FOR about 145 days now, public university
education in the country has been at a standstill.
It has been popularly dubbed a strike — or more
elegantly, an industrial action. But the reality is
that what is ongoing is a feud between two
groups of people — one, dominated by a greedy
lot feigning sanctimony and posturing as genuine
advocates of education revamp; the other, by a
grossly irresponsible clique of people whose only
business in governance is siphoning public
funds.
There is little to prove when I say the Nigerian
government is dominated by an irresponsible lot,
one so crassly and rapaciously corrupt that
virtually no sector of the economy is working at
half the capacity commensurate with supposedly
invested funds, be it health or power or
education. In the oil industry, the scale of
corruption is in life-and-death proportions, far
beyond the millions and billions of naira always
being bandied about in the media; and the most
worrisome matter for me is: where or who will
begin the clean-up? Only three months ago, I
was served the most chilling warning of my
entire life when an industry expert told me: “Stay
out of corruption in the oil sector... Are you
married? Do you have kids? You will die if you
try it...”
There is little to write on matters of corruption
in public places and how well the country would
be functioning if we incorruptibly deployed our
resources into tackling some of our most
pressing socioeconomic challenges, including
the sliding standard of education. Added to that
is the damning tragedy of having a president
who has a narrow idea of how to run the country,
and is consequently prone to being misled by the
hordes of sycophants massing around him and
masquerading as his loyalists and the country’s
patriots.
More than three years into the Presidency of Dr.
Goodluck Jonathan, I am still unconvinced that
he is the man. At his last media chat, for
example, his responses on the state of tertiary
education and the whereabouts of wanted
terrorist Abubakar Shekau betrayed his
underwhelming understanding of a country he
ought to be governing. Add corruption to
government ineptitude and confusion, and you
can tell the country won’t be free from doom
anytime soon.
Clearly, education has had its share of the
resultant rot, beginning from student populations
far above universities’ carrying capacities and
culminating in utterly unbelievable learning
conditions, such as the staging of lectures under
trees or in sports pavilions. In 2004 as a student
at the nevertheless prestigious University of
Ibadan when students had to take courses
across departments, many of us were Olympic
sprinters in the making. We ran from one lecture
theatre to another because we knew they could
not accommodate all of us. Too many times, I
received lectures without seeing or hearing a
single word of everything the lecturer wrote or
said. Tens of students shared laboratory
equipment both during practical lessons and
exams. In my final year, I wrote an exam that
required students to identify certain leaves; but
since about five or six of us shared a leaf, we all
knew the answers! Any recent graduate of a
public university has his/her share of such
nightmarish experiences.
So we all know the problem. But what we all do
not know is that a certain body, the Academic
Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), deceptively
claims to be fighting for all of us. Very
unfortunate. ASUU has downed tools these past
four months due to its insistence on full
government implementation of the 2009
agreement both parties signed. Sadly, very few
students have read the contentious agreement,
which at once explains why so many student
unions and groups have been blindly staging
protests in support of ASUU.
Is ASUU wholly fighting the cause of saving the
Nigerian education system from collapse? Who
or what has the right answer? Well, it isn’t
President of ASUU, Dr. Nasir Isa Fagge. And of
course, were we to ask President Jonathan,
expect him to say, like he did during last
month’s media chat: “I don’t know ... you
journalists know more than us...” The right
answer lies in the underlying reasoning behind all
the sections of that 2009 agreement.
In January 2007 when the Federal Government
team led by Deacon Gamaliel Onosode and that
of ASUU led by then President, Dr Abdullahi Sule-
Kano began meeting to renegotiate the 2001
agreement, the terms of reference for the
resultant committee were to: (i) to reverse the
decay in the university system, in order to
reposition it for greater responsibilities in
national development; (ii) to reverse the brain
drain, not only by enhancing the remuneration of
academic staff, but also by disengaging them
from the encumbrances of a unified civil service
wage structure; (iii) to restore Nigerian
universities, through immediate, massive and
sustained financial intervention; and (iv) to
ensure genuine university autonomy and
academic freedom. However, when the issues for
negotiation were listed, they were: (i) conditions
of service, (ii) funding, (iii) university autonomy
and academic freedom, and (iv) other matters.
First observation, how exactly does “condition
of service” — candidly put, “salary upgrade” —
constitute the most important step in “reversing
the decay in the university system”? Why was
condition of service ASUU’s most cherished
matter for renegotiation, at the expense of
infrastructure upgrade or funding?
