There is an urgent need to find enduring solutions to the problem of funding public universities in Nigeria
The nationwide protest by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) over the continued strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has once again drawn attention to the crisis of public education in Nigeria. With more than half the current academic session gone, there are no indications as to when a truce would be reached for the students to return to campus. Yet, the frequent bursts of strikes that have become a routine weapon by university staffers to force the hands of the federal authorities have done incalculable damage to tertiary education in Nigeria.
What makes the situation particularly unfortunate is that students in public owned tertiary institutions are now caught in what amounts to a rivalry between academic and non-academic staff. The consequences have been a situation where these unions alternate strikes, with the attendant debilitating effects on academic pursuits on our campuses. The hurried academic calendars allow for very little attention to serious studies and have contributed significantly to the decline in the quality of graduates of our public universities that have continued to go down the ladder of academic ranking, even among their peers in Africa. But we cannot shy away from the fact that under-funding the education sector, over the years, has had collateral damaging effects on the country, such that our universities have now become grotesque carcasses of their former glorious selves. The challenge is that strikes by lecturers and the solidarity by others offer no solution.
As we stated in the first part of this series, the weak financial conditions of most of our universities is exacerbated by the current crippling economic crisis afflicting the nation. Besides personnel costs, funds are required to rehabilitate dilapidated facilities, purchase consumables and aid research. But dealing with the challenge of thin liquidity requires more than seasonal strikes by both the academic and non-academic staff. Like it is done in other countries, we need to explore several ways of raising funds for their operations, without any attempt to reinvent the wheel.
As things stand, our public universities are not getting the resources they need to function well. So, this issue goes beyond any agreement signed with ASUU or whether they should be paid through IPPIS or UTAS. It is about how we fund and run public universities which 80 per cent of undergraduates within Nigeria attend. But ASUU is not blameless on this crisis. It is a crying shame that intellectuals who are supposed to be producing the next set of thinkers for our society can’t even offer decent solution to an important challenge in their own backyard. We need a conversation on how to free our public universities from their attachment to total government funding and spoon-feeding.
The universities are leaving a lot of money on the table because of the fixation with government funding. Whereas the schools most Nigerians attend abroad bombard them with requests for donations, our public universities hardly make such efforts. Foreign universities have resource mobilisers and fund managers. They have scholarships and work programmes for poor students and set up endowments. All these seem to be too much work for ASUU and university administrators in Nigeria. What is therefore lacking is ambition across the board, including sadly among university teachers.
While we plead with ASUU to consider the plight of suffering students, time has come for the federal government to overhaul its collective bargaining machinery with a view to ensuring effective implementation of agreements it freely enters. Incessant strikes by university lecturers and members of other critical sectors are hugely inimical to the health of the economy and, in many ways, disruptive of the social order. There is an urgent need to stem this ugly trend.
