STUDENTS’ ACTIVISM AND THE NATIONAL POLITICS (Part 2)

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EPISODE TWO

Obed Amenyo Kweku

The national partisan politics has managed its way to metastasized into our students’ activism so much such that their influences on student activists by virtue of satisfying their stomachs have crippled the intensity of students activism.

Students fail to stand and fight for their rights because of the fear of being ripped off from the tokens from their influencers, hence tend to become hypocritic activists fighting the front of their political affiliates.

Tertiary Students Confederation Network (TESCON) of the NPP and the Tertiary Education Institution Network (TEIN) of the NDC in the tertiary institutions have nothing beneficial to champion for the betterment of [ads1]students welfare, rather championing the agenda of their political parties and eventually end it up in the Students’ Representative Councils (SRCs).

Perishability of students’ welfare and rights is when Ministers and MPs sponsor students’ elections because of the realization of how powerful and influential student activists can influence their delivery in their respective offices.

I had no doubt when Ghana’s high commissioner to South Africa came out openly to tell the public that TESCON members would be given more priorities in the job market, (How could you?) what happens to the others? Why won’t that TESCON president in that institution help push the agenda of that Ambassador than that of the students?  This and many, are those who are slowly poisoning the country with nicotinic slow poison, (it starts by shutting down the brain leading to coma and finally death), and with this, I say our country is in a comatose state, a few distance away from death.

However, coma is a reversible condition which can be brought back to normal when we take things serious as citizen professionals.

Today we are experiencing a massive division in NUGS not because there is a god or any supernatural being that is hiding somewhere to cause it.  It is all due to the imposition of these invisible political forces that are operating behind the student activists. It is for these reasons NUGS has not been able to stand tall to front most of the numerous challenges confronting Ghanaian students.

SRCs are still fighting for payment modalities;

Schools are still struggling against exorbitant school fees;

Students are been threatened against examination for their inability to pay full fees in the first semester, these and many others are the reasons for the existence of students activism, but today`s activists have been compromised by the virtue of their political affiliations.

Recall from the episode one of this article and highlight the changes students’ activism is capable of bringing so that we can bring our minds back home as change makers and not just political affiliates.

Episode three brings out suggestions as to what we can do to break this mental embargo to revitalize students activism in our generation.