n the last few weeks, President Olusegun Obasanjo has embarked on a verbal rampage against the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the national association of university dons. While the basis of this unrelenting verbal attacks remains mysterious - given the fact it is not ASUU, but the other unions in the universities that are currently on strike - it has become imperative that someone talks back at this clumsy president who seems to have turned insults and abuses into the directive principle of state policy - and even travels with it!

What is the basis of this less-than-presidential attacks from a president that sees himself as Nigeria's underserved gift of grace? Behind all these is the perennial request of the national union of university academics for coming to terms with the collapse of our educational structures and the resultant problems that have arisen with this, including remuneration, infrastructure, administration and finance. But at the time of writing this, in spite of the totally objectionable conditions of our universities, ASUU has not called out its members to withdraw their services yet. It has only served noticed. The other unions on the campuses, which are on strike, have their reasons and one cannot even attempt to defend those reasons. The only wonder is, why is the president attacking the union that is not currently on strike, leaving aside those unions on strike? One can guess that his advisers, one or two of them who have been able to pick up the courage, must have pointed out to Olusegun Obasanjo that ASUU is not currently on strike even as he lambastes the dons almost on a daily basis. His response would most lkely be, "I don't care, they are all the same to me"!

Given Obasanjo's pagan pride, it would be difficult for him to desist from abusing his set target. Even those around him who attempt to urge him away from his constant un-presidential verbal resort, would be quick to remember that Obasanjo has a passionate hatred of intellectuals or those who 'pretend' to be his mental superiors.

In the last few weeks, these abuses have sunken the office of the president to such a level that it is incumbent upon those of us who care about public decency to challenge the president, and in fact, put him on leash.

What insults is he yet to heap on a union to which some of us proudly belongs? Here him at Calabar last month: "It is utterly irresponsible and immoral for university teachers to disturb students having their examinations. Lecturers are the bane of the country and most of them have contributed nothing to the nation yet they still print handouts and sell and even harass female students." More than a week ago, he again repeated this charge and added that he was going to try his hand on one of those medieval laws that will characterize teaching as "essential service" therefore making it illegal for teachers to go on strike. The next day after this, he said at the Nigerian law School that "we will fight them (lecturers) and God will fight them too". It is obvious that Obasanjo finds it quite painful that he cannot order soldiers to shoot at these lecturers as he seems to have chosen to do at the slightest irritation these days, and as he would have ordered when he was a military head of state.

To say that Obasanjo insults and disparages people publicly and regularly is not to say anything fresh. But, we must insist that there is a level below which any one who claims to embody our democracy cannot descend. There are several samplers of his predilection to insult, which is increasingly becoming part of our morbid national entertainment.

Only a few weeks ago, returning home from a trip, this writer met his old-school mate and friend, Simon Kolawole, the editor of The Week magazine who recounted what would pass for an ordeal in the hands of Olusegun Obasanjo after the monthly Media Chat in which he participated. As is characteristic of Simon, he has asked Obasanjo some legitimate, but cheeky, questions, which Obasanjo (obviously on the strict advice of his minders) answered without abusing him. But, away from the television cameras and Simon's compatriots, Simon alleged that Obasanjo called him a "fool" and "idiot" for asking those questions! The guy was too shocked to react to the president's uncouth language, but he could not continue with the dinner he and the others were having with the 'abuser-in-chief'. The very well brought-up young man he is, he refrained from asking Obasanjo for due apologies.

One can go on with stories of even eminent Nigerians that Obasanjo has insulted, including a prominent traditional ruler in his homestead of Yorubaland, who promptly reminded his fellow monarchs present that he had warned them that the man (Obasanjo) would abuse anyone who tried to caution him on the less than savoury path he has been threading.

But, this man has gone on for too long and someone or some people need to stop him. Like he was given to describing Ibrahim Bababngida, in a more wholesome way, he (Obasanjo) is the contemporary drunken man who must be guided carefully out of the chinaware shop so as prevent him from breaking the whole pack of wares.

We all cautioned the then military governor of Lagos State, Michael Akhigbe, when he called Obasanjo names in the 1980s, because we felt he did so for indefensible reasons, and not, as many claimed, because Obasanjo was a more senior officer. What was an officer worth in Babangida and Abacha days, and even beyond? If they were not prostrating - like Diya, they were looting - like Abacha, or doing both - like you-know-who.

The way Obasanjo has carried on over ASUU in recent times, he has pretended to more patriotism than the ASUU leadership and membership. It is important to tell the president that he has not shown more patriotism than many of us. He is not in any way an arch-patriot. We do not know of even one among those who have ruled this country. When he was making separate peace with a collective threat in 1979 and in 1993 - and at other times - some us, his compatriots, were in the trenches, at our posts and in numerous other little ways, battling the odious system, which he had helped to impose on our country in 1979 and in 1993.

This is not to talk of several academics who could have left this country either temporarily or permanently, but stayed back to help build the future of the country. Obasanjo with his pride of lions in power is no more patriotic than these fellows.

It is indeed a matter for serious concern that Obasanjo possesses an unusual ability to fritter away public confidence, trust and acclaim. And he seems not to care. If not that things have come to a sorry past, how could Prof. Sam Aluko, another patently embarrassing figure of our recent history (not to talk of his more embarrassing son in the national assembly) be saying that nonsense about comparing Obasanjo to the larcenous and evil general. This should be worrisome because no matter how bad things have turned out under Obasanjo, he is not to be compared with Abacha, or even Babangida, the other fugitive figure of the slow-grinding order of divine justice. But that is another matter entirely.

