Moral, Symbolic or Systemic Dysfunction? What to Blame When An Unfulfilled Graduate Decides to Relinquish His Certificate

A video recording of a graduate of the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH) who recently stormed his Alma Mata to return his certificate and demanded a refund of his school fees because he couldn’t secure a Job since he graduated from the University has been making round on the social media since the past couple of days it’s uploaded on the internet. According to the man, as shown in the video, he’s not seen any financial benefit of the certificate since he got it from the school. Therefore, his decision to return it to the school.

Not a few individuals have described the Alumnus as irresponsible and an embarrassment to his Alma mata. Some have used words such as ‘psychologically impaired’ or ‘frustrated’ or ‘rude’ to qualify the situation. Others have sparingly foreclosed the action as simply chasing the clouts on the social media.

However, a closer or wider look at the behaviour seek to lay bare its latent meaning and the broad lessons to draw from it. The particular incident is typical of the many social issues that play out on a quotidian basis but which we often take for granted or in the least give only a paltry reflection in relation to the general state of our society.

Sociologists do not bother themselves much about the actions of the individuals; rather, they interrogate the interplay of social facts and social relations that inform individual’s actions or behaviours and their general implication or effect on the moral firmament of Society. The moral firmament is the basic of social life. And where the moral firmament is still very strongly rooted in the people’s consciousness, a disturbance to it will not likely go unpunished or unsanctioned as the case may be.

Morally speaking, your Alma mata is perhaps next to your parent or family to accord gratitude as a functional member of society. You should think to give back to your alma mata for the knowledge impacted in you. And even when you cannot afford to do this with the big cheque, you could at least make your alma mata proud by being a good ambassador of it. Here, the ungentle man has goofed; he’s committed a terrible moral blunder. So he’s sentenced unsparingly via the same court his lot had become public knowledge.

But is morality a one way street or a monolithic affair? Your guess is as good as mine. According to the social strain theory — I have explained it broadly in another article accessible here –.a sort of social contract exists between the people and the social system within which they exist. Where the contract could not hold simply due to the failure of the system to fulfill its own end of the bargain, people are hard pressed and they react in diverse ways to the anomic conditions that develop therefrom. From this sociological perspective, it makes a lot more sense to understand the ungentle man’s behaviour as a reflection or consequence of a systemic failure rather than as an extension of moral ineptitude from the individual.

There is yet another perspective that transcends the moral or systemic failure to the far-reaching effects of our day-to-day social interactions on our general social life. Here, it is important to ask fundamental questions such as these; what kind of conversations dominate our social life? What thought lies furtively in our collective conscience? These social cues are important because social thoughts constantly seek to manifest themselves as social realities. The increasing “fraudulization” of school, of adulthood and of the entire social system in our day-to-day conversations and social interactions no doubt has its telling effects on our moral attachment and general attitude in the social stratosphere.

The overused saying “school is a scam” among the young individuals, albeit a social expression of the pains experienced from the general systemic failure, is not only jaundiced but also myopic as it merely stereotype the school not minding the myriad of social issues that impact the institution. It is a sort of argument that throws the baby away with the bathwater. This thought has become so endemic in our collective conscience and it informs our tendencies to be unpatriotic, immoral, disloyal, rebellious or criminal. On this track, the rebellion of the Alumnus to his alma mata may have been informed by the emboldening social thought that has continued to pigeonhole school as scam.

But much bigger of a social problem that urgently needs to be addressed is the incidence of brain drain in the country, particularly among the youths who constitute the nation’s greatest manpower resources. Nigeria currently has a brain drain index of 6.60 compared to the global average of 5.21. The mass exodus of people from the country in search of greener pastures in other countries of the world, even though fundamentally a systemic problem, is increasingly aggravated by negative sentiments that have formed part and parcel of the youth social thought. Significantly driving this problem is the ‘Japa’ concept, meaning to escape for good, that has become commonplace and loosely used in the day-to-day conversations and social interactions of the youth.