ASUU and the Federal Government agreed to
have a “separate salary structure for university
academic staff” to be known as Consolidated
University Academic Salary
Structure II (CONUASS II), comprising the
Consolidated Salary Structure for Academic Staff
(CONUASS) approved by the Federal Government
of Nigeria (FGN) effective 1st January 2007, the
Consolidated Peculiar University Academic
Allowances (CONPUAA) exclusively for university
teaching staff and derived from allowances not
adequately reflected or not consolidated in
CONUASS, and the “rent” as approved by the
FGN effective 1st January 2007. Under these
circumstances, a lecturer can earn as much as
N7.5m per annum.
ASUU and FG also reached an agreement on
earned academic allowances that will see an
assistant lecturer receive N15, 000 per student
per annum, senior lecturer N20, 000, and reader
and professor N25, 000 as postgraduate
supervision allowance; and the lecturers can
receive the payments for up to five students.
Added with other allowances — for teaching
practice/industrial supervision/field trip,
honoraria for internal/external examiner
(postgraduate thesis), and honoraria for external
moderation of undergraduate and postgraduate
examinations — a lecturer can earn up to N580,
000 per annum in earned allowances. There is a
sum of N200, 000 for external assessors of
candidates for the position of Reader or
Professor; plus a Responsibility Allowance that
sees Hall Wardens receive N150, 000 per annum
and Vice Chancellors/Deputy Vice Chancellors/
Librarians receive N750, 000. A list of other non-
salary benefits includes improved proposals for
vehicle loan/car refurbishing loan, housing loan,
research leave, sabbatical leave, annual leave,
sick leave, maternity leave and injury pension.
To be clear, I am unfavourably disposed to
arguments in some quarters that ASUU’s
remunerative demands are unreasonable. No. In
my opinion, ASUU — and indeed any other labour
union — reserves the rights to propose whatever
conditions it considers most effective for
motivating its members for optimum job
performance. What I find unacceptable is ASUU’s
less-than-impressive approach; and there are at
least four manifestations of this trait in the 2009
agreement.
One, in pushing for CONUAS II, ASUU
conceitedly argues that Nigerian university
academics represent the critical mass of
scholars in the society, with the potential for
transforming it. They, therefore, deserve unique
conditions of service that would motivate them,
like the intellectuals in other parts of the world,
to attain greater efficiency and effectiveness in
service delivery with regard to teaching,
research and community service, and thereby
stem the brain drain. However, if doctors,
teachers, oil marketers and transporters, civil
servants, engineers all downed tools as often as
ASUU does, I am wondering what is left of the
society that ASUU so piously claims to be
desperate to “transform.”
Two, while ASUU agrees to be disengaged from
the encumbrances of a unified civil service wage
structure, it goes on to demand that whenever
there is a general increase in public sector
salaries and allowances, the remuneration of
academic staff shall be correspondingly
increased. Simply put, ASUU wants to have the
best of both worlds.
Three, in the agreement, ASUU ensures that the
renegotiation team agrees to its salary demands
but as soon as discussion shifts to other
matters, the team only recommends. And so, on
matters involving the Education Tax Fund, Joint
Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB),
amendment of the National Universities
Commission Act (2004), and funding of
universities, which are major institutional
channels for reforming education, what ASUU
does is to recommend, agree to recommend or
project.
Finally, ASUU has been going about its latest
industrial action like a social crusader when the
crux of it all is increased wage. On its website,
President Faggae wrote: Dear Comrades, as the
struggle to save Nigerian University system is
being pursued, I’ll like to salute all our members
for their resoluteness in ensuring that the 2009
ASUU/Government Agreement is implemented in
accordance with the Roadmap defined by the
2012 MoU. We believe very strongly that the rot
and decay in the University System is not only
arrestable but also reversible. We believe even
more strongly that, the key to turning round the
University System lies in the sincere
implementation of the Agreement... We will
continue to carry the banner of this struggle to
its logical conclusion....
By sanctimoniously claiming to be fighting to
reverse the rot in education when it is in fact
chiefly motivated by its own pecuniary benefits,
ASUU is equally guilty of the deception and
mischief its president oft-accuses the
government of. Between Jonathan’s Federal
Government and ASUU, I cannot find the saint;
and I find them jointly culpable for the current
standstill in the country’s tertiary education.
My prediction is that the ongoing industrial
action will be hard to halt. Whatever his
understandable grouse with the 2009 agreement
or the negotiators on behalf of the government,
President Goodluck Jonathan fulfil its dictates.
That is the moral thing to do. An agreement was
signed; it must be honoured until such a time
when it is due for another review. And surely,
ASUU or no ASUU, a government in which a
federal lawmaker willing to play ball receives
N4m as soon as a breakaway faction surfaces at
the National Assembly has the financial resource
to embark on an infrastructural overhaul of
education.