₦airaland Forum

Habidab: why are you guys fighting each other now,its cleared the way both of you explained to me.when is the PUTME registration going to close

planetuzor: WARNING: What you are about to read is thought provoking and a long piece of article

PROF. FESTUS IYAYI is a former National President of
the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). In
this interview, he explains why university teachers
nationwide are on strike; saying the action is to
compel the Federal Government to implement the
agreement it reached with ASUU on funding of
universities. Iyayi, currently Head of Dept, Business
Administration, University of Benin, insists that the
union members are prepared to stay at home for the
next three to five years until the right thing is done.
Excerpts:
BY GABRIEL ENOGHOLASE, BENIN
ASUU has gone back to the trenches with the
Federal Government. Why are you on strike?
The short answer is this: Government believes that
Nigeria should continue to be not just a second rate
country but a third rate country because the quality
of development, the kind of society you have
depend on the kind of education that the people
have and the quality of education that exists in the
country. In 2009, ASUU reached an agreement with
government on how to rehabilitate and revitalize the
universities. That agreement was a product of three
years of negotiation, from 2006 to 2009, and
government agreed that it will provide funding for
universities to bring them to a level that we can
begin to produce graduates that will be recognized
worldwide, and our universities can also be
classified and rated among the best in the world.
People keep talking about universities rating, but no
Nigerian university features among the first 1,000 in
the world because of the issue of lack of facilities.
So, from 2009 to 2012, ASUU waited for the Federal
Government to implement that agreement and what
government did was to believe and present the
argument that what ASUU was looking for was
money, and so, they implemented part of the salary
component; they did not implement the agreement
on funding. As academics, if you pay us N10million
a month and we do not have the tools to work with,
that money is worthless because we want to be able
to conduct research, teach students the latest that
is available in the world of knowledge. Those tools
were not available and are still not available. So, in
2011, precisely in December, ASUU went on strike to
force government to implement the funding part of
that agreement. What did the government do? They
apprehended the strike in January 2012 and the
Secretary to the Federal Government invited the
leadership of ASUU for a meeting in his office. We
went there, discussed with them on the basis of
which on 24 January, 2012, we signed a
Memorandum of Understanding with the
government under the title, “MEETING OF THE
SECRETARY OF THE GOVERNEMNT OF THE
FEDERATION WITH THE ACADEMIC STAFF UNION OF
UNIVERSITIES “and signed by Prof. Nicholas A.
Damachi, Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of
Education on behalf of the Federal Government. The
most important of the items signed was 3.0, that is,
“FUNDING REQUIREMENTS FOR UNIVERSITIES”. And
this is what the Federal Government said it would
do: “Government reaffirms its commitment to the
revitalization of Nigerian universities through
budgetary and non- budgetary sources of funds;
government will immediately stimulate the process
with the sum of N100billion and will beef it up to a
yearly sum of N400billion in the next three years”.
As we speak now, not a Kobo, not an iota of
intervention has taken place in the universities. Yet,
government itself, in the various studies it has done,
said it recognizes the pathetic state of the
universities. In order to implement this agreement,
government first gave a reason saying, ‘oh, for us to
apply the funds, let us first of all identify the areas
of priorities to which the funds will be applied’.
Government also said, ‘we are not going to give the
money to the universities, what we are going to do
is to identify the projects, we will them call on
government agencies such as the CBN, PTDF, ETF to
deliver the projects to the universities that would
then be estimated’. So the money is not coming to
the universities, government will do the costing and
get people to come and do all those things such as
the rehabilitation of the laboratories, classrooms
and a variety of other things.
Needs assessment committee
Now what should be those things:
Government set up a committee called the
NEEDS ASSESSMENT COMMITTEE and it went
round the universities and what it found was
shocking. First, it found that the students –
teachers ratio was 1-400 on the average
instead of being 1-40. It found out that the
classrooms were grossly inadequate and
could accommodate only about 30 percent of
the number of students that needed to enter
those classrooms; they went round and found
students standing in their lecture theatres
with other students writing on their backs;
they found lectures going on under trees in
some of the universities; they went to
laboratories where they found people using
kerosene stoves instead of bushing burners to
conduct experiments; they found specimens
being kept in pure water bottles instead of
the appropriate places where such specimens
should be kept. They found chemistry labs
without water; they found people doing
examinations called theory of practicals and
not the practicals and you will imagine what
the practical ought to be. And when the
report was eventually presented to President
Goodluck Jonathan at the Federal Executive
Council, we understand that Jonathan said
that he was embarrassed and did not know
that things were all that bad.
No intervention
