahmed” is faithful to his original name since Amoda is the domestication of Ahmad, which is often orthographically Anglicised as “Ahmed.”
Pastor Tunde Bakare helped to push this aspect of Tinubu’s past into the center of national consciousness during a dishonest sermon in December 2020 that pretended to defend Tinubu. In my December 26, 2020, column titled “Bakare Didn’t Defend Tinubu; He Defanged Him,” I unpacked Bakare’s sly unmasking of Tinubu’s identity chicanery.
I wrote: “In Bakare’s political homily, he basically affirmed all the hitherto fringy whispers about Tinubu: that he is from Iragbiji in Osun State; that his current name is not his original name; that he has disowned his biological parents and ‘adopted’ the Tinubu family of Lagos with whom he has zero consanguineal affiliation; that the late legendary Alhaja Abibat Mogaji of Lagos is not Tinubu’s biological mother…”
It’s also intriguing, by the way, that “Mogaji,” the last name of Tinubu’s adopted mother, is the Yoruba domestication of the Hausa name Magaji, which means successor or inheritor. I am curious to know what Alhaja Abibat Mogaji’s ancestral story is. Like her last name, Tinubu’s daughter, Folashade, has become an inheritor of Alhaja Abibat’s “Ìyál’ọ́jà of Lagos” title and privileges.
Well, I can understand Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s opportunistic adoption of the Tinubu name as his family. After all, most people identified with the Tinubu family name in Lagos today aren’t related to Madam Efunroye Tinubu who popularised it in nineteenth-century Lagos.
If descendants of Kanurised Shuwa Arabs (or Baggara) can be Tinubu, why not an Amoda Lamidi Sangodele, a Yoruba man from Iragbiji? But I don’t and can’t understand why he would also “adopt” Alhaja Mogaji as his mother to the point of shunning the funeral of his own biological mother in Iragbiji, according to the late Yinka Odumakin. Well, make of that what you will.
Elder statesman, Chief Reuben Fasoranti on Tuesday expressed optimism that the issues of federalism and restructuring of the country would come to reality should the National Leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, become the nation’s president in 2023.
Fasoranti stated this while receiving members of the South West Agenda for Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu (SWAGA 23) at his country home in Akure, the Ondo State capital.
Fasoranti stated that with Tinubu’s track record he deserves to be elected president come 2023 in order to turn around the fortunes of the country positively.
He emphasised that with Tinubu as president, all the prayers of Afenifere for Nigeria to be restructured would be answered. He further prayed for the desire of the APC national leader to be fulfilled.
“Tinubu has my total suport. Majorly from his activities and track record, he deserves to be there. Someone told me about his ambition five days ago. May his prayers be answered. When he gets there, he will do all we want.”
Earlier, the National Chairman of SWAGA, Senator Dayo Adeyeye, who solicited the support of the foremost Yoruba organization stated that Tinubu had always been part of Afenifere who will listen to the yearnings of the group.
Adeyeye said with the arrangement and agreement already established, the next president must be from the Southern part of the country.
While stressing that Tinubu is not aware of what they are doing, Adeyeye urged everyone within the South-West to rally support for him.
“If it must come to the South-West, the best person that fits the race is Tinubu, hence the need for everyone in the region to support him in order not to create a division.
“With Tinubu in the race, the South-East and South-South will have no option than to support him.”
