Students moved in groups guided by their campaign strategies, to the various halls of residence and lecture theatres and release their heavy artillery of campaign speeches on the student body. The candidate gives a witty, entertaining and articulate speech and all you hear from the students are cheers and slogans. While this alone is for the fun of it, the most important aspect is to win the votes of students. They also move into the Diaspora singing and chanting the names of the candidate they strongly and when they the compound houses they crack jokes, and sing to catch the attention of students and then introduce their candidate to them. They are scrupulous about their terms when introducing the candidate.

The happiest part is campaigning in the Diaspora as it is fun moving from house to house and sometimes mistakenly entering people’s rooms. Students sing happily and get so much involved that they forget about the scorching sun and some forgo lectures to come on board. It was really full of fun. There were no cost involved as student willingly and happily joined in and only few posters were needed.

Student politics has, however reached a turning point maybe point of no return to those happy moments. The moments of sacrifice and fun are no more. Students no longer take part in student politics. A decade ago, friends campaigned freely for their favorite candidate but now it is “cash na hand – mouth go campaign”. Students spend a lot of money these days in their campaign; they make lots of posters, handbills, pay people to campaign for them among others, implying if you don’t have money you can’t enter into student politics. Some candidates are their own campaign manager and spokesman because they can’t afford to pay a student to be their manager. Students hardly listen to such people as they don’t have a team to support them. The team spirit is no more and this makes it difficult for most of the candidates to go to the Diaspora as they would feel the scorching sun. There is no moral support. On the day of voting, some students have to be begged before they walked down reluctantly to cast their vote while others simply don’t vote.

Students invest so much into the campaign managers and other members of the team. Candidates who fail to win become sad and moody, some even weep not because they lose honorably but because of the money they have wasted.

They heyday of student politics is no more. It has now put on an ugly face making it uninteresting any longer. How I wish the good old days of student politics would be seen again.