A young lady was angry that students are being told to use their time at home during the ongoing ASUU strike to grab a skill, learn a trade or do something productive. I really couldn’t understand why she was furious with that advice.
So, ASUU is on strike, and no one knows how long that would last. What do you expect people to tell students? They should be angry, protest, block the roads, break down school buildings, stone government officials?
Certainly, no one is happy about these hurdles that young people have to face. But the best thing young Nigerians can do for themselves is to understand that they’re waging a war against a system that isn’t built to allow their prosperity by default. Yes, I said so.
I remember when after being unable to find a good-paying job initially, I settled for freelancing, it still wasn’t easy. No power supply, I had to buy power banks (like many are currently resorting to inverters following the grid collapse and fuel price hike).
You can either sit and keep lamenting, coming online every day to complain and talk about everything going wrong, or you can choose to fight! Fight for your life. Fight for your future. Fight for your pocket. Fight to build up yourself to be someone who can actually drive change in your community.
So my response to the lady’s outburst was this: Whether or not you choose to do something with the strike period, that time will still pass, and you won’t be in school. ASUU doesn’t care about you; the Federal Government doesn’t care about you. Do YOU care about YOURSELF?
PS. For those who’d talk about PVC, I totally get it. But I promise you that changing this country isn’t going to happen overnight by just one casting of vote. So while you wait to exercise your voting right and you hope to bring the right people into power who would do the magic and change things, KEEP FIGHTING FOR YOURSELF!