Joseph Ushie

Being the Text of an Address Presented by Prof Joseph Akawu Ushie at the Reunion of the Alumni of Bendi Technical College, Obanliku Local Government Area, Cross River State, Saturday, November 26, 2022, at Bendi Technical College Compound. Protocols PreambleLet me begin by commending the wonderful and resourceful organizers of this historic […]

My dear Prof Kperogi, Greetings from your beloved country, Nigeria, which is ruling-class-battered, bandaged and bound in cerements for a likely interment. Firstly, I have to address this to as an interpersonal exchange as this would give me the communication the flavour of an informal conversation, and I would, hence, be both brutally frank and […]

Even amidst mourning or in war, people still occasionally laugh, especially when clowns happen around such scenes. That seems to have been the situation with this war declared against a trade union by an entire national government, which is busy deploying every arsenal at its disposal to crush the perceived enemy as if the Government were fighting […]

It was the late St Lucian (Caribbean) poet and Nobel Prize Laureate, Derek Walcott, who wrote: “You prepare for one sorrow, but another comes”. In that same vein, just as I was preparing these clarifications as a response to the cacophonic reactions to the supposed recent urging of Nigerian students by the ASUU President, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke, to […]

I was celebrating this year’s New Yam Festival among my Northern Cross River State communities when congratulatory messages started pouring into my phone from friends, family and fellow members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). The news: I was among those appointed to an ASUU Committee to help in rescuing the members of the […]

“In the opening paragraph to his contribution under the title referenced above, Prof Farooq Kperogi has referred to his support for the cause of ASUU since its 6-month-old strike till now. I am among those who have read his contributions reasonably consistently in the course of this struggle, and I attest to the fact that he has been quite on the […]

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is a union of the teaching staff of public universities in Nigeria. Established first as the University Teachers Association (UTA) in the mid-1970s, ASUU has been such a dogged fighter for the survival of the Nigerian university system, especially through strikes, that once the acronym “ASUU” is […]

Still as within the precincts of the metaphor of the racist knee on the neck of the African American George Floyd, we also consider complicit in the killing of the nation’s university system the Nigerian public who include the parents and students themselves as the replicas of the other three police officers who did nothing while Derek Chauvin’s […]

As children in the typical agrarian world of Northern Cross River State, Nigeria, it was the tradition for mothers to leave their young babies in the care of the older ones while the mothers went to distant farms. Across the day the older children grappled with the occasional frustrating cries of their baby-siblings, sometimes grappled with hunger […]

In the kingdom of the wild, birds found by the roadside a corpse with wings and, believing the deceased was one of their own, they went close to identify the body only to find the corpse with teeth and furs like the rodents’, particularly like the rats’. The birds then sent word to the rats to come pick the dead body of one of their own. When the […]

Welcome to June, which is usually one of my favourite months. Not only June, though. As a receiver of the monthly deception called salary, I love every month that has only 30 days because its distance to the next deception day is usually shorter than January, March, May, July, August, October and December, which are punishingly and frustratingly […]

One’s homestead is a place that is one’s home or one’s place of originor birth. A homestead should, hence, not become unfamiliar to any of itsmembers, no matter how long the one has stayed away from it. But it doeshappen sometimes that one’s homestead can become very unfamiliar. In1978 or so, the Ikom-Obudu Highway was massively reconstructed […]

As I’ve continued to read your comments I’ve continued to feel that Ihave a most forgiving group of friends here. The scolding for my goingAWOL (Away without leave) was mild. The urge that I stay put, like J. P.Clark urging the Abiku child in his poem by this title, is heavy. Someof you gave me the impression you missed my words, even with […]

In the period of my longish absence from this homestead christenedFacebook, something epochal happened. A virus descended from the ChineseWuhan heights and spread itself regally around China and the rest of theworld, killing and traumatizing the human race. From there it madestraight for the Romance countries where it dealt innocent Italy alethal […]