Founder of the Latter Rain Assembly, Pastor Tunde Bakare, has lambasted students in the country “for selling themselves cheap”.
Bakare took the stand at the first National Students’ Summit organised by the Campus Life Project, the National Association of Nigerian Students and the Reach Out Integrated in Lagos on Saturday.
Bakare spoke on ‘Campus Life Decay: What Went Wrong?’
The outspoken man of God, who doubles as Convener of the Save Nigeria Group, blamed the students’ union for endorsing the third term agenda of former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
Bakare said, “We need to talk about the catastrophic quality of governance in the student unions with due respect to the few exceptions; we need to talk about how the corruption, aggrandisement, violence, incompetence and cluelessness among Nigerian politicians have become the characteristics of politics and leadership among students on campuses.
“We need to talk about the shameful endorsement of Obasanjo’s third-term agenda in 2005 by the National Association of Nigerian Students then led by Kenneth Hembe.
“We also need to talk about how student union leaders in different universities would scramble to share largesse from Nigerian politicians rather than speak truth to power.
“Before you talk about the profligate spending of politicians in your state capital or Abuja, you need to talk about how student leaders budget millions of naira for phantom phone calls.”
The former vice presidential candidate of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change stated that unlike when there was one major fellowship – the Lagos Varsity Christian Union — when he was a student, the many campus fellowships and churches today “are as powerless and helpless against the ills of the campus society as are the churches and mosques on the city streets.”
He said, “What I find disheartening, however, is the hijacking of student unionism by political godfathers with the aid of their student conspirators who go on to extend the bad governance records of their godfathers within student union circles and beyond, including rigging student union elections, deploying violence, and making themselves perpetual or never-graduating students in order to continue to feast on the perks of office much like their sit-tight political godfathers.”
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