The full gist of this TRILOGY can be found here... http://aguntasolo.com but I've simply cut out an extract from the part two... Enjoy!

So my blog post on ASUU which contained no facts has been accused of being fact free. I actually thought I explained this in the very first sentence and even called it a tirade. But no matter.

Now that I have your undivided attention, let me try again. This time around we shall stick to the facts. But before we get to that, I received another response from a Professor to my blog post and its reproduced below

This piece is utter rubbish for many reasons e.g : 1) Nigeria is not a poor country as claimed by the writer, the politicians just want everything to themselves at the expense of others. ASUU is relatively underpaid, my salary as a lecturer of 35 years and professor of 8 years is only half of that of a local govt councillor with no university education!
2) In any profession or group there will always be some not effective people, in the university I will put it at 10% definitely not 90%
3) Nigerian universities are currently understaffed because of student overpopulation, I take some classes with more than 500 students. So how can anyone in their right mind advocate a cut down in staff? Besides Nigeria now has over 70 universities and many lecturers are already teaching in 2 or 3 concurrently
4) If any cut down is needed it is in the political office holders, if at all in the universities perhaps in administrative staff.

1. This issue of student overpopulation is a recurring one so perhaps its best to start there. Undoubtedly, many universities are bursting at the seams at least to the naked eye. But this is mainly a problem of facilities not really overpopulation. Looked at in a different way – I was in Shanghai (24m people) and Beijing (20m people) this year and neither place felt anywhere near as crowded as Lagos. So this problem manifesting itself in packed lecture halls in our universities is no different from what causes gridlock traffic in Lagos everyday – we simply aren’t very good at organising ourselves.

But let’s look at some numbers starting with a rough calculation. There are currently around 37,504 academics/teaching staff in Nigeria’s 74 universities. Those same universities also have 1,252,913 students in total. This gives a rough ratio of 33 students to one lecturer. However this kind of headline data masks the very wide distribution across the schools. So for example the ratio in University of Abuja is 1:122 (512 lecturers) while LASU is 1:114 (797 lecturers)

However, Ondo State University of Science & Technology has 29 lecturers and 212 students giving a ratio of 1:7. Quickly we can see that the student to teacher ratio can be meaningless when taken as a whole but let’s persist. What is the ratio like in other similar countries?

Vietnam – 84,109 lecturers. I can’t find latest figures but a reasonable guess based on this report will be 1,900,000. So a 1:23 ratio. By the way, the average university lecturer’s salary was N24,000 ($150) per month in Vietnam in 2010 (more on this in next point). In that same year, Nigeria had a GDP per capita of $1,432 and Vietnam had $1,224. By 2012, they had overtaken us and had a slightly higher GDP per capita than us. Nevertheless, between 2007 and 2010, the government there rolled out 100 new universities.

China – 31 million students in 2011. I can’t find a total number of lecturers for all Chinese universities but I did find the student-teacher ratio for the top 20 Chinese universities in 2013. The list is here. The ratios vary wildly. In Zhejiang University, it is 1:29 while at National Yan Ming Uni it is 1:98. All the others fall somewhere in between.

India – Student population was 12 million in 2011. The diagram below relates to 2006/07 but we can make a rough calculation. In total – adding colleges and universities, there were 488,002 teaching staff so a ratio of 1:25.

Screen Shot 2013-09-27 at 23.14.36

South Africa – This report says that in 2008, the country had some 799,568 students in its universities. It also had 15,589 academics for a 1:51 ratio.

As I said earlier, this ratio can be very meaningless but it’s an argument that ASUU like to make but our numbers are not particularly crazy especially considering the hidden distribution.

2. Last year, there was a book released that compared lecturer salaries across 28 countries in the world. Nigeria happened to be one of those countries. The book is titled ‘Paying The Professoriate‘ and its findings were widely reported when it came out. So what did they find?

Screen Shot 2013-09-27 at 23.39.43

In the 28 countries studied, entry-level Chinese academics were the worst paid with a monthly salary of $259 while Canadian entry-level staff were the best paid at $5,733. Nigeria? $2,758 – higher than in France, Colombia, Brazil and Turkey and roughly the same as in Malaysia. At the top-level, Nigerian lecturers earn more than their counterparts in Japan and Norway. No, I am not making this up.

