Alaran Muslihudeen Mayowa is dead. He died in the common room of the Independence Hall, the University of Ibadan, while watching the UEFA Champions League match between Barcelona and Bayern Munich on Wednesday May 6. May Mayowa’s soul rest in perfect peace!
Before Mayowa’s demise, he was a 200-level student of the Department of Health Education and Human Kinetics, Faculty of Education. The condition allegedly leading to Mayowa’s death is sad; also disheartening is the reaction of students who protested the death of their colleague.
Mayowa reportedly slumped and died, possibly from exhaustion since there was a crowd of football lovers in the common room. Satellite television technology has made football easily accessible and it is easier to find a needle in a hay stack than to find a young man who does not love the round-leather game. His parents and relatives will be distraught to hear of what led to his death even as one wishes them the fortitude to bear the loss.
Given Mayowa’s course of study, it is easy to conclude that the young man was simply trying to garner practical knowledge that he would find handy for work life. According to reports, his death would have been avoided if the members of staff on duty at Jaja Clinic, the university’s primary health care centre, had responded in good time when he was brought in. The students alleged that the clinic officials insisted on seeing the young man’s hospital identity card before attending to him. Jaja has a reputation that makes it difficult to deny this allegation given this writer’s experiences on two different occasions in company with patients to the health facility. In the 21st century, this approach to health care is at best anachronistic, especially in an academic environment where research papers on technology and health sciences are readily being churned out. I will return to this issue shortly.
The protest by the students of the university is a predictable one by anyone, who is close to any ivory tower or is a student of university administration. The narrative of Prof. Roger Makanjuola, a former vice-chancellor, in his memoir – ‘Water Must Flow Uphill: Adventures in University Administration’ – comes readily to mind. By design, the idea of a protest is to draw attention to social ills and use it as an avenue to reach out to the authorities on issues that need to be attended to. The hundreds of student protesters, however, did great injustice to the memory of the late Mayowa. Their style was without substance. It was at best an automatic response to the unfortunate death. They stopped traffic flow on the Trunk B road across the university and molested a number of individuals, including journalists, who tried to cover the protest and wanted picture or video evidence to go with it.
The irony even lies in what a number of them said while on the protest –‘we want the world to know what happened at UI’, they chanted. Yet these gentlemen and women alike were not willing to have their faces identified with the protest. They wanted the words out on their own poorly, conceived terms.
A newspaper correspondent with The New Telegraph reportedly had his shirts torn into shreds by some of the students, even as he lost his phones in the melee. Apparently, the students concluded that it was unfair to be part of the protest and then later be identified. For them, the fear of the disciplinary committee of the university is the beginning of wisdom. This then put to question the moral burden they carry in seeking justice for the late Mayowa. They forget that it may be Mayowa’s turn today and another’s tomorrow.
Facebook and Twitter; two of the most prominent platforms in Nigeria, are blank when a search for #MayowaAlaran is drawn. One will have expected undergraduates to marshal a clear action plan for the protests and make available even press releases for journalists and the retinue of citizen journalists who might have been drawn to the issue by human compassion.
Selfies and mentions of human rights organisations would have drawn even international attention to the students’ concerns. One would have expected #JusticeforAlaran to trend, courtesy of an organised protest. One would have expected interviews to be granted by the hall chair of Independence Hall where the student died or even the leadership of the Student Union Government. That door was shut immediately the students took every passer-by with a phone as their enemy.
Information on the issue was also slow. This is 2015 and a single tweet from the university or even a Youtube video from the VC would have made the difference. Jaja Clinic needs to be overhauled in the same way the payment of school fees has been organised. The university needs to come up with creative ways of making registration and capturing of medical history by the clinic part of the requirement for registration.
It will be refreshing to see students walk into the clinic and all they are asked is their matriculation number and not their clinic cards to have them treated. Maybe it will make for a master degree thesis; afterward Google is a product of a scholarly work by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Barcelona went ahead to trounce the Pep Guardiola side by a stunning 3-0 after the world had lost another young mind whose exploits we will never know.
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