Forwarded:
SAHEED ADEKILEKUN:
I have read this and feel the piece is very educative on the subject of ASUU and IPPIS. Please read to the end.

THE MISCONCEPTION OF ASUUS POSITION ON IPPIS

It is no longer news that there is a brewing war between the Federal Government of Nigeria and the Academic Staff Union of Universities on IPPIS. The former insists that the latters members must be captured on the platform of the IPPIS if they wish to receive salaries henceforth. ASUU says no based on some fundamental issues while the FGN believes that ASUU is guilty of insubordination. The stage is thus set for a clash of the titans.
In view of the above scenario, I wish to explain certain things the way I understand them. First and foremost, I wish to explain Academic Freedom and University Autonomy based on the proceedings of the International Conference on Academic Freedom and University Autonomy held in Sinaia, Romania, from 5 to 7 May 1992. The Conference was organized by CEPES, the UNESCO European Center for Higher Education, the Standing Conference of Rectors, Presidents, and Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities (CRE), the National Rectors' Conference of Romania (NRCR), and the Romanian National Commission for UNESCO, in cooperation with the Council of Europe. The conference brought together some 180 distinguished scholars, including representatives of international organizations, from about 30 countries.

After thorough debates, the participants in the Conference all agreed that:
a university is the repository of truth, be it historical, cultural, or scientific; it is the place where minds, embarking on the quest for truth, meet and clash in pursuit of this ideal. Minds so-fashioned are the individual carriers and transmitters of past and future thought, of tradition, and of innovation. The university, by its very nature, is the collective mind that bears the truth of all who pass through it, continuously revising and improving scientific knowledge and concepts in a climate of and according to the principle of truthfulness. It is the place where the scholarly elite, the critical intellectual mind of a society, takes shape, discards obsolete findings, and affirms and reassesses other interpretations of truth. In order to function as a hotbed of knowledge, a university must benefit from and respect a number of basic norms of conduct. Although not a fundamental human right; academic freedom is a basic university right. Academics must be free to choose what they will put forward in their teaching, research, or publications. Academic freedom is the freedom of individual academics to follow a particular path of intellectual conception and activity within particular higher education institutions. The second crucial institutional right of a higher education institution is university autonomy. It is the right to fully exercise and practice academic freedom and self-government with regard to internal activities. It is the right of a university to be free of interference by the state and by any other external power as regards its operations and affairs. (https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000092770 accessed 28 November, 2019)

Back home in Nigeria, there are provisions guiding the operations of universities. There is the Principle of University Autonomy as enshrined in section 2AA of the Universities Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment) Act 2003 which states that:

"The powers of the Council shall be exercised, as in the law and statutes of each university and to that extent, establishment circulars that are inconsistent with the laws and statutes of the university shall not apply to the universities.
Section 2AAA of the same Act states:
“(1) The Governing Council of a university shall be free in the discharge of its functions and exercise of its responsibilities for the common management, growth and development of the university.
"(2) The council of a university in the discharge of its functions shall ensure that disbursement of funds of the university complies

the approved budgetary ratio for:
(a) Personnel costs;
(b) Overhead costs;
(c) Research and development;
(d) library development; and
(e) The balance in expenditure between academic vis-à-vis non-academic activities.

"For example, the 1992 Act of the University of Abuja expressly states in Section 6: Functions of the Council and its Finance and General Purposes Committee:
(1) Subject to the provisions of this Act relating to the Visitor, the Council shall be the governing body of each university and shall be charged with the general control and superintendence of the policy, finance and property of the university including its public relations. There shall be a committee of the Council to be known as the Finance and General Purposes Committee, which shall, subject to the directions of the Council, exercise control over the property and expenditure of the university and perform such other functions of the Council as the Council may, from time to time, delegate to it".

Going through the above objectively will make any unbiased reader understand the position of ASUU better. It is said that people will revolt when they have nothing to lose but their chains. There are peculiarities in universities and that is why it is called the ivory tower. We should look beyond ethnic, political and religious affiliations in this issue. It is a procedural as well as systemic issue. Let us look beyond PMB. The resistance is never against him.

Some people say that ASUU is selfish. I do not understand what they mean by that. In 1992, when Professor Jega was the ASUU president, he took on IBB on the funding of university education. IBB said that there was no money and Jega and his team came up with a proposal that multi-national companies and industries should be made to pay a percentage of their yearly profits for the development of education. It was called education trust fund. The government implemented the proposal and she realised a lot of money which she distributed to primary, secondary and tertiary institutions in the country. It is now called TETfund. No public university can survive in Nigeria today if we remove TETfund. The major thing the government does for universities now is the payment of salaries. Apart from this, you can talk of Needs Assessment which may not be more than two buildings per university.

Some other people ask, How can employees tell their employers how they should be paid? This is having a misconception about governance. No Dangotes employee can tell him how he is to be paid. The government oversees our collective wealth. Nigeria is not a company. We should stop seeing those who manage our collective wealth as people doing us a favour. It is a very wrong mentality. That is why we always send emissaries to our Governors to thank them whenever they perform duties they promise to perform during campaigns and are elected to perform. This makes them have a false sense of grandeur instead of seeing us as their employers.

