Day one lecture ‘Wahala’

Fellow students,

Please permit me to discuss the matter of our Institution (G.I.J.) again. I’m truly troubled because of the attitude I saw on display yesterday.

I wish to state tentatively, that this write-up is at the behest of what went on Monday, 12th February 2018.

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I am no journalist, not in any sense of the word. I would have written a reportage with the headline AUTHORITY DRIVES STUDENTS OUT OF LECTURE HALL but rather I am just a student of a Journalism Institute.

I modify space or rather create living or livable and sometimes unlivable environment.

I am not an aspirant either, but I would not for the life of me keep quiet at a time like this, when all pressure groups including LOPA (I smile) and even the Revolutionist that stands for student interest are quiet.

Silence would mean a tacit approval and acceptance of things as they are.

I am cynic. A thorough going pessimist and a realist. GIJ is as is, things are and they exist in different layers even though the SRC assures us everything will be fine.

Nothing is black or white and truth, to the postmodernist, varies or depends on who is telling it. What is it I will not be quiet about? Student denied of Lecture halls. But as I told my friends when we started this conversation, that I am conflicted and have many thoughts on this. Hope, in a way is the greatest of all evils. It prolongs human misery.

The hope that things will be better, especially when there is much against this hope, is to prolong our misery. Herein is my first conflict. I am agitating for change. I hope change is possible. But I also believe such a hope prolongs my misery.

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The cycle of prolonging seem to me to have no end in sight. In GIJ, it does look like it will only get worse. The institute has, by convincing the student populace and other external enemies, militarized the population. And the most unfortunate thing in this has happened at the level where critical thinking is a luxury.

In my brief study of history, I have come to the conclusion that historical events do not have a single cause, but that their causes go back decades in an unbroken continuum of cause-effect. What are we to do in such a scenario? What can each of us do to affect the cause of history or rather to improve the present?

Are we to watch helplessly as history unfolds before us? How do we become participants in changing the course of history, to write a different history?

These and many more questions are what we are called to reflect upon.

Thank You.

Voice of the voiceless weekly columns.

Written by:- Cedric K. Afewu (The curious mind)