Government Must Keep Its Deal With ASUU
What’ s your take on the constant face-off between the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities( AS U U) and the federal government? The issues are very simple to me. It is very easy. One problem that is giving you concern year in, year out is not a celestial but a human problem. Bring the egg heads together and let us reason these things out. Okay you have agreed to do the following and you have not done them, take a timeline of what needs to be done and when. Take a professor’s salary as an example. Governor Fayemi recently said his salary was less than that of a professor by N500.00. That is a fallacy because governors have what they call security vote that runs into billions of naira; they have all manner of allowances and virtually control the state treasury. A professor has no vote like governors and is not entitled to what a governor has. What is expected of those in power is to provide the teaching staff what it has promised to. You are not providing for them and that is why we are failing. If the government wants to increase staff salary by engaging with them and reviewing the timelines, that is no problem. Government can have an engagement with the labour unions and there would be no need for strikes once the reviews are tenured to timelines say every three, four or five years. Once both parties, government in particular, keep to their part of the deal there would be no strikes.
If you are convinced the university staff or any worker for that matter is entitled to a good comfortable life such as good medical care, school fees for the children and a roof over their heads, the problem is solved. According to a former Vice Chancellor of the university, Prof. Jelili Adebisi Omotola, if you provide a university staff with a roof over his head, 75 percent of his problems are solved. I agree with him. We need to build model houses for various workers in the country. That is what is done in advanced countries including Dubai. Since land is limited, build high rises and let people own houses.
A salary of N18,000 is a licence for the workers to be thieves. A man with a wife and four children living on a salary of N18,000 has been consigned to death and cannot live within the Lagos metropolis. He would go outside to Shagamu to live and come to Lagos to work with all the traffic jams. Such a person cannot live long. The point I am making is that the university must sit with the government to solve societal problems.
If Government is serious it can stop these incessant strikes through a constructive engagement of the Labour unions. The government must keep to its deal with the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU). The same applies to its deal with the Nigerian worker. Conditions of work can be reviewed periodically based on economic indicators which are easy to determine and through constructive engagements with Nigerian workers. We don’t need strikes to start before negotiations are done. Take the case of the NLC and the TUC.
How can anyone live in this country with N30, 000.00? The leaders of NLC and TUC as far as I am concerned are not serious. I had expected that this time around they would have weighed in on the bogus budgets, corrupt and wasteful spending of our collective commonwealth by the gatekeepers right from the top to the bottom of governance- the executive, the governors, members of the National Assembly and other arms of government such as the MDAs and their executives. Salaries must be commensurate with what the economy can carry. The salaries being paid to those in government and politics are humongous.
Such things as security votes for governors must be taken off as well as their large retinue of staff which must be largely reduced while the constituency projects should be scrapped. The money from these outlets can pay the civil servants on very comfortable salaries and other emoluments.
Elsewhere people are proud to be civil servants, not waiting to collect contracts because they are well paid. N30,000 is what governors are saying they cannot pay. Labour unions must fight their fight. Let me restate that the fight from the labour unions should have started with the insistence on reviewing how our collective commonwealth is appropriated by a few in the name of budgets that do not impact positively on the lives of the people because of corruption which manifests itself in various ways. No governor who has ruled a state for eight years and sat on its budget should ever be entitled to this bogey called severance package. Most of them did nothing except paint buildings and buy motorbikes called empowerment and mass transit provision. Is mass transit a Hiace bus in developed economies? It is an insult on the intelligence of the people and this goes on all the time.
We don’t need rocket science to solve the problem of Medicare in this country. Those known as NHIS collect money they don’t remit to those providing the services. There must be checks and balances because the money is supposed to fund the hospitals so that they will be able to purchase needed equipment. We need a mixed grill of transportation. We need more bridges and alternative ways of transportation. Waterways transportation must be developed in addition to metro-line transportation to make life better for the people.
How much research goes on at the University of Lag os? The University of Lagos was established by an Act of Parliament in 1962 to provide the needed manpower for the emerging democracy of Nigeria and its Republican status in 1963. It was more of operational programmes. However, because of the quest for education by Nigeria, the operational content was diluted with the inclusion of other programmes to ensure the university existed and lived up to its expectation of teaching, research and community service. As time went by the faculties were created around 1978 or thereabouts because the schools that were in existence at the time like the Schools of Business and Social Studies emerged as autonomous units or faculties.