If all that Obasanjo has said against the academy and the academic are allowed to pass without a response, people might begin to believe him that Nigerian academics are staff-club freaks, who teach one hour a day, drink long, sleep with female students and then return to demand greater pay. What is ASUU's demand that has provoked these unfortunate repeated outbursts? The Union is only demanding among others that the government honours an agreement it freely entered into. The question then is, why did the president characterize the academic and the academy in this way?

For a country that is yet to produce a ruler that took even remedial courses in a university -except the 84 days of that ambivalent government called the ING - it is understandable that you can find that level of ignorance about the work and life of an academic as the president has betrayed. Even a year of pre-degree course in a good university will teach anyone that one hour of quality lecture in a day, with three hours of robust discussion at the staff club over a quality larger beer, can be more useful for national development than all the time spent by those elected ruffians in those disgraceful assemblies, national and state. What quality deliberations have come out of that National Assembly -or the cabinet - which have proved to be more concerned with the grievous conditions of ordinary Nigerians in Oron, Katsina-Allah or Ajegunle than the welfare and gluttony of its members?

And then the less than presidential charge that lecturers sleep with the girls on campus -consenting adults who have not taking their case to the travelling president! (Augustus Aikhomu, while in power, also made the same allegation, which just shows how so much these fellows covet our girls, and don't we see them when they come to pick them in the nights for their many merriment!) The less that is said about that the better. Since people know that the president is a tower of moral strength when it comes to women - 18 wives, by self account, at the last count - he is eminently qualified to castigate anyone who lacks comparable moral restraint. Only this: It is arguable if Aso Rock, yesterday and today, is more sexual than an average university, in spite of the number of civil whores that clutter our female hostels. But, at least we have one piece of evidence of the prurient nature of that villa when one of its recent maximum tenants gave up the ghost on the prurient laps of oriental temptations!

Instead of spending his time finding powerful answers to many of the pressing, fundamental questions confronting the Nigerian state and the Nigerian commonwealth today, Obasanjo is busy abusing people and enumerating the number of girls who have parted their laps at the behest of teaching rascals.

When he said the University of Ibadan moved from being among the best ten in the Commonwealth to a much lesser category, what point was Obasanjo making? By stating this fact, he located the problem brilliantly, only for him to lapse into elementary causality. So, who is responsible? For the president, it is the "striking" lecturers - his staff-clubbing, sexually inclined characters? If a student wrote a term paper for me and produced this kind of low-quality causality, I will definitely score him a c-minus.

Were the lecturers responsible for the direct and organized devastation of the academy in the 1980s and 1990s under IBB and Abacha? Were they responsible for the almost complete erosion of social safety nets since the mid-1980s Nigeria that drove many intellectuals out of Nigeria? Were they responsible for the open war IBB declared on the bright and brightest, which was dubbed a war on "radicals and extremists", as if any nation has developed without its radicals and extremists raising critical questions that produced change?

By the way, what moral right has Obasanjo in all of this when he is yet to ask the man he made Education Minister if indeed he is not a professor as the national union of his erstwhile colleagues have proved? Currently, only the Nigerian Tribune and TELL address the man as "Dr." while the others address him as "Prof." The man is an associate professor (or reader, as they are also called, in the British tradition) and associate professors do not prefix their names with "Prof.", as the man has been doing for at least a decade now. Only full professors do. If Obasanjo continues to ignore this, then we can understand and in fact appreciate how easy it is for Fuji musicians to take on the prefix of "Dr." and - in the case of Kollington Ayinla - "Prof." - and therefore trivialize the academic accomplishments, which the president himself seems to detest with passion.

The president's predilection for abusing and insulting people only feeds into the generally low level that this government has sunken as it is confronted with myriads of problems. Even those of us who were persuaded that Obasanjo was the "best" out of the terrible options that Nigeria presently has are being forced to do a rethink and re-focus our search in the challenges ahead. Lacking here, which has turned the president to an abuser-in-chief, are vision, imagination and reflection. As John Dewey pointed out so many years ago, ".In a complicated and perverse world, action which is not informed with vision, imagination and reflection is more likely to increase confusion and conflict than to straighten things out".

This explains all these confusion and conflicts. The president should stay at home while he reflects - even if he has no vision of Nigeria - and be more imaginative in responding to the cocktail of crises that presently defines his presidency.

When he has done that, he will realize that male lecturers sleeping with their consenting female students does not constitute one of the fundamental crises that beg for national debate. There is nothing sexual about Tiv-Jukun war, the wars in the Niger Delta, the marginalization of the Igbo, the Sharia challenge (even though this is lately taken on the toga of the sexual!) the North-South dichotomy, the on-going unbridled corruption, the threat of a Babangida civilian presidency, the banality of the National Assembly, the aridity of the executive and the glorified embarrassments that answer to the name of state governments, except of course, the moral turpitude of the present power holders.

Laolu Akande has already provided what would pass as the most fitting answer to the protest by the hirelings of that power-besotted, venal cabal that has held Nigeria down for so long, in their attempt to shift the battle they are losing at home to the newsroom of the Voice of America.

Perhaps all that is there to add is to say that, for the VOA to have hired Sunday Dare, the hardworking, tested and well groomed new helmsman at the Hausa Desk of the Voice, the guys must have done serious background checks on Dare. It is a deliberate hire, I suspect very seriously. They must have realized that it is time the coverage of events in Nigeria moved away from the exclusively jaundiced views of men who ought to be behind bars but are parading themselves as leaders of the north.

If these guys are eager to have a Voice that speaks only to their pristine design to take Nigeria back to medieval times, then let them establish their own voice. When America proclaims herself a land of the free, she means it. And anyone who is sworn to bondage can go to where bondage reigns but leave the newsroom of VOA out of it - as the BBC will also soon realize!