Despite the seeming defeat of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) by the agents of the Federal Government following the forced suspension of the recent strike that lasted for eight months in Nigeria’s public varsities, the government is yet to win the lasting peace in these citadels of learning, still dwelling in their past glories and fame due to poor funding and other self-inflicted ills by their administrators and contradictions within the leadership of ASUU. The seeming industrial peace in these institutions is not likely to last following the Federal Government’s implementation of work to rule law, which led to the payment of half salary to the university teachers in October, which the ebullient Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr. Chris Nwabueze Ngige, later explained after some prodding was based on pro-rata basis. This means that the affected lecturers were paid on the actual days they were deemed to have worked for the month of October when the failed strike was shamelessly called off through a court fiat.
In spite of the fact that the Federal Government through its agents, Ngige of Labour Ministry, Adamu Adamu of Education Ministry and Femi Gbajabiamila, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, tamed the fearful ASUU by giving them two technical knock outs through the National Industrial Court, and contrived persuasion and dubious mediations that left the lecturers with nothing to hold unto except to obey before complaint, the crisis is not yet over. This government Ngige is telling all of us that wants to settle its rift with ASUU using the instrumentality of law is legendary in disobeying court orders. For instance, it refused to obey the court orders in respect of freedom for Ibrahim El Zakzaky, the Shiites leader and Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). There are many other instances of this government disobeying the orders of its courts but space constraint won’t allow their being catalogued in this article. If the government feels that it has won the victory over incessant strikes in the varsities by ASUU, it must have a rethink. If there is any victory in the macabre dance, it is at best pyrrhic. It will not endure. The lecturers may adopt other tactics to undermine the university system without embarking on strike. However, I do not recommend strike for the settlement of any industrial dispute.
Disruption of the varsity academic calendar has done more harm than good to the system than the advertised government’s disdain for education. ASUU has abused that instrument of negotiation called strike. It has been utterly overused and it has lost its relevance. Embarking on eight months strike without a ‘plan B’ is foolhardy on the part of ASUU leadership. Insisting that the government, this APC government will fulfill all your requests before you call off the strike is wishful thinking on the part of ASUU. No doubt, ASUU leadership goofed in its management of the strike. The government has seemingly won, but it is yet to win the peace in these varsities. I say this because the pathetic pictures of university teachers protesting the gratuitous insult of casualized payment of their October salary and months of withheld salaries splashed on the prominent pages of major national dailies are veritable signs that all is not well with our public universities despite the triumphal songs and Buga dancing of Chris Ngige, Adama Adamu and Femi Gbajabiamila. The worst treatment the government has given the varsity lecturers is the casualization of their work, which apart from teaching and research includes community work. Teaching in the university requires a specialized training and expertise that takes many years and experience to attain. The basic requirement for teaching in a university in Nigeria is now the possession of a PhD. Those with good first degrees and masters are employed as graduate assistants and assistant lecturers and being mentored and groomed until they get their doctorates. With 76,526 PhD holders currently teaching in Nigerian universities, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) second quarter of 2020 report, Nigeria is in dearth of this category of staff. According to a report by the National Universities Commission (NUC), as at February this year, Nigerian varsities had 100,000 academic staff members teaching not less than 2.1 million students. At present, Nigeria has 201 universities. Out of this figure, the Federal Government has 48 universities, state governments 54 and private sector 99. Some of these universities do not have the required number of staff with PhDs and many of them cannot boast of having the required number of professors. While all these universities are not adequately funded, it is worst in state varsities.
The tragedy of our varsity education is that many bright graduates are no longer interested in staying in the country. All of them are more interested in migrating to United Kingdom (UK), United States (US), Canada and other foreign countries in search of greener pastures, a euphemism for escaping from Nigeria’s misrule and hardship. Some Nigerians will prefer living in Ghana, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali, Ukraine, than staying in their country without any prospect of job and good standard of living. About 2,000 Nigerian doctors left the country in the last two years in search of the proverbial El Dorado overseas. The new waves of migration or what has been referred to as the Japa culture in local parlance should worry these agents of the Federal Government bent on destabilizing the nation’s public universities through intimidation and skewed observance of the rule of law. Before, the news was that many Nigerian doctors are migrating in droves to countries in Europe and America and Middle East.
Today, nurses and midwives, pharmacists, and other health workers, IT specialists and university teachers have joined the bandwagon. Yet, Chris Ngige and others are daily grandstanding over withheld ASUU members’ salaries for the months of the last strike. The prorating of ASUU members’ salaries based on the fact that they were on strike for eight months and to ensure that they don’t embark on strike again is not based on logic. It is not even based on fact on account of doing their research and community work during the period of strike. Besides, the backlog of work is still being done by ASUU members. The job of a university teacher is not like carrying files in the ministries. It is more rigorous and intellectually engaging. What the government should do now to save Nigerian universities from imminent death is to swallow its pride and pay the lecturers their eight months salaries in full and henceforth warn them against using strike to settle any trade dispute.
That will be after they have fully funded the institutions and equipped them like those universities the children of our political office holders attend in UK, US and Canada, while they taunt all of us with their graduating photographs splashed on the pages of major Nigerian dailies. The present brain drain in the education sector is encouraged by the neglect of these varsities by our political leaders. I am beginning to think that there should be law banning children of our political leaders from attending varsities abroad and accessing healthcare abroad. They must be made to have the same education their fathers forced our children to obtain. They should access healthcare in the same hospitals all of us go. This country cannot develop when its youths are daily sleeping at foreign embassies to obtain visa to leave the country with the next available flight. The development of any country lies so much with its youths, the people with energy, zeal and inventive spirits. The migration of our young ones, our professionals and technocrats will stultify Nigeria’s development agenda if not checked. If more lecturers decide to migrate now, our varsity will be in crisis of unimaginable proportion than this government can effectively handle.
The Nigerian university of today is not the type the generation of Chris Ngige, Adamu Adamu and Femi Gbajabiamila attended and never the type their children attended. Instead of wrestling ASUU to the ground and shouting false Eureka, let them return these universities to their past glories through proper funding. It is not true that the Federal Government cannot fund its universities. It is also not true that state governments cannot adequately fund their universities. If private individuals and organizations can fund theirs, it is axiomatic that federal and state governments can fund theirs.