At that time the different units created could not function because of the dwindling Nigerian economy and limited funds made available to the universities. However, during the tenure of Professor Rahman Adisa Bello, the need for such academic centres became more germane and in 2016 through the institution’s affiliation with the African Universities Research Association (ARUA), centres were created and the World Bank recognised us as a centre of excellence in Mass communication, one of the best you can find in the world.
The current Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Oluwatoyin Temitope Ogundipe, has as the cornerstone of his administration the creation of centres to solve societal problems, centres to bring town and gown together for the mutual benefit of Nigeria as a country and the global village as a whole. His emphasis is on research that solves human problems rather than the solution to basic science problems. So our Centre for Housing is up and running, there is the Centre for Nigeria and China Studies recently launched, the Centre for Herbal Medicine and Allied
Discipline will cut across all areas of human endeavour in this university. We bid for it through the World Bank and we are sure of getting it. You have other centres in science, we have the Centre for Entrepreneurship which ensures the extra soft skills required for the employment of our graduates are given to them before graduation. The university is established to teach the concept, the construct and theories relevant to the various areas of calling. However, you need extra skill sense or set to live through life better than you would have been without them. The idea is to separate the green from the shaft, which is why the Experience Centre has also been created.
We have the Hub and the Abash centres being currently installed. We are also trying to install the Innovation Hub whose foundation stone was laid by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. The Hub of Innovation will take this university to the nearest level of human endeavour because all our students would have to be creative irrespective of their discipline. The idea is not to just prepare students for employment but to prepare students as employers of labour in the society and in addition to that, every research grant must be relevant to the human capital development, which is relevant to the society and the people who make it up. For example under the administration of the current Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Ogundipe, there is an attempt to make lecturers comfortable; they should not be living in a state of denial. One way of achieving this is to leave your comfort zone of academic pursuit and venture out into the society to make a living to augment your earnings because one stream of income is totally insufficient for any human being who wants to survive and live well.
So the VC’s drive is on how we can leverage on the gains of the past and take this university to the next level and I must say the 25 years strategic plan put in place for this university is the first of its kind and was followed by the immediate past VC. Everything that is going on right now under the current vice-chancellor is in line with the policy plan. We are also trying to bring knowledge to people wherever they find themselves. You don’t have to come to the university to have a university education. We are into blackboard for interactive knowledge impartation. In fact, the essence of the VC’s leadership is impacting knowledge positively on our students including the orientation of our value system of students and staff irrespective of whatever they are.
I just had a discussion with him that even the unskilled workers who are here can be encouraged to do extra jobs. Take for instance the element of waste which can be turned to wealth only after a value is added to it. Here in the university we are working to convert waste to wealth. Used plastics can be converted to more productive ends by turning them to fiber as a raw material which with additional inputs can become an end user product. An example is the lady’s hairs some of which are the by-products of plastics. Plastics can be used in road construction and we are trying to develop a machine in the Department of Chemical Engineering, where the plastics are crushed, with value added for purposes of commercialization.
We are financially driven and competitive in the global community with the hope that before the end of the VC’s tenure our international rating would have gone up, higher than we met it and through the collective effort of all stakeholders such as the graduates of the university and all parents who have children in the university, et al.
We shall leverage on our unique positioning at the commercial nerve centre of Nigeria to create linkages with all foreign embassies in the country and all other agencies that we can contact as much as possible
Why are the key institutions in the country taking the back seat of the rating agencies while the relatively private universities like Covenant are very much ahead?
When you prepare an old woman for a beauty contest, it would involve a lot of funds. The U.I. and Unilag are old universities with old infrastructure whose maintenance costs are very high. At a time WebMatrix, the online rating agency and similar organisations placed us on a high scale. It is a different story now because the problems we face here are not the same other countries face. Here access to bandwidth is a very genuine, pivotal problem. It has limited the activities of the National Universities Commission in their attempt to bring everybody under the same umbrella. It became cumbersome and it ended there. Each university is trying to improve on its bandwidth with the attendant problems.
These agencies don’t tell you ahead they are coming to rate your university. They can go into your website to assess you and if there is no power, how would they rate you? How would they assess the papers of those who are in the institution without access to the website? The world has become a global village. The world has become such you can interact with everyone in the comfort of your home. The ideal thing is for students to work, interact and read their books everywhere they go within the country and outside but when the internet access is limited or shut off that possibility becomes an issue. The problems are hydra-headed but we are tackling them. Main One is helping in the area of bandwidth and Wahoo the Chinese company is coming on-board.