For years now, ASUU have gotten away with the idea (often not backed by facts) that they are underpaid. But relative to who? And how much exactly should we pay them? To be clear, ASUU members are 100% entitled to their pay because the government, in its wisdom or foolishness, signed the agreement. It must honour it. How much is enough to pay our lecturers and when can we start asking for returns for this pay?

3. Fun Fact: Since 2007, Nigeria has been led back to back by former lecturers.

Under President Yar’Adua in 2009, ASUU went on strike for 3 months which ended in October after government agreed to a 53% pay rise for senior lecturers. They had initially gone on a 1 week ‘warning’ strike in May of that year over an agreement reached in 2007. In 2007 they also went on strike for 3 months which ended in July of that year. How exactly are these pay rise numbers arrived at? I honestly have no idea but I imagine that ASUU have a strong hand to play with students sitting at home and parents asking government to just give ASUU what they want. 53% is a lot to get as pay rise in one go which is probably why governments always end up not honouring them and why ASUU will never say anything other than ‘government broke the agreement’ without telling us what the agreement was.

I digress. Goodluck Jonathan became President in 2010 and given that this is his first(?) strike, you have to say he is doing quite well. Yar’Adua was on his 3rd strike in the same time period. In any case, this current strike began on July 1st so he might break Yar’Adua’s record for length very soon.

But there is a subtler point to be made here – who can negotiate with ASUU to ASUU’s satisfaction? What you are seeing is typical bunker mentality you find in hardcore unions. The moment someone is not part of the group anymore, all past relationships are meaningless and he/she is to be treated like the enemy. If ASUU cannot sit down round a table with 2 of its former members and trash out an agreement that doesn’t waste the lives of thousands of students across the country, what hope is there for anyone else?

4. Does anyone have a copy of the 2009 agreement between government and ASUU that is supposedly the cause of the current strike? I cannot find it anywhere online and the links to it on the ASUU website are all dead. But I did find this press conference by the ASUU president, Nassir Isa at Unilag on August 22nd. Please read it. From it we can deduce that there was an agreement for the government to spend around N1.3trn (they will manage N100bn for now while N400bn is released to them each year for 3 years) on our universities over 3 years to ‘restore their lost glory once and for all’. Apparently this amount was arrived at ‘scientifically’. Please note that this is only for universities and not education in general.

In the 2013 budget, education got the highest allocation with N432bn. Of this amount, more than half (N291bn) already goes on universities. But ASUU want another N400bn. Perhaps no amount is too much to be spent on education but when you read the ASUU president’s statement, you quickly realise what this is all about – it’s a shakedown operation by experienced shakedown artistes. He is invoking the amount given to Nollywood and airlines and banks i.e. we want our own too. There is an ongoing debate about how the government spends our money very badly and this was part of the conversation during the fuel subsidy protests. Salaries and such like will consume N1.72trn in 2013. This is madness and we all know that if we break away from this model, so many things will improve even if only marginally.

But ASUU are very clever. When these conversations are going on, they never participate too loudly so as to not weaken their ‘brand’ or become part of something that will be eventually bigger than them. When they join the conversation, it is always to highlight how money is being spent elsewhere and not on them, given how they are the ‘key to the nation’s development’.

They want the money because they are ASUU…and they will take your children hostage if you don’t pay up.

All of this begs the question – what kind of government signs such an agreement anyway? Even the current budget is difficult to implement and every other day we worry about the government going broke. Are the government stupid or perhaps clever? I go with the latter because they surely know they can never pay this money.

By the way, out of curiosity, I put the ASUU president’s name into Google Scholar and it returned one result – a paper he co-wrote with 2 other academics. One. The man is a Professor, I will have you know and the journal in which it was published is a Nigerian one but at least it is online so 1 point for him.

Someone will say ‘oh but my professor has published several articles in international journals’. I am happy for you. But can you please help me ask your Professor why he is happy to be led by a man who is, to all intents and purposes, a non-academic?

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