http://africanspotlight.com/2013/11/15/why-ASUU-is-always-on-strike-ii/
Why ASUU is always on strike (II)
Posted On 15 Nov 2013By : Web MasterComment: 0Tag: ASUU, ASUU strike, Nigeria, Nigerian Universities, Opinion
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Written by Adamu Adamu via Daily Trust

Chief Onosode in fact cleared every major decision and every single aspect of the 2009 agreement with the government before proceeding with ASUU to the next item on his committee’s agenda, and before signing the final document on its behalf.

If, as Senator David Mark said, he didn’t know his left from his right, and, so, in effect didn’t know what he was doing, it followed the government that appointed him and with which he consulted, and which at every stage accepted and okayed every decision he had made, knew even less.

Sometimes the self-deception in official circles can be quite inexplicable. One of the governors even went to the extent of saying that the ASUU strike was a ploy to overthrow the Jonathan administration, which, if true, and were it not so tragic, would have been treasonable; but, as a felony, it would have been quite a popular one—and, yes, even patriotic.
But now that the government had finally been forced to accept to pay exactly what it agreed to in 2009, what would the Senate President have to say about the new development? Was it now the right leg or the left foot that it didn’t know which from the other?


So, instead of hectoring ASUU to call of its strike, the nation should be praying for more of its kind in other sectors of the economy. Since the government has shown itself incapable of doing the right thing until it is forced, the nation should be thinking of organising the association of Nigerian farmers to go on strike to force the government to do for agriculture what ASUU has been struggling to make it do for education. Certainly, something drastic and dramatic is needed to force the government to stop the mindless destruction and degradation of our environment, to persuade it to change its neglect of agriculture and steer the nation towards agricultural self-sufficiency as ASUU has tried to steer it in the direction of educational excellence.
With its 129 universities, 100-odd polytech-nics and 85 colleges of education and a very I-don’t-care attitude to higher education, Nigeria spends less than 1 per cent of its Gross National Income [0.85% to be precise]; while four of its smaller English-speaking African compatriot-states spend multiples of that: Ghana [2.85%], Egypt [3.9%], Zimbabwe [5.4%] and South Africa [7%]. And while the percentage of education expenditure to total national expenditure in Nigeria is a paltry 8.4%, South Africa spends 20%, Morocco spends 26.4%, Botswana 25.6% and French-speaking Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire spend 25.6% and 21.5% respectively.
In spite of this, how Nigeria still dreams of joining the big league remains the biggest mystery. In what must now be seen by some as a joke, especially in view of its attitude to education, Nigeria has been saying it wants to be among the world’s top 20 economies by 2020. But after laughing at this joke, we should remind policymakers that those nations that are in, or truly wish and look poised to join, the ranks of those top economies have a particular attitude to education that Nigeria doesn’t seem to share.
While Nigerians are always very good at mimicking educated global discourse as if they were the ones who invented it—corporate governance, information and communication technology, ICT, globalisation, climate change, ozone layer and the knowledge economy—their government has in fact been busy laying solid foundations for an ignorance economy.
And a comparison with China and India, the two countries of the BRIC whose rank Nigeria wishes to join, will quickly put Nigeria in its place. The Nigerian university system is, indeed, paralysed by a strike caused by government refusal to make the kind of investment the BRIC’s have been making.
Within a decade and a half, for instance, China invested in a massive expansion of its education sector, nea

More money onto the system will mean more money into the pockets of the lecturers and little improvement.

Let Nigeria adopt Australian method where private run the school but government give grants for capital project. School fees for salary part payment while the grant for capital payment and subsidies. Then school will grow. Just imagine if private schools like covenant is given a yearly grant of 5billion.school feel will be in region of 100k and standard will increase.