It was on that basis that they said that this money
should be spent. As we speak, the money has not
been provided, no intervention has taken place and
the academics are tired. We negotiated for three
years, 2006-2009, we went on strike in December,
2011 and government apprehended that strike; we
signed an MoU in January 2012, between then and
now, nothing happened. That is why we are on
strike. We are saying, ‘look, rehabilitate the
universities’. As a reporter, you can go round our
classrooms and you will see what our classrooms are
like. In this era, it is the quality of knowledge that
you acquire that will determine the position you
occupy in any part of the world. We did this and
government did not do anything. A professor came
from Bayelsa State recently to the University of
Benin, looking for journals. We went to the library
because we have an e-library and he could not do
anything there because there was no light for two
days in the library. If you go round here now,
lecturers have generators in their offices to be able
to work, every department has two or three
generators to be able to do their work. Is that what a
university should be like? If you go to the students’
hostels, they in a sorry state, they live 12 in a room;
they are like piggery; they now have what they
called short puts, they excrete in polythene bags
and throw them through the windows into the fields
because there are no toilets. If you come into this
building (faculty building), there are no toilets and,
if walk round, you will find faeces sometimes in the
classrooms because students have no place to use.
And it is like that in all other universities.
Enough is enough
Academic staff has said enough is enough, we
cannot continue to work under these
conditions, especially when government gave
commitment in 2012 that this matter would
be addressed but up till now nothing had
happened. We had several meetings between
2012 and now and they will say ‘next week
this one will happen; in two weeks time that
one will happen, give us one month, this one
will happen’, nothing has happened. And
when students leave here, they apply for
progammes in the United Kingdom, United
States and other countries for their master
degrees, PhD or other postgraduate
programmes and they are told that they
cannot be admitted because their degrees are
suspect. Shell here in Nigeria spent millions
of dollars re-training graduates, people who
made First Class and, when they test them,
they found out that they have problems. How
can you take an engineer who has not
conducted an experiment, all he did is the
theory of practical? He does not know how
the equipment works? If you want a properly
educated student population, you have to
provide the facilities. That is what ASUU is on
strike. What government has done in the past
is to say that we are on strike because of
money, now they don’t have that excuse. It is
true that part of the agreement we have with
the government also talked about academic
allowances, but academics are saying that we
are not interested in that; we are saying that
government should rehabilitate facilities and
once they are rehabilitated and they are up to
standard, we will come back to work. If you go
to our classrooms, we use chalk boards, the
situation of the 1960s but people are using
multi-media facilities, mark boards where you
can download information. That is not
available here and government is not
interested in that. No country developed
without a sound educational system and the
foundation is not the primary school
incidentally, it is at the university level
because it is the university that trains other
levels. For instance, if you want to teach in
primary school, you need people who
attended the Colleges of Education; if you
want to be teacher at the Colleges of
Education, you must have a degree from the
university; so, the university provides the
manpower for other levels of education and
that is why you must concentrate efforts on
the university education. If you don’t do that,
other levels of education will suffer and that
is what has been happening in Nigeria.
Against this backdrop, of your complaints more
private universities are being approved by
government. Will this help to solve the problem?
Even the National Universities Commission (NUC),
which is licensing private universities, has now
drawn attention to the crisis of quality in many of
these private universities. You know what
government does: We have refineries in Port-
Harcourt and Warri; I was just talking with some
people recently and they said, oh, Port-Harcourt
refinery is in a state where it can refine whatever
amount of crude oil sent to it; its plants are all now
working,’ but, as at today, government has not send
crude oil to it and they cannot process anything
because they want to import. Nigeria is the only
OPEC member country that sells crude oil to its
refineries at the international price? Does that work?
It doesn’t work, but they use international price to
sell crude oil to refineries, to make it impossible for
the refineries to process crude and then they go to
Spain and other countries to import refined
products.
So, what is happening is that government wants to
kill the public universities just as it has killed its
own enterprises so that it can invite people to come
and buy over the public universities? Unfortunately,
it will not work because universities are not like
enterprises. In the UK, most of the universities there
are public owned; in the US, most of the universities
are state owned; the one you hear about, HARVARD,
is a private one, but most of the universities in the
world are owned by government because education
is a social service; the revenue and tax collected by
government comes from the people, the
