ASUU strike number 15: Why the struggle continues

At the risk of stating the obvious, ASUU has been on strike almost every year since 1999. The only exceptions were 2004, 2012, 2014 and 2015. Days wasted in these strikes come to a tidy but unfortunate 37 or three months and one day so far. The current strike is in its second week as of this writing. It would certainly add more days to the current total. Whatever the final figure comes to, it is a huge waste of days that ought to be devoted to teaching and research.

Each day of the 37 days was/ is a loss of learning opportunity for our children. However much we may pretend about this, it is difficult to ignore these strikes as a mere infantile and even selfish indulgence by men and women who demand to be pampered by the system. That is a mistake, a very bad mistake.

Each time the teachers abandon their classrooms, they raise critical issues in our educational development, not only at the tertiary level but even more importantly at the primary and secondary school levels. Even Nigerians living on the moon, would be fair to their conscience to admit that all is not well with our education. The progressive decay in the system is an open sore. The fact that through poor funding our public universities as centres of learning and research are progressively unable to fully develop the minds and the brains of the future leaders of our country, is indisputable. ASUU is the most misunderstood union in the country. People misunderstand the lecturers out of unwillingness to appreciate the crises in our education yesterday and today.

Each successive federal administration going all the way to the dark days of the dictatorship of the military politicians inherited unresolved ASUU-government issues. The 2016 warning strike and the strike of last year and the current one were/are attempts by ASUU to force the government to respect agreements reached with it by previous federal governments. The root of the current strike goes back to the administration of the late President Umaru Yar’adua. In 2009, that government and the union came to an agreement, to among other ASUU demands, commit N1.3 trillion to the universities to help halt the progressive decay in the system over a six-year period at an annual rate of N220 billion.

This heavy figure must be put in perspective. All our public universities are sorry sights, lacking basic amenities such as water, electricity and lecture halls. Generally, the libraries are not just analogue but truly ancient. Add to this mix poorly-equipped laboratories and inadequate or non-existent funds for research, and the picture of what we are doing to our universities emerges against the background of the general profligacy and the poor prioritization in our national development.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for the university teachers to do their best in the face of these glaring inadequacies and decay, although we expect them to do so. The N1.3 trillion was deemed sufficient at the time to help the country reposition its universities as credible centres of learning and research.

Yar’adua managed to release the first tranche of N23 billion to the universities. The succeeding Goodluck Jonathan administration renegotiated the agreement in 2013 but could do no more than release N200 billion to the universities. The renegotiated agreement expired in 2015.

President Muhammadu Buhari assumed office in May that year to find the unwanted ball sitting smugly in his court. The union was back in the trenches in September 2017, forcing the government to release another N200 billion to the universities for the payment of the allowances of lecturers. The issue here is the balance of N1.08 trillion. I think the federal government is frightened by this huge figure, as indeed, it should be.

The minister of education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, has made it clear, at his press conference in Abuja, that this is beyond the financial capability of the federal government. He made two important points worth bearing in mind. One, he said “that the issues necessitating this strike date back to 2009 when the then government of President Musa Yar’adua signed an agreement with the ASUU” at the time the country was experiencing an oil boom. Two, that “there are other sectors with similar competing needs (because) if our universities produce graduates, such graduates must work in other sectors of the economy…”

The blame game? Inevitable. Crude oil makes or mars our national fortunes. According to the minister, crude oil price boomed in Yar’adua’s time and it made sense for the late president to accept the agreement with ASUU. But now that the price of crude oil has dipped, the Buhari administration is trying to manage burst, not boom.

This story is not about to change soon. We still depend almost entirely on crude oil earnings. Years of lofty pronouncements on the diversification of the economy have not changed this dependence. Why blame Buhari for failing to meet ASUU demands when he is managing poverty, not wealth?

But the chickens have an unsettling habit of coming home to roost. When ASUU went on strike in 2013, Buhari’s then CPC chided the Jonathan administration for “failing to respect and implement the agreement reached with ASUU.” In a statement by its national publicity secretary, Rotimi Fashakin, the party blamed the government attitude on “executive irresponsibility.” What says APC now about its government’s handling of the same lingering problem? The blame game is a game of shifting responsibilities. Adam ate the forbidden fruit because Eve gave it to him; Eve refused to accept responsibility because the serpent advised her to eat it.

But here is the real problem. Nigeria has 91 public universities, 43 of them are federal governmentowned. Successive federal and state governments before Buhari chose to plant a university in every corner of the country as if it is competing with Rev Adeboye who does the same with his church. I do sympathise with Buhari. In his first outing in 1984, he degraded the universities set up by the Shagari administration. Now, as a democrat, his hands are tied. He has inherited the burden. It is his to carry. And he must do so bearing in mind his statement at an education retreat in November last year that to fix the country, we must first fix our education.