school students since 2000, students from Shanghai’s schools outperformed those from 65 countries. They were followed by students from Korea, Finland, Hong Kong and Canada in that order. In the same test, students from the US ranked number 24.
And at the lower end, India has 373 univer-sities with 16,000 affiliated degree-awarding colleges functioning under them; and. Like China, the emphasis in the tertiary level of education is on science and technology. India has some 3495 degree-granting colleges with an annual student intake capacity of over 1.76 million with actual enrolment crossing 1.2 million in engineering alone. Total enrolment in science, medicine, agriculture and engineering crossed the 6.5 million limit in 2010, as expenditure on education grosses 4.1 per cent of GDP and surpasses the 12.7 per cent mark of total government expenditure.
In essence, the struggle by ASUU is to force the Nigerian government make this type of investment. Obviously, it takes concern to understand the nature of what is going on, and it takes real public spiritedness to want to do something about it; and it takes uncommon patriotism to then go ahead and do it, especially for lecturers who face a barrage of insults, the prospects of possible job loss or pay withheld. This nation owes a debt of gratitude to ASUU and the strike should not be called off until the government accepts to do—and does—what is required. This is why ASUU is always on strike.
The goal for ending the strike shouldn’t be to save parents anxiety or to take pity on students or to save lecturers’ jobs or to graduate students: it is to save the university system so that it becomes what it is supposed to be—a system for producing a culturally literate society, and for generating and harnessing ideas and knowledge, initiating and driving social and economic innovation, and ensuring national competitiveness on the global scene.
While for this to be possible, government should guarantee institutional autonomy for the university system, ASUU must ensure that campuses exercise this new power with utmost sense of responsibility and full accountability to all stakeholders. This is the only way for Nigeria to realise its full potential as a guarantor of prosperity for its people and for its natural leadership position on the African continent. Without education and the full development of the nation’s human capital, Nigeria will never be able to achieve any of its national goals, targets or plans even if every grain of sand in the country becomes a barrel of oil.
In this, ASUU should see itself as a van-guard – probably the only active one—dedicated to making the government begin to tread the path of responsible good governance in the administration of education in Nigeria—and not just on university campuses. Perhaps it should, in addition to what it already shoulders, take up the task of holding Nigeria responsible for, and forcing it to conform to, the six goals of Education for All by 2015 adopted thirteen years ago at the World Education Forum in Dakar.
These EFA goals, which are designed to improve learning opportunities for everyone, are: expanding and improving comprehensive early childhood care and education; ensuring universal access to and completion of free and compulsory primary education of good quality; improving learning opportunities for youth and adults; increasing adult literacy rates by fifty percent; achieving gender equality in primary and secondary education by 2015; and improving all aspects of the quality of education. We can go a year without graduation, especially of people who will not be employed.
Calling off the strike is no big deal nor yet a cause for celebration; it is not just its calling off that is important, what is more crucial is what eventually happens to the university system as a result. It is a hundred times better for this nation not to have graduates at all than to continue producing this army of half-baked [actually unbaked] graduates,

my of half-baked [actually unbaked] graduates, 89 per cent of whom, according to the boss of the National Youth Service Corps, cannot communicate in English, a charge that is as bad and shameful as the failure itself is deplorable and unacceptable—that Nigeria is still talking of communicating in English.
(I take this opportunity to express our sincere condolences to ASUU, to University of Benin and to the Iyayi family over the death of veteran struggler Professor Festus Iyayi).

Why ASUU is always on strike [I]
By Adamu Adamu adamuadamu@dailytrust.com | Publish Date: Nov 8 2013 4:00AM | Updated Date: Nov 8 2013 4:00AM

Let’s get a few things straight. If ASUU decides today not to embark on any strike again ever, this will not solve any of the problems of the education sector; rather, it will compound them. But ASUU cannot keep on keeping on going on strike for at least two reasons. First, because many of the issues involved are not very clear to the public, it will lose the public relations war and all the blame will ultimately become an albatross on its neck. Second, if there is any least common denominator at which it should meet government, when the government decides to act in good faith, is at the altar of the sanctity of the academic calendar.
While meeting a negotiating partner in whom it has totally lost confidence is going to prove difficult for ASUU, it is nonetheless something that must be done. Along the way, ASUU has to accept that universities must reopen, and it must become realistic enough to accept that a government whose minister can unilaterally buy unauthorised materiel and bullet-proof cars for her use with an amount that is the equivalent of more the annual basic salary of one hundred professors is not the government that can be forced by logic or by university shutdown to see reason.
Right now, it is difficult for ASSU to resist the temptation and urge to ride the high horse thinking that it is involved in a great war on behalf of the civilisation that is us—and it is. Even with ASUU, things have not become any better or at least not as good and as well as they should; but without ASUU there wouldn’t have remained even the inkling of the semblance of an education system by now. The problem with the union’s struggle is that it can be as altruistic as it is egocentrically personal, depending on how a viewer looks at it; but the import of its 2009 agreement with the government is largely for the salvation of the tertiary education system.
Here is how it saw its brief then. The single term of reference of the committee was to re-negotiate the agreement reached between ASUU and the Federal Government in 2001, and enter into a workable agreement. In the course of discussion, the committee agreed that the essence of the re-negotiation was: to reverse the decay in the university system, in order to reposition it for greater responsibilities in national development; 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; to restore Nigerian Universities, through immediate, massive and sustained financial intervention; and, to ensure genuine university autonomy and academic freedom.
On December 14, 2006, the Federal Government inaugurated the FGN/ASUU Re-negotiation Committee, and on January 23, 2007, the re-negotiations began at the National Universities Commission, Abuja. Since the end of the negotiations and the signing of a memorandum between it and the government in January 2009, the government has refused to deliver its part of the bargain. But ASUU has.
ASUU has always enjoyed the support of the Nigerian public. To be sure, much of its early support was ideological; and even if it was fighting a just—and a particularly just—cause, it was also an extension of the Left, or so it was seen by, well, almost everybody. Its support solidified as successive governments, under the order or glare of the Breton Woods institutions began withdrawing support and funding; and as people began to see that the struggle by ASUU was the only way to ensure the long-term survival of education.
However, as strike after strike began to be long and drawn-out, and graduation date began to recede into the distant future, ASUU started to lose the support of some parents and other otherwise well-meaning sympathisers. At one time, students—and today, student leaders—began turning against their lecturers

