“Rough waters are truer tests of leadership. In calm water, every ship has a good captain.”
—www.cfod.com.au
By Omoniyi Salaudeen
Professor Emmanuel Osokede, the national president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), is the man of the moment. He is the cynosure of all eyes in the ongoing protracted face-off between the Federal Government and the striking lecturers.
Today, he will be convening the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the union where the final decision will be taken on whether to call off the strike or keep the universities shut until further notice.
For the records, ASUU embarked on the current industrial action on February 14, 2022, to press home its demand for the renegotiation of the ASUU/FGN 2009 agreement, deployment of UTAS to replace IPPIS, the release of the reports of Visitation Panels to Federal Universities, adequate funding, and revitalisation of public universities, earned academic allowances, poor funding of state universities and promotion arrears, among others.
Nigerians cannot wait for the resolution of these matters because the crisis in the university system is an issue that touches the heart of every patriotic individual, especially parents and students who have had to wait endlessly for the resumption of suspended academic activities in the various institutions.
For all it cares, ASUU strike has become an albatross weighing heavily on the neck of the Federal Government. It is one crisis too many. Now, it needs to be tackled once and for all; otherwise, generations yet unborn will continue to suffer the negative consequences of the destruction it has brought on the education sector. Unfortunately, the seemingly interminable discussion on the possible solution to the current impasse is taking forever as the government negotiating team and the union leaders engage in a blame game.
While the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, maintained that the government had acceded to all demands made by ASUU except the request for the payment of six months arrears of salaries of its members, which, he said, had been turned down, Prof Osodeke denied having any meeting with government representatives.
For being unable to strike a deal, while the nation counts its losses, there is already a seething cauldron of anger against ASUU for plunging the university system into another round of crisis. Parents, students, and stakeholders are angry. They have not taken to the street to demonstrate their right indignation, but they are angry because they see the perennial industrial dispute as avoidable, destructive, and unnecessary.
The Deputy National President, National Parents/Teachers Association of Nigeria (NAPTAN), Chief Adeolu Ogunbanjo, could not hold his emotion when he declared that “ASUU should understand that a lot of things are involved in this crisis. Many of our children, especially the girls among them, who are in the universities, have turned to glorified prostitutes because of this strike. Some of the boys have also become yahoo fraudsters and things like that because an idle hand is the devil’s workshop. It is affecting everybody. ASUU should stop grandstanding and consider whatever their employer says.”
By insisting that the six months salaries arrears of its members must be paid without work, ASUU has technically shot itself in the foot. And at this point, Osodeke will be doing a great deal of damage to the image of ASUU if his leadership fails to conduct a simple survey before any hasty endorsement of another round of infinite strike.
Out there, a preponderance of opinions is in support of the ‘no work, no pay’ policy of the Federal Government because the union has lost public sympathy. Even the legal perspective does not support rewarding a wrongdoing.
A renowned legal icon, Yusuf Ali (SAN), chips in a few words on this, saying “Section 43 expressly states it without exception that, ‘once you go on strike, you don’t get paid.” This, he explained, is without prejudice to the right of workers to strike.
“Strike is a right. It is your right to go on strike, but there’s no attachment to it that you must be paid if you don’t work,” he added.
ASUU has always argued that its industrial actions are primarily motivated by the desire to achieve revitalization of the university system.
On Wednesday, Osodeke was right on AIT progamme vehemently defending the union’s action, arguing “that we still have 95 per cent of our students in public universities is because of ASUU struggles. Without ASUU, in the next five or six years, our public universities will be like public primary and secondary schools. But we will not allow that because the children of ordinary Nigerians will be forced out of school. Only the children of the ministers will have access to university education.”
That, of course, speaks to the fear of many stakeholders who are increasingly getting worried about the reckless proliferation of private universities to the detriment of public institutions.
But the argument will fall flat in the face of overwhelming evidence. First, how has the university system fared in the last three or four decades since ASUU started this recalcitrant approach to the struggle for the revitalization? Those in the system know better. But the question again is: whenever the union goes on a strike and there is brain drain, as it has always been, who pays for the loss of inestimable human capital? Not only that the students pay for the loss of competent hands but also the valuable time of their lives. In the worse scenario, some unlucky ones among them most often have their ambitions outrightly truncated. On the flip side, every addition of more years to the duration of students’ stay on campus inadvertently puts an additional financial burden on the parents. More painfully, when such strikes are called off and lecturers get back to work with frenetic energy after the payment of commutative arrears of salaries they did not work for, what they do is collapse two semesters into one, as Osodeke recently indicated in his argument with the Minister of Education, and then rush the students to take exams. This is where Nigeria’s university system lost global respectability as institutions continued to churn out half-baked graduates who were said to be unemployable.
Under the present administration of President Muhammadu Buhari alone, ASUU has gone on strike for not less than a cumulative period of 15 months approximating two academic sessions and still counting. The last was the COVID-19 strike, which was declared at a time when the whole world was on lockdown. What did the ASUU achieve at the end of it all? Nothing!
It is very unlikely that the current impasse will do any good to the union. Some members of the academics have boasted that they fought successive military governments and won the battle. This is democracy. And democracy thrives on the rule of law. If the law says there should be no salary for work not done, which court will give a reward for disobedience of the rule of engagement? None!
Whatever the argument for or against the incessant strikes, finding a lasting solution to the logjam shouldn’t last forever. But this is a case of the unwilling cultivating the unprepared. Beyond the fact that there is no sincerity of purpose in the ongoing negotiation, the Federal Government has always been unwilling to make the right investment in the education sector. And there is a reason for this nonchalant attitude, which is to stifle the public universities to create a thriving environment for the private ones.
No one is clapping for the government for irresponsibly starving the universities of funds with reckless abandon, while also investing money in establishing some new ones. Nigeria is the only place in the world where the government spends so much on human capital development, but leaves so little in reserve to keep the brains behind to develop the country.
At the heart of the current crisis is the relatively poor enumeration of university workers compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world. But the current reality also requires ASUU members to do a thorough soul-searching.
Today, if peradventure, the National University Commission (NUC) carries out a comprehensive audit of academic staff in both public and private universities, only a few members of the union will come out on a clean slate. The outcome will be startling. It will expose the underhand practices of many of these lecturers, who masquerade as defenders of public interest. It is already an open secret that many of them are involved in part-time teaching, servicing three to four private and public universities to make up for their poor remuneration. This is one of the reasons beneath ASUU’s opposition to the IPPIS payment platform because it will reveal their names in multiple places doing visiting lecturing.
At any rate, there must be a balance between what constitutes genuine public interest and the narrow self-interest of individuals. The onus is on Professor Osodeke to lead ASUU out of the current abyss in which it has found itself.
As for the age-long struggle for the revitalization of the university system, this is the most auspicious time to engage in public debate on the need to compel the National Assembly to enact a law that will make it an offence for all elective public office holders from sending their children to schools abroad. Without that, no matter how long the strike lasts, public institutions will continue to suffer neglect.
Emmanuel Osodeke is a professor of Soil Science at the Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike. He took over the mantle of leadership from Professor Biodun Ogunyemi on May 31, 2021, and currently testing the troubled waters.