PLIGHT OF THE NIGERIAN STUDENTS

Two students of the Nasarawa State University Keffi were trampled to death and dozen others injured when the sharing of palliatives provided by the government became deadly on Friday 21st March 2024. Bright futures smoldered painfully and prematurely as a sharing formula failed, and a stampede flared, the strongest flexing their muscle. In many ways, it was a metaphor for what Nigeria has become today—a survival of the fittest.

Students of the University had obviously got wind of the distribution and gathered to receive their portions. News of the palliative and proposed distribution had no doubt traveled from mouth-to-mouth like wildfire among the hungry students.

There were bags of rice, of course, whatever was left of what was given, given the propensity of those in power in Nigeria to help themselves first before leaving the scraps for the dogs milling around the foot of the table. There was a planned distribution point and a crowd of students was expected to gather.

So, rationally some chaos should have been expected.

Because the university, like many others in Nigeria, is porous and prone to instances of insecurity and improper identification, the ‘students’ coming for the rice would have included a healthy handful of miscreants and street urchins from the University environment. Some more unruly students would have been expected to feature heavily too.

So, some disturbances would have expected given that many Nigerians have trouble with crowding and crowd control, not to talk of historically poor crowd etiquette.

Many Nigerians prefer a free-for-all than to stand in a queue and wait for anything. The many sharp corners cut around the country have confirmed to many Nigerians that it is only crumbs that come to those who wait.

According to reports, the students overpowered the security men at the gate and broke through the venue of the sharing, resulting in a stampede.

Those in charge of the distribution could have devised other equitable means rather than let students gather in a less than dignified manner and trample each other to death. It was certain that not everyone would get the rice. So, troublemakers likely took advantage of the situation to foment trouble. In the process, bright lights were cruelly put out, breaking the hearts of many families.

Palliatives have become a thing in Nigeria because the country is struck in a rut of poverty and frustration where the only thing happening is that government policies routinely fail. Following the removal of the fuel subsidy and the soaring costs of goods and services, palliatives were devised to paper over the cracks.

But corruption, which trails everything in Nigeria has trailed it too. Dissatisfaction has quickly followed. Early this year, primary school teachers in the Federal Capital Territory downed tools for more than a month. Their grouse was that while palliatives were given to their secondary school counterparts, they were shunned.

The conclusion from the heartbreaking tragedy in the Nasarawa State University Keffi is that Nigeria’s half-hearted measures at tackling hardship in the country is now breeding death. A window has also been opened into the incredible slug that school life has become for many students in Nigeria’s public universities.

Even before the prices of goods and services soared beyond reach, students in many universities were living from hand to mouth. Beyond having to buy usual school stuff, school, there were also the astronomical costs of compulsorily buying textbooks authored by their lecturers, and submitting assignments. Now, there is death too, stalking them, right on their campuses where their minds are supposed to be illuminated for the next stages of their life journey.

The discontent that has been swirling through Nigeria since 1999 has been especially marked in the young, who include many Nigerian students. They swelled the ranks of the EndSARS protesters in 2020. During the last general election, as the Labour Party and Peter Obi, its infectiously popular candidate, made an unlikely push for the country’s highest office, many young people, including numberless Nigerian students, were central to the struggle to liberate their country.

As things have consistently failed to look up in the country, many young people with means have fled the country, preferring everywhere else but the place they call home. While the terrifying turn of events would worry everyone in power elsewhere, those here can afford to look away.

The corridors of power in Nigeria have a history of aloofness to the plight of Nigerian students. In 2022, while Nigerian undergraduates ground out eight months of an interminable Industrial action by university lecturers, many members of the government saw nothing wrong in picking up nomination forms of the All Progressives Congress, with each valued at over a million Naira.

It is doubtful that the deaths in NSUK will cause any seismic changes in the course of events in the country. Beyond perfunctory and even hypocritical memorials and boring speeches, it is doubtful that serious attention will be given to the dead.

While Nigeria marks several more gravestones as stations in its improbably sorrowful journey, may the families draw what little comfort they can from the fact that their children died not as perpetrators of the crimes Nigeria has foisted on people, but while seeking food to keep body and soul together.