commonwealth, that is the fund that is used in
funding education. And what the government is
doing is to under-fund public universities, give them
a bad name and provide an excuse to license private
universities many of which borrow lecturers from
public sector universities, many of which do not
have the equipment which public universities ought
to have. And many of the private universities focus
on the social sciences, law and arts; they do not go
into engineering, medicine or sciences because you
need a lot of capital outlay, you need to spend a lot
of money building laboratories. I went to Oxford
University last year and they showed me a
laboratory that was built last year, a huge building
where people from different parts of the world went
there to conduct experiments. It cost billions of
pounds and no private sector person will like to
invest such money because the returns on
investment cannot be recouped. So, private sector
universities are gimmicks by government to say
that they are better than the public sector
universities, but then, how many people are there
how much fees do they pay and how many people in
Nigeria can pay the sum of N350,000 and above
paid in private universities? Those universities are
not meant for the children of ordinary Nigerians and
development has to be about the ordinary people, it
cannot be about the rich. So, there is no way, not in
this century, not the next or in a life time that
private universities will become more important
than public universities.
So what is The Way Forward?
The way forward is that the ruling elite in
Nigeria must be sure of what that want. We
have an example; many years ago, Ghanaians
were here; they flooded our universities;
when the Ghanaians rulers saw what was
happening, they took a step back and said,
lets us change direction’. They closed down
the universities for three years or so,
rehabilitated all the facilities in the
universities and brought the students and the
lecturers back. Now, the CBN Governor
Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi disclosed that
Nigerians spent about N62billion paying
school fees for 75,000 Nigerian students in
Ghanaian universities. Our people are in
South Africa paying fees there, but who those
going there; they are the children of the rich.
Ghanaians are in Ghana universities but they
are not paying what Nigerians are paying
there. So, the way forward is that government
makes up its mind that Nigerians must have a
place under the sun and that place under the
sun can only be guaranteed with a sound
university system. It must make up its mind;
is it to close down the university system for
three years or so, do what should be done and
then invite students and lecturers back? For
instance, in the University of Benin, you don’t
have a foreign student and if you go to other
universities in Nigeria, I don’t think there are
foreign students. When I came to the
University of Benin, I was interviewed by Prof.
Smith, a Briton who was the Dean at the time
and many people from different parts of the
world were here as teachers and students.
But, right now, they are not in Nigeria;
instead, Nigerians are everywhere. That
shows that the system has collapsed. When
we went to the National Assembly, Sen. Uche
Chukwumerije and his colleagues told us that
they were on the knees begging us to recall
the students because they are on the streets
posing dangers and problems, and we said, it
is better for them to be on the streets than on
the campus of universities learning ignorance.
You cannot teach ignorance to people or half
knowledge to the people because they will be
more dangerous to the society.
‘Not asking for money for ourselves’
If you have a doctor that is not well trained, and you
say ‘go and remove an appendix’, and he goes to
remove your heart because he doesn’t know where
the appendix is; it is better not to have doctors than
the one who will go and remove your heart than the
appendix. That is what the Nigerian government
wants us to do and the academics in universities are
saying no, for once, let us do the right thing; we are
prepared to stay at home for between three and five
years until these problems are resolved. We are not
asking for money, facilities must be provided to
make the universities truly what they ought to be. In
terms of how to solve the problems in the
universities, when the financial crisis broke out
in 2007 and banks declared that they were in
trouble, government brought out N3trillion to
bail out the banks. First, they gave the banks
N239billion, another N620billion and
N1.725trillion making a total of N3trillion.
Then the aviation sector said that it was in
distress, they gave the sector, N500billion
and they gave even NOLLYWOOD billions of
Naira. These sectors are important, but they
are not as important as the fundamental
which is the education sector. If you can give
the banks N3trillion and all the universities
are asking for is about N1.5trillion, the same
way in which they sourced the money which
they gave to the banks which they are now
saying that they should not pay back, they
should be able to do more for education. So,
nobody should come to us and say that
government has no money.
If they can bail the banks with N3trillion,
banks owned by the private sector, they
cannot tell us they cannot fund the education
sector because the World Bank told them that
Africans do not need higher education, that
what Africans need is middle-level technical
education; that is what the Okonjo-Iwealas
and Goodluck Jonathan are for. So, let them
do what they did in the case of the banks to
education and if they do that, the problems
will be solved.
- See more at: http://
www.vanguardngr.com/2013/07/ASUU-strike-
nigerian-varsities-may-remain-shut-for-a-long-time-
to-come-prof-iyayi/#

