Lingering eight-year-old impasse between the Federal Government and Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) reflects an even older unease between the two institutions, which is deepening distress in an ailing education sector.
On August 14, ASUU, an umbrella body of all university lecturers in Nigeria, declared an indefinite strike over Federal Government’s failure to fulfill the 2009/2013 Agreement made with the Union.
Some of the immediate causes of the current strike as contained in the Agreement include: funding for the revitalisation of public universities, earned academic allowances, registration of Nigerian universities pension management company, university staff school, fictionalisation and non-payment of salaries among others.
However, universities’ academic calendar since 1981 has been regularly disrupted by ASUU’s recurrent strikes in pursuit of fair wages and university autonomy.
The total number of time lost to ASUU strikes since 1981 is approximately two years and six months about 4, 320 work hours; practically every year since the ‘80s has been marked by strike, BusinessDay’s findings show.
Some of the reasons for these strikes have been conflict between ASUU and Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities on salary parity, poor implementation of agreement by the Federal Government, review of salaries, review of fringe benefits and allowances, increased university autonomy among others.
The effects of these strikes include: deteriorating quality of graduates from Nigerian universities since time lost due to strikes that should be used for delivering the curriculum is not recovered. The other effect is loss of revenue to universities. Many potential students prefer universities in neighbouring African countries including Ghana, Benin and Togo because of these countries have stable academic calendar.
“It is unfortunate that in Nigeria education and in particular our universities are not factored into the long-term national development plan. There is little or no synergy between the gown and town” said Dauda Yunus, associate professor of management at the Lagos State University, Ojo.
Yunus added “at a recent conference for universities in Germany, I was pleasantly surprised to realise the person sitting on the chair in front of me was Germany’s minister of education. In Nigeria the situation is different; the government tends to see university lecturers as adversaries, not partners in nation-building.”
Ike Mowete, a professor of Electrical and Electronics engineering at the University of Lagos contends that ASUU should take the plight of students seriously when making decisions to go on strike.
“There are good and dedicated academic staff members in our tertiary institutions and I respect them. Now, the flip side of the coin is that there are many who do not really mind whatever happens to students, they care mostly about their welfare as lecturers. I never supported ASUU strikes when I was a young lecturer and radical because of some fundamental principles and I am not about to start doing so in my old age” he said.
Debo Adeniran, executive chairman of the Centre for Anti-Corruption and Open Leadership (CACOL) has called on the Federal Government to as matter of urgency to address the circumstance that has culminated into the freshly declared indefinite strike by ASUU.
Adeniran, reacting to the continued strike action embarked upon by the academia said that the present scenario could have been avoided if government (past and present) had been responsible enough to abide with the agreement it had with ASUU since 2009.
If this had been done, according to him, this precarious situation which has the cancerous tendency of ruining education not just at the tertiary level but the education sector generally would have been avoided through dialogue, sincere and genuine negotiations and this would have added up to the continuous improvement in the education system basically
It is time for government to abandon the same rhetoric of the old which downplays the prominence need to ensure that incessant strikes are abated in the education sector. The usual reactionary response from government has already begun with the appeal to ASUU, to consider students who are currently writing degree and promotional examination to call off the strike.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
