Due to the lingering strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) recently expressed its resolve to embark on a two-day solidarity protest against the continued closure of public universities. According to the NLC, the nationwide protest will take place on July 26 and 27 in Abuja and all its councils in the 36 states of the federation. While condemning the Federal Government for alleged unwillingness to resolve the varsity crisis, the NLC accused the government of not being serious in implementing the recommendations of the Prof. Nimi Briggs committee on review of workers’ salaries in the universities.
We agree with Labour and urge the Federal Government to resolve the crisis by making some commitments to ASUU. President Muhammadu Buhari has made a number of promises about what he will do before leaving office. Resolving the ASUU strike once and for all should be one of them. To achieve this, government should muster the political to quickly resolve all outstanding issues with the varsity teachers. The ongoing strike in the universities can be traced to the government’s unwillingness to honour the 2009 agreement it entered with ASUU and subsequent ones.
In one of its renegotiated agreement with ASUU, government agreed to inject N1.3 trillion in six tranches for the revitalisation of public universities. It was able to pay the first tranche of N200 billion in 2013, but reneged in completing the payment subsequently as agreed. This is why this strike has continued to linger. In 2020, the nation’s universities lost one full academic calendar on account of the strike. This time, they are about to lose another academic session.
Incidentally, ASUU’s demands are not too hard to meet. The union wants the government to end the use of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) and adopt its own version called University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS). It wants payment of arrears of allowances and renegotiation of the condition of service of academic staff. Above all, it demands increased funding and revitalisation of all tertiary institutions to bring them at par with similar institutions in other parts of the world.
We acknowledge the President’s recent lamentation that the strike had taken a toll on the psychology of parents, students and other stakeholders and his charge that “enough is enough for keeping students at home.” As we have observed in a number of editorials on this strike, our children are the worst hit in this show of shame. A student who entered the university to study a four-year course will end up spending six years. This mainly affects the children of the poor who cannot afford the cost of foreign or private universities. The children of many government officials are insulated from this problem as they are either in foreign or private schools. Some of these officials have been celebrating the graduation of their children abroad without showing any sensitivity to the plight of the students at home.
They are also not bothered about the poor image the sorry state of our school system has subjected the country to. In sane countries, people will be wondering what has gone wrong with the most populous black nation on earth. If we cannot handle priority areas like education, what else can we handle? The decaying education system shows that the country is gradually becoming a failed state. The poor state of the health sector is equally glaring. Beyond ASUU demands, Nigeria has not met the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)’s recommendation that every member country should devote between 15 and 20 per cent of its national budget to education. On the average, our budget for education has always been less than 10 per cent.
It is inconceivable that the government has not shown enough commitment to resolve the lingering varsity crisis. In many other countries, serious efforts are being made to close up on the losses incurred in the education system in the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic. In our own case, we are worsening the situation by expanding the gap especially in our tertiary institutions.
We urge the government and ASUU to resolve the lingering industrial action in the universities forthwith. The continuation of the strike will mortgage the future of Nigerian students. Government should show good faith in its negotiations with ASUU. Members of the academic union must be realistic in their demands if government shows good faith. For the umpteenth time, we warn that having the public universities under lock and key is not in the best interest of the country.