ASUU strike: Between the pretender and deceiver By Fisayo Soyombo Tuesday 8th October, 2013 marked 100 days that public university education in the country has been at a standstill. It has been popularly dubbed a strike — or more elegantly, an industrial action. But the reality is that what is ongoing is a feud between two groups of people — one, dominated by a greedy lot feigning sanctimony and posturing as genuine advocates of education revamp; the other, by a grossly irresponsible clique of people whose only business in governance is siphoning public funds. More than three years into the Presidency of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, I am still unconvinced that he is the man. At his last media chat, for example, his responses to questions on the state of tertiary education and the whereabouts of wanted terrorist Abubakar Shekau betrayed his underwhelming understanding of a country he ought to be governing. Add corruption to government ineptitude and confusion, and you can tell the country is doomed. Clearly, education has had its share of the resultant rot, beginning from student populations far above universities’ carrying capacities and culminating in utterly unbelievable learning conditions, such as the staging of lectures under trees or in sports pavilions. In 2004 as a student at the nevertheless prestigious University of Ibadan when students had to take courses across departments, many of us were Olympic sprinters in the making. We ran from one lecture theatre to another because we knew they could not accommodate all of us. Too many times, I received lectures without seeing or hearing a single word of everything the lecturer wrote or said. Tens of students shared laboratory equipment both during practical lessons and exams. In my final year, I wrote an exam that required students to identify certain leaves; but since about five or six of us shared a leaf, we all knew the answers! Any recent graduate of a public university has his/her share of such nightmarish experience. So we all know the problem. But what we all do not know is that a certain body, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), deceptively claims to be fighting for all of us. ASUU has downed tools these past four months due to its insistence on full government implementation of the 2009 agreement both parties signed. Sadly, very few students have read the contentious agreement, which at once explains why so many student unions and groups have been blindly staging protests in support of ASUU. Is ASUU wholly fighting the cause of saving the Nigerian education system from collapse? Who or what has the right answer? Well, it isn’t the President of ASUU, Dr. Nasir Isa Faggae. And, of course, were we to ask President Jonathan, expect him to say, like he did during last month’s media chat: “I don’t know … you journalists know more than us…” The right answer lies in the underlying reasoning behind all the sections of that 2009 agreement. To be clear, I am unfavourably disposed to arguments in some quarters that ASUU’s remunerative demands are unreasonable. No. In my opinion, ASUU — and indeed any other labour union — reserves the right to propose whatever conditions it considers most effective for motivating its members for optimum job performance. What I find unacceptable is ASUU’s less-than-impressive approach; and there are at least four manifestations of this trait in the 2009 agreement. One, in pushing for CONUAS II, ASUU conceitedly argues that Nigerian university academics represent the critical mass of scholars in the society, with the potential for transforming it. They, therefore, deserve unique conditions of service that would motivate them, like the intellectuals in other parts of the world, to attain greater efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery with regard to teaching, research and community service, and thereby stem the brain drain. However, if doctors, teachers, oil marketers and transporters, civil servants, engineers all down tools as often as ASUU does, I am wondering what is left of the society that ASUU so piously claims to be desperate to “transform.” Two, while ASUU agrees to be disengaged from the encumbrances of a unified civil service wage structure, it goes on to demand that whenever there is a general increase in public sector salaries and allowances, the remuneration of academic staff shall be correspondingly increased. Simply put, ASUU wants to have the best of both worlds. Three, in the agreement, ASUU ensures that the renegotiation team agrees to its salary demands but as soon as discussion shifts to other matters, the team only recommends. And so, on matters involving the Education Tax Fund, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), amendment of the National Universities Commission Act (2004), and funding of universities, which are major institutional channels for reforming education, what ASUU does is to recommend, agree to recommend or project. ASUU has been going about its latest industrial action like a social crusader when the crux of it all is increased wage. On its website, President Faggae wrote: “….We believe very strongly that the rot and decay in the university system is not only arrestable but also reversible. We believe even more strongly that the key to turning round the university system lies in the sincere implementation of the Agreement… We will continue to carry the banner of this struggle to its logical conclusion…” By sanctimoniously claiming to be fighting to reverse the rot in education when it is chiefly motivated by its own pecuniary benefits, ASUU is equally guilty of the deception and mischief its president oft-accuses the government of. Between Jonathan’s Federal Government and ASUU, I cannot find the saint; and I find them jointly culpable for the current standstill in the country’s tertiary education
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 10:14:42 +0000
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