IN THE ARENA
As the Academic Staff Union of Universities rises from its crucial National Executive Council meeting at the University of Lagos, it may commence another enervating strike cycle that would ground the public university system. While ASUU should opt for dialogue, the federal government must quit dithering and meet its serially breached obligations, writes Louis Achi
Peering into the future of humanity, South Africa’s revolutionary first black President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Dr. Nelson Mandela once observed that: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
With compelling authority forged in the searing furnace of Robben Island Prison and a life of principled activism, he stated that “education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world,” proclaiming that: “No country can really develop unless its citizens are educated.”
To Nigeria’s political leadership, these free, enduring philosophical advisory may sound like strange homily.
This is why what is unfolding in the nation’s academic arena currently is comparable to an Athenian tragedy but certainly lacking the majesty of a Greek drama.
To-date, it’s hardly debatable that Nigeria’s development quandary at this juncture of human history is firmly linked to how cavalierly its leadership has been treating the education of its children. The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), founded in 1978, has fought unending war to ensure that the university system draws the vital oxygen of funding, infrastructural and other critical inputs from its promoters to give real meaning to having varsities in the first place.
Consequently, over the decades’ strike threats by ASUU and other sister unions have continued to dog the nation’s tertiary educational system. Curiously, no regime has found a lasting solution to these intermittent crises.
At the heart of the union’s work stoppages is the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), reached between the federal government and the union in 2008 which was never implemented. After serial strike actions which always ended with the federal government giving assurances during the negotiations, ASUU went on one of its most protracted strikes in March 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
Eventually, ASUU called off the strike in December 2020 after the unimplemented MoU was rechristened Memorandum of Action (MoA). Fourteen months later, the federal government has only released N55 billion to partially address the issues of Earned Allowances and the Universities’ Revitalisation.
As it were, the promise to deploy the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), rather than the FG’s payroll system, the Integrated Payroll and Personal Information System (IPPIS), to ensure academic freedom, has not been fully activated. ASUU is miffed that even the Earned Allowances, Universities Revitalisation Funding and deployment of UTAS have not been satisfactorily implemented.
More, very little has been done about the issue of poor funding of state universities, promotion arrears and others. Though not a candidate for sainthood, ASUU’s struggle is nevertheless targeted at up-scaling its members’ welfare to align with modern trends to guarantee staff commitment. This is legitimate.
The union also wants the universities to be upgraded in terms of facilities to fairly compete with their peers in other parts of the world where the nation’s grasping ruling elite and wealthy individuals send their children to access sound, qualitative education. This position can hardly be validly faulted.
The union certainly is to be commended for canvassing restoration of the nation’s university system to enable it draw students from other parts of the world. This was the scenario in the 1960s and 1970s.
It would be recalled that ASUU’s NEC recently directed its various chapters to set aside a day to sensitise and mobilise Nigerians for its fight of saving the university system from collapsing. Rising from its congress meeting in Abuja, the Zonal Coordinator of Abuja ASUU Zone, Dr. Salahu Lawal, echoed the key issues, saying it is not going into the signing of new agreement or Memorandum of Understanding or Action with the federal government.
The union blamed the government for the blatant refusal to implement the crucial February 7, 2019 MoA, which contained important highlights of the 2009 ASUU-FGN agreement and aggregated the cardinal arguments of the 2012 and 2013 MoUs and the 2017 MoA. It also blamed the government for failing to implement the December 2020 MoA, which signing ended the longest strike in the history of the nation.
An important dimension to the apparently insincere stance of the federal government is that the ruling elite have allegedly found nimble ways of corruptly accessing public funds, enriching themselves and accessing the educational services of more civilised countries for their children.
The children of the middle class and the poor (of which those of ASUU are among) are left to languish in a decayed system from which they come out as unemployable products. This scenario has drawn considerable sympathy for ASUU’s struggles.
Without question, ASUU’s demands can be met if government becomes really serious and resolves to produce a credible and actionable road-map to change the disastrous narrative of the nation’s public university system.
Looking at the big picture, ASUU also demands the regulation of the proliferation of state-owned universities by governors, who it alleges owe staff salaries and university subventions, leaving the universities with failing infrastructures.
According to the coordinator of Lagos zone of ASUU, Dr. Adelaja Odukoya, “this proliferation has led to the decayed infrastructural facilities, withholding of salaries of academic staff, and non-payment of research grants. “The common practice of state governments withholding the salary of our members for a period ranging from three to eight months is condemnable! In most cases, net salaries are paid and sometimes not paid at all. The continued denial and non-release of subventions to cater for the needs of these universities by reason of exigencies is unacceptable.”
Just as Mandela pointed out, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children.” The federal government must bestir itself and meet the substance of the MoA it had freely entered with ASUU and conceptualise a sustainable, actionable funding and tertiary education development template that can save the youth who represent the future.
For ASUU itself, another strike action is certainly not an option because this may finally crash the tottering public tertiary education system.
