Ivory Tower shutdown

Governor Rauf Aregbesola’s government in Osun State has gone down in history as the first state government to shut down a federal university over a dispute on tax remittance. In this era of ‘anything goes’, when the educational system is being buffeted from all angles by all sorts of avoidable glitches which have all but made nonsense of university calendars, the disruption of activities at the Obafemi Awolowo University only shows how low we have sunk.

The Osun State Government had claimed that the University was owing N1.84 billion of statutory taxes and had refused to negotiate, hence the forced padlocking of the university’s main gate and Secretariat. If that was true, it would still have been wrong to shut down the institution on account of a dispute that could otherwise have been resolved following laid down procedures. The state government resorted to self-help because impunity is fast becoming the order of the day in governance.

It was a straightforward matter of under-deduction of Pay As You Earn (PAYE) taxes, and NOT non-remittance of deductions.

It has since been revealed that Governor Aregbesola personally wrote the President who directed that the Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit (PICA) in the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, handle the dispute. Both parties were invited to an accounts reconciliation meeting by PICA, following which the Accountant General of the Federation by a letter reference number INV/0089/844/ II, dated January 19, 2018, ruled that the University’s outstanding underdeducted PAYE tax liability from staff salaries between 2015 and 2016 was N384 million. It was agreed that the adjudged outstanding sum could be paid at a monthly instalment of N5 million.

The university has been keeping its own part of the bargain as regards clearing the backlog. Indeed, employees of the institution have been paying the full tax rates since January 2017.

However, agents of the state government suddenly stormed the university on May 2, 2018, and sealed the university’s main gate and the Secretariat, crippling the institution.

Federal universities are only just coming out of a crippling strike by nonacademic staff. Students have borne the brunt of irregular closures causes by a plethora of reasons not least of which is the resort of unions to strikes to push their demands for better working conditions. To add whimsical impunity perpetrated by a host state government is to sound the death knell.

Imagine if the incident had happened when students had fully resumed and activities were in full gear. There may have been casualties.

I can’t imagine the Kaduna State Government which has made so much intervention in uplifting the quality of education in the state, shutting down Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) because of under-deducted taxes which the Accountant-General of Federation had mediated.

The irony of the development in Osun is that Governor Aregbesola, with the introduction of the ‘Opón Ìmò’ (electronic tablet of knowledge), had signalled several years ago, that he set a big store by education, determined as he claimed to be, to “revolutionise learning”.

As explained by the government then, “The ‘Opón Ìmò’, a standalone e-learning tablet, provides the senior secondary students with the learning materials required to prepare for school leaving examinations. It provides 3 major content categories; Text Books, Tutorials and Practice Questions. 150,000 of these tablets are being distributed to all senior secondary students across state schools in a move that is expected to radically democratise ‘access’ to learning, regardless of means, location or status”.

The nation had given Aregbesola and his government a standing ovation at that time.

Now, it’s thumbs-down for the illadvised resort to ‘Jankara’ tactics in shutting down a citadel of learning on an issue that had all been formally resolved. That retrogressive step marked a sad precedent in the chequered history of tertiary education in Nigeria. Sad. Very sad.

EKITI’S FUTILE PRIMARIES

just over the

The police and other security agencies were caught napping again last weekend when the All Progressives Congress (APC) held its governorship primaries. It was a tale that could have been foretold by an idiot. With 33 contending aspirants and their inability to reach a consensus on anything, one would have expected that the security agencies would have been primed to enforce order. But, as it happened, a band of rag-tag disruptors successfully put the police and delegates to flight and brought the exercise to a doleful end.

Governor Umaru Tanko Al-Makura, the Chairman of the Primary Election Committee, had promised “to ensure free and fair election, conform and adhere to all guidelines so that by the time the exercise is over, the party will become stronger and more cohesive”. I watched him on TV waxing lyrical about how the exercise was going well. He even enthused that final results were likely to be declared before midnight. Sadly it was not to be. The governor had spoken too soon.

Have our politicians learnt anything? Must every contest be a do-or-die affair? If the aim was to serve the people, must limbs and skulls be smashed into the bargain?

As Nigeria’s governing party, APC must show good examples. Where personal ambitions override party cohesion, the shameful episode in Ekiti is bound to be replicated in other party primaries yet to be held. It is generally believed that thunder rarely strikes the same spot twice. Not in Nigeria, as Ekiti and other states with fractious primaries have shown.