Can the changemakers change anything?

After every student protest or “admin decision”, many of us have become virtually numb to the same comments frequently grumbled all across campus:

 “ALA doesn’t give its students a voice on campus”. 

The problem is that when admin is blamed for yet another issue on campus, we are often so quick to join in that many of us forget we have the God-given ability to think for ourselves and consider whether Hakim’s texts on the group chat actually hold any water or not (they probably do, Hakim). 

So the time has come for us to truthfully ask the question, this time (temporarily) without Dean T’s “guardrails” : does ALA give the student body a meaningful voice on matters most relevant to us?

For many, the answer to this question depends on their background. For all of us, our previous school’s “justice systems” ranged anywhere from fair to FIFA, and our perception of what ought to be fair is most probably relative to that experience.

 For those privileged enough to have school systems that were flexible to accommodate their wants (not needs), it seems almost inevitable that they would place those same expectations on ALA and consequently label the academy as “authoritarian”.

On the contrary, students who come from North Korean boot camp-style schools (or, even worse, Nigerian Catholic schools) will most likely find it absolutely fascinating that we are even permitted to possess phones on campus to the extent that they consider ALA borderline paradise.

Resultantly, this creates a messy middle ground where one person’s “bare minimum” expectation of the academy far exceeds another's “best case scenario”.

So using subjective, individualized metrics clearly does not work. Instead, if we still want to answer the question, our best option is to compare what ALA burdens itself to do with what it actually does. The question then becomes:should we expect ALA to consider the student voice in matters affecting students, given its mandate?

The answer is... probably not. By its own standards, ALA is expected to provide high-level education (which, compared to the average school in Africa, it does), and make African leaders capable of changing the same issues that should have driven us to the academy in the first place. But what does it actually do? So does it allow students to be so-called leaders and challenge their environment? 

Yes, to a certain extent. ALA—like most high-level (posh) institutions— often seems to tolerate disagreement until it challenges the fundamentals of the institution itself. The more polished, posh-sounding critiques that require little change are always welcomed and labelled as “leading and critical thinking”. Yet the confrontations that would now make people genuinely uncomfortable are usually faced with harsh barriers. (If you're not convinced, think about the Student Government: what kind of change does it bring?).

Why does this matter, though? The thing is, this system will inevitably produce one of two kinds of people. Either you have the nonconformist, those who wish to flip the entire system and target its very foundations, for better or for worse. They will always conflict with the school and eventually suffer the consequences of their passion and ambition (something we’re all told to have).

Or you have the product of the ALA (and, lowkey, world) system: someone who can criticise a system until it comes at a social cost to them, then they subside. They don’t flip entire systems but strategically navigate them. This, perhaps, is what ALA tolerates. (shoutout to Eric for the idea of this whole paragraph btw)

This then becomes quite a lot deeper than just ALA. When you think of it, of course the academy doesn’t tolerate such nonconformists because neither does the world. After all, is ALA not just another academy within the world, intentionally simulating the larger globe on a singular campus.

My question to the reader, then is this: who are you going to be? If we are to be radical changemakers of Africa, do we have to defy the standards the same institution has instilled in us in order to bring about change? Or do we instead learn to navigate the box rather than completely throwing it away?

Ultimately, the choice is personal. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being selfish, and aren’t we all? But then, what will ever change if we can’t be nonconformists? People who are willing to change the same institution their futures depend on. In my humble opinion, though, the greatest irony would be graduating as a 'changemaker' who never changed the place that taught them how to change.