Contd from last week
The funds to develop the necessary infrastructure for the overcrowded hostels and classrooms, blocked and broken sewage pipes, mosquito-friendly but over-crowded medical centers without drugs or expired ones, empty dilapidated student and research laboratories with their time-worn broken but dusted instruments for decoration and accreditation to propagate generational ignorance remained inadequate and was to be brought forward in the next ASUU strike.
All this has changed as ASUU gradually underwent a qualitative transition from a patriotic to an elitist union. Languidly, it has alienated its victims, Nigerian students, its once loyal supporters that have been in the trench of National liberation with them, the head-leaner in confronting the Nigerian State. Today, their feeding money is extorted for grades or their flesh, the source of their dignity, in kind where grades are dangled to entice the students for sex. Nigerian students are also the tenants of the newly built mansions around the universities and towns from money extorted from them as they flee from their dilapidated over-crowded and unlit hostels with their broken sewage pipes, nursing an avalanche of mosquitoes and rodents. The new landlords who in subterfuge are their lecturers and Vice-Chancellors, unable to sense the misery of their students, view the maintenance of the hostels as an obstacle to their money-making ventures and another avenue to primitive accumulation.
What about those academic staff who through being executive members of their local branch of ASUU surrendered their loyalty for ASUU to their university’s chief executive in return for a privilege to primitive accumulation through appointment to the numerous boards, institutes, business consultancies and sectors each harbouring a significant population of students to be robbed their money. In fact, the increasing factionalization of various local branches of ASUU is a result of the bitter struggle for privileges to rob Nigerian students through the chief executives.
As if the struggle for privileges at the local branches was not enough, the additional and informal establishment of a partnership in crime between INEC, Nigeria’s Electoral Umpire, and ASUU has been another venue opened to ASUU members for primitive accumulation. While history shall remain the judge on the integrity of the executive members of ASUU, appointed as chairmen of INEC, the fighting among ASUU members at their local branches conducted by their local chairmen for opportunities to serve in vote processing and the electoral machinery of the state demonstrate a fanatical desire for accumulation of money and not patriotism or the love and sacrifice for the fatherland. There are alleged cases where highly placed members of ASUU have exchanged money for votes in their various task as returning officers for the election of notoriously corrupt politicians.
Today, ASUU also exhibits its elitist trait in its attitude to other labour unions when compared to its past patriotic history. Its leaders were cognizant of the suspicion of other labour unions to the presumed claim of the supremacy of intellectual labour. Their response while engaging other labour unions was to imbibe in simplicity and a culture of frugality. ASUU administered itself as head-leaner among all its fraternal and labouring comrades. The competition for privileges and desire for accumulation has made it difficult for ASUU to form Joint Action Committees with other local unions to resolve collective problems such as delays in salaries, administrative delay in the payment of earned allowances among other issues.
It is indeed no surprise today that while all other unions in Federal Universities have complied to the anti-corruption drive by the Federal Government with its Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information Service Scheme (IPPIS), only ASUU with the dormant and quiescent alliance of various University Administrations are battling against this scheme. What is significant is the proportion of ASUU members and administrators against this anti-corruption scheme. The sum total and percentage when plotted against the striking strength of each university should give a reasonable and relative scale of corruption in our university system.
Such a study does not preclude the need by the Federal Government to develop an in-built mechanism within the IPPIS which could ameliorate the peculiar working conditions of academic staff. Without question the universities have abused their laudable won autonomy by the tragic allowance of a descent from patriotism to moral decadence and primitive accumulation for which the students have been the main victims. To keep away the persuasive hands of the Federal Government to ensure the institution of a productive system of rights and merit as a condition for the development of knowledge through its intervening checks and balances initiated with the IPPIS is to encourage a system of primitive accumulation, tutelage, privileges, ignorance, false pretense and corruption. It is also to sentence Nigerian students as the perennial victims to an unending unscrupulous exploitation and misery. The nation’s narrative no longer belong to ASUU and to regain it, ASUU will do well to revisit its sacred alliance with Nigerian students, return to its once humble relation with other labour unions particularly in the campuses, and above all return to a patriotism beyond its present elitist unionism.
■Henry A. Onwubiko, Ph.D Professor and Head, Department of Biochemistry, University of Nigeria, Nsukka