ASUU and FG Author of this article: By Sylvester Akhaine, Lanrewaju Ajiboye, Surajudeen Mudasiru, Femi Edun, Tunde Fatunde, Tobi Oshodi, Shola Adabonyan, Wale Aderemi and Dele Seteolu In the last three months, we have watched with bewilderment the mind-boggling kid-gloves approach adopted by the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) over its agreement with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). The height of it is the last September national media briefing of President Goodluck Jonathan. The president who was asked about his position on the ASUU strike said inter alia, “In the past, they did not go this far when strikes were called off but now politics has gone into everything.” This response is an uncomplicated indication of the low level of leadership in the country. The president seeks to create the impression that ASUU strike was politically motivated. This is far from the truth and we wish to highlight some salient points at issue in the three-month old standoff for the benefit of many Nigerians who are yet to grapple with the basics. The university is the highest place of learning in most societies. It is a place for research, knowledge production and reproduction as well as its use for the benefit of society. The commitment of academics is the pursuit of truth wherever it leads and this is central to the autonomy of the university. It is not a place to be indicted for ‘teaching what one is paid not to teach.’ It is a place of dissent and controversy and that is the dialectics of arriving at the truth. Countries which believe in the development and transformation of their society invest heavily in education. The industrialized countries of the world invested in research and capacity building and therefore were able to attain the height of development which they occupy today. It is to be noted that developing countries that have caught up with the first world have also invested heavily in education and training. Japan, South Korea, China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia to name a few have all invested heavily in education making the respected scholar, Amartya Sen, to christen education in Asia, and especially in China, as the “Eastern Strategy”. South Korea alone commits over 60 per cent of its public spending to achieve universal primary education. China invested $1.26 trillion representing four per cent of its GDP on education in the last five years. Its institutions have access to all published journals worldwide. Indonesia invested 29.5 per cent of its public spending in 2011 alone. UNESCO recommends 26 per cent of a country’s annual budget to education. In Africa, Ghana tops the list of countries with a huge 31per cent, Cote d’Ivoire, 30; Uganda 27; Morocco 26. 1; Swaziland, 24.6; South Africa 25.8; Kenya, 23; Botswana, 19; Burkina Faso, 16.8 and Nigeria hugs the bottom at 8.4. Tell us how a Nigerian scholar can compete effectively with his/her colleagues elsewhere availed with so much huge learning resources. Celestin Monga once identified four deficits in Africa. These include deficit of self-esteem; deficit of knowledge and learning; deficit of leadership and deficit of communication. In the twenty-first century, the worst deficit is that of knowledge and learning. In Nigeria and elsewhere in the continent it is due largely to naive consciousness of the leaders who believe that development can come about by miracle and rhetoric. Simply put, it is surrender to irrationality. This is the scourge which ASUU is fighting. It is important to reaffirm here what ASUU demands are in the current standoff. The demands are that the FG implements agreements in three separate documents: the 2009 Agreement; the January 24, 2012 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) and the July 2012 Needs Assessment Report on Nigeria public universities. The common elements in the documents are that: 1) Government shall provide N1.3tr and N1.6tr funding for addressing the rot and decay in the universities. The MoU specified N100 billion for 2012 and N400 billion for each of the three years 2013-2015. 2) Payment of earned allowances to all staff in 24 federal universities. The allowances for July 2009 to April 2013 stand as N92b. Government insists that ASUU must forget about the agreements because ‘they are just on paper’. It wants to provide 100 billion for funding and N30 billion for earned allowances on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis. ASUU says no. Do note however that even the N100 billion which source the FGN has refused to disclose is to be taken from Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) already set aside for the universities. Earnest leadership elsewhere knows the significance of education. Recently, France made public its policy to build a digital economy based on research and training. At the turn of the Millennium, Bill Clinton made public his policy to put every American child in school and improve the standard through systems assessment and accountability as basic requirement for today’s world economy. About the same time, Tony Blair made bold to say that the British would control the information superhighway in the new century. What is the Nigerian vision? None. The staff-student ratio of 1:30 is hardly met in our tertiary institutions and so is the staff mix of 20 per cent professorial cadre, 35 per cent senior lecturers category and 45 per cent others. Full-time staff are complemented by adjuncts and associate lecturers in order to meet National University Commission benchmark. Now private universities proliferate the landscape with low staff capacity and churning out deficient graduates to justify the huge amount of money parents pay. Virtually all those in leadership position in the country today have their children enrolled in schools abroad. Does anyone need to go far to know why they are not bothered? The situation in our universities today is so bad that we cannot produce globally competitive graduates. Majority of graduates are simply unemployable. The consequence of the Federal Government’s imprudence is that the tertiary institutions in the country will suffer a triple tragedy: half-baked graduates, deficiency of academic staff and development stasis. Indeed, many of our colleagues who out of patriotism returned to the country to help turn around the dwindling fortunes of our institutions will return to overseas where their services are valued. Without ambiguity, political and financial commitments are required to pull the country’s education sector out of the woods. Parents especially must realise that the ASUU cause is not self-serving, not about salaries and not politically motivated; they must also resist the logical inclination to prize their wards’ immediate plight above the collective and longer term interest of rescuing our educational system from the brink of the abyss. Everybody must hold the leadership accountable and demand for it to do the right thing. Indeed, public officials wallow brazenly in affluence unchecked and to be acquiescent at this time is to be supportive of the status quo. The amount already earmarked for the ‘centenary celebrations’ in 2014 will conveniently address the immediate emergencies in the educational sector. We, therefore, employ this opportunity to call on parents and well-meaning Nigerians to appreciate the demand of ASUU and put pressure on the Federal Government to save education and the future of our children.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 14:17:01 +0000
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