But arll this ire is really misplaced because right now all the cards are in the hands of the government, and if it chooses to play the right ones, straightaway, lecturers will be back in class, students, ever so eager to graduate, will be back in school, and the public will applaud. But a stay in the university is not just about eagerness to graduate or receive a certificate; it is more about the content of what one goes through and the receipt of quality, functional education, which is what ASUU wishes to ensure. But some people have opposed the ASUU position on the premise that there is corruption in its rank. Yes, so there is; but so is there in government—incomparably so!
No doubt, there is corruption in ASUU members: there are incidents of plagiarism on campus among its members; there are professors without peer-reviewed scholarly articles to their credit; there is harassment of female students, in order to get that thing for marks ; there is greater devotion to unregulated part-time lecturing than faithfulness to tenured positions; there is glaring failure to carry out crucial assignments, like the marking examinations scripts, in which case, they do what they call ‘mark allocation;’ there is abuse of the famous democratisation process, with members electing not the best person for the job but someone who will do only what they like, often leading to incompetence, inefficiency or even a breakdown of law and order; there is ASUU’s inability to discipline its members owing to the voluntary nature of its membership; and there is too much unjustified and indefensible globe-trotting as members junket from one unnecessary conference to another using funds that are supposedly and otherwise inadequate even for teaching and research; but the quality of today’s graduate is inescapably as much a failure of the system as it is of neglect by the university lecturer.
But all this will not absolve the government of its own faults: its notorious, continuing,, insupportable pigheaded failure to adequately fund education even as it misapplies the resources that will have done what is required in the sector; its highhandedness in always taking ASUU for granted; its cynical adoption of deception and serial insincerity to define the modus operandi of its approaches to, and interactions with, members of the staff union; and its adamant refusal to ever honour any of its agreement with ASUU until it is forced into doing so by a determined strike action. What is there in ASUU’s demand that will take the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the Senate President, the Vice President and the President himself to fail to solve? If it is the question of funding that the government is running away from, the report has presented its solution to that.
In addition to the other sources recom-mended in the ASUU Report—the Higher Education Fund [TETFUND], PTDF and many others—the following may be explored. In order for universities to be able to generate sufficient internal revenue, they should charge internationally competitive fees, provided state governments will ensure that all needy or, in fact, their entire students get full and automatic scholarship to cover tuition, board and lodging. Many states have sent hundreds of students overseas and their fees are being paid in dollars—thousands of dollars, why should it be difficult for them to support internal effort to regain lost academic glory?
And if government could direct the setting up of rural branches by commercial banks in areas where patronage might not be sufficient, it shouldn’t be difficult for it to direct them to set up specifically ‘education bank’ branches; or charge all commercial banks to pool resources and set up one giant Education Bank to cater for everyone such that every eligible university student gets a loan sufficient to see him through university.
No doubt, the 2009 agreement with ASUU and the memorandum resulting from it provide a very good starting point if the government is really interested in helping education

But perhaps that much is clear that no one in Abuja is really interested in anything that can move the nation forward, especially anything as nebulous as education, and more especially what needs to be spent on it.
It tell a lot about the government that, with the exception of the civil servants who, strictly speaking are not part of it, there is no one in its upper echelon who knows what government really is or what its processes are. And it tells a lot about the lack of seriousness in public life that the Senate president will call a group headed by Chief Gamaliel Onosode as people who don’t know what they are doing. If this is the expression of gratitude by the government for his three years of painstaking negotiations on its behalf, it leaves much to be desired; but if it is merely an expression of the appreciation of the situation by the Senate president, it desires much to be left.


We hope the new minister of education, Adamu Adamu can bring to the dilapidated, moribund educational sector, those statues he wrote about with such passion during the 2013 ASUU strike.