4reigningqueen: **clears throat**
maybe i can share somethings.
First of all, where i lived,the natives were helpful and caring.only that whenever am away to school,someone had the key to my room and was always entering to take my provisions and sometimes its my soup.I didnt know who the person was till i finished my two years course.
You dont have to run after bus cos the cabs are always available and Unaab is not a school for those who are not serious.

monkvirus: l just keep wondering, is it dat som pple have difficulty in reading or wot? Any sensible person who reads atleast 2 to 3 pages of dis thread will get all Info needed witout askin a single question about d official jamb cut-off mark, I have dis particular utme mark am I gud 2 go?, do yct accept 2choice? nd other silly questions like d@. It just keep irritating & annoying me wen I read/see questions as such from prospective students *yuck!!!* pls think & use ur brains as students, u dnt need 2 b spoon fed.
Thank u.

Dankylove: Mainly 1st Batch except few D.E candidates who have issues with thier result may be referred to 2nd Batch which is Connection Incline(Money)

Dankylove: same here. its a while i've being in a lecture hall. i miss serious lectures.
hopefully,Academics wont be "give & take" as practiced in polytechnic but "independent" in varsity.

i'm Tired of being Thought how to Fish in Yabatech,i want to go Fishing myself @ Funaab.

if u fully understood my above Terminology,Kindly LIKE.

Prof.Dan
(Thread Administrator)

Abuklaw: u can obtain it online via ur atm card @ www.federalpolyede.edu.ng/makepay and fill in the form therein

Gleefreak125: Wow, wow, wow. 4 days on d sidelines,pls dont ask me how,cos u nyt l8r call me a cow(raptinz).Culd only watch as tins unfold bt say nofin. Antispambot no do me well @all. I jst pray say e no go knack me anoda 1 afta dis post bt make I comment concernin d thread so e go dey confused on wetin 2 do wit ma case. Concernin d final composite, 70%CGPA, 30%O'level jst simple maths now. 2 make it easier jst use d 4mat. Ur CGPA/Total CGPA *70%, den add ur answer 2 d total of wat ur 5 core courses give u e.g my CGPA=3.52,Total CGPA=4, CORE COURSES, maths=A1(6),Eng=A1(6),Phy=A1(6),Chem=B3(4),Bio=B3(4). Now calculation; CGPA 3.52/4*70=61.6
O'level 6+6+6+4+4=26
FINAL COMPOSITE=61.6+26= 87.6. Dats all. I miss all of una no b small. I DON SHOW I DON SHOW SHA. Yes lest I 4get I wan repost wetin I post d oda tym way dem ban me. @geedee4real I'm gunnin 4 BCH,u chemistry ryt? Sori I say u b chemical d oda tym bt no vex, mayb na u ban me self*jstkiddin*. @rkarang,sanguine,tamax,walexy,lake04side et all u've all bin 1daful. Men I'm hapi 2 b back.

Walexz02: I see you bro, have you submited ya transcript??

Walexz02: Agricultural Engineers!!! You guyz should show up... Make we no carry last o! It is good to be an optimist.. Lets start the friendship from here.

emmyeuler1: in all courses

Pussyface: Any post ume or direct entry student who wana gain admission into unilorin who nid assistance shud kal dis num 08136049913

chi chi chi: Pls can someone give me the ICT number so I can call,this issue is giving me sleepless night. thanks

Walexz02: Hi there! You guyz should calm down and let see wtz going to happen by next week. Since the problem seems to be genral, then am sure Funaab is going to do something about it asap. Btw, the problem could as well be from Jamb, you knw y I said so? May be jamb have not submitd the total list of candidates. Although I hv printd my invoice without any ish, i am yet to continue d process, and I promise to infor the house of whatever new development i hv found.
Good morning to you all.

amaizinn: please o my people. what is the meaning of this one that they are sayin that i did not choose unaab as my most preferred instituition.
what am i to do abeg

olameday: Wooow... Never knew this thread exists. Nice one tho I'm in for good. Would keep u guys posted about the latest peeps. We're resuming 2nd semester 17th june and wrapping up exams by Oct 4 and the session fully by Nov 1 so u guys are resuming latest Nov ending or early Dec this year... Recte Sapere Fons all the way!
Pls add me on 2go@olameday2 or whatap 08070554637 i wnt to ask u some qustion pls.

hoodboi: Does anybody have an idea when UI would call second choice students?