Others say that in the developed world, where universities enjoy autonomy, the universities generate the money with which they run the universities. That is why they believe that ASUU should not talk about autonomy. I wish to ask them these questions: Doesnt National Assembly have autonomy? Do they generate their own money? What about the Judiciary and the likes? Moreover, education is a social service which government renders. If we say universities must become income generating institutions I wonder how many children will have access to university education.

As you read this, the National Assembly is neither on TSA nor being captured on IPPIS platform. Let us forget the fact that some of them may not meet our expectations but their autonomy is sacrosanct for the growth of our democracy. If the autonomy is taken away we will become a banana republic.

The Army is not on IPPIS. The Navy is not on it. The DIC is not there. NDDC is not there. Why the hues and cries about those who need autonomy most? When they talk of the cream of any society they talk about universities and other

institutions. Some may say what about other professionals? Other professionals are equally produced by the same institutions whose autonomy ASUU is fighting to protect.

Out of lack of adequate information, some say ASUU is selfish. According to such people, they are selfish because they want to be visiting two universities and be collecting double salary! They say further that ASUU members go on sabbatical when they collect more money for doing nothing. Some others say that instead of those Professors working up to 70 years they should retire normally at 35 or 60 on the account of service and age respectively.

I wish to explain the above misconceptions to a layman. Visiting other universities means that you go and teach there at least twice a month. You are paid 50% of the basic salary you receive in your place of primary employment. You cannot visit if your rank is below Senior Lecturer. And to become a senior lecturer you must have gone through the ranks of a GA, AL, L2& L1. So how many lecturers do you think can partake in the so called visiting?

Sabbatical is almost always for the Associate Professors and Professors and sometimes Senior Lecturers. This is because of the fact that it is the professorial cadre that is in short supply. Moreover, you can only go on sabbatical once in seven years. How many seven years do you think we can get in the service years of someone who is a Senior Lecturer or a Professor?

On the retirement age, tertiary institutions are not like where they deal with files and the stuff like that. They are places where people do specialised intellectual work. You can compare them to lawyers who have to read till they drop dead. They are not places where you retire people whose places can hardly be filled at the age of 60. They are the people who carry out researches to better the lots of the society. In fact, in developed world, university Dons rarely retire. It is not because they like money but because they are not tired of moulding the young minds. We say lecturers should retire at 60 but they can be senator at 80! It is very funny. For our information, Nigerian lecturers are the least paid and the least remunerated in the world. You can take this claim to the bank. Outside Nigeria, even in African universities, the templates they use are straightforward. Each cadre has a number of hours to teach per session. Anything above that is calculated as excess work load. However, it is not calculated like that in Nigeria. That is why we have brain drain in the country. And our politicians are the highest paid in the world. What an irony! A professor in Nigeria, after many years of reading and research, does not go home with ₦500,000!

The IPPIS does not make provisions for external examiners for PhD and other postgraduate students. It does not make provision for the payment of External assessors for promotions to the ranks of associate professors and professors. There is no provision for casual staff such as cleaners and gardeners who keep the environment clean. There is no provision for adjunct and part time lecturers who are professionals in their field but could not take full time appointment because they are already working elsewhere. There is no provision for international experts who would want to come from world recognised universities to come and establish new programs in our universities and share their wealth of experience with us. There is no provision for post graduate supervision which has been completely removed from the IPPIS platform. All these are against the norms in universities world over. The government insists that the universities use internally generated revenues to cater for all the above. That means the universities are to increase fees that are already difficult for many students to afford except children of those who have access to free money.
ASUU is not asking for total autonomy as it is. The universities are administered by Governing Councils constituted by the President. The members are appointed by the President with Vice Chancellors and Registrars as members

d secretaries respectively. ASUU has just two people representing it through the senate of a university. This is to show that the control of universities is still in the hand of the President who is the Visitor to those universities. What ASUU is asking for is a template that captures the peculiarities of universitys operations and to be so controlled by the organs stipulated and recognised for the purpose by the relevant act and not by the office of a civil servant. If we claim that we do not think that ASUU has a case it means we are not being fair and objective.

The university is the only constituency in this country whose members do not defend wrong things. When a staff violates a rule, he or she is shown the way out. ASUU will never defend erring members. ASUU condemns whatever sane people condemn. University Professors have been serving as Returning Officers during elections. We always say look at this professor who is expected to be independent! What do you think will happen if their salaries are to be paid from a single platform being controlled by the office of a civil servant? Think about it.

It is good to fight corruption and a greater percentage of workers in our universities are in support of the fight against corruption. If not for the fight against corruption the salaries we are talking about now wouldnt have been there anymore. However, we cannot cut our nose to spite our face. We should not look at ASUU from a greedy perspective. It is the only voice we have now. It is the only union that has refused to allow ethnicity, politics and religion to polarize it. If it allows ethnicity, politics or religion to polarize it the northern universities should be supporting the enrolment by now. When we talk about them we should do so with consideration. We should not have pictures of only the bad eggs. We should have pictures of those whom God used to make us what we are, and to some extent, make us who we are. We should note that many of them are parts of the struggle to liberate Nigeria and Nigerians and they are here with us even on this Ayo Ojeniyis wall.

Thank you and do have a wonderful week.

ASUU it appears made mistake in this case.