The Upper Crust

ASUU is back with their groove (I)

 

With Uche Nnadozie

It is inconceivable for the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU not to go on strike. I have come to accept the fact, yes, fact that downing tools is part of academic curriculum in Nigeria. It’s a long way coming and they never make any mistake about it. How else will they show they are ASUU if they do not go on strike? Any union who get paid while on strike will always go on strike. Nobody wants to work, especially if such individual will gets paid by sitting at home or doing other jobs. In the case of ASUU being the supposed knowledge store of the country, the way, manner and frequency they go on strike portrays them in very bad light. I will return to this shortly.
On November 4, 2018, ASUU declared what it called “an indefinite, total and comprehensive strike”. They claimed the strike was necessitated by the failure of government to implement 2009 FGN/ASUU agreement, the memorandum of understanding of 2012/13 and the memorandum of action of 2017. For ASUU, they claim that government has failed to renegotiate these agreements between last year and now. The long and short of this agreement or disagreement is the failure of government to fund the “revitalisation” of publicly owned universities. Furthermore, the union wants a reconstitution of the negotiating team of government, release of the forensic audit report of earned academic allowances, payment of all outstanding earned allowances and mainstreaming of same into salaries, payment of arrears of shortfalls of salaries, release of the University Pension Fund operational license, inclusion of workers of primary and secondary schools owned by universities into FGN payroll, etc.
According to ASUU President, Prof Biodun Ogunyemi, the union took the decision after waiting in vain for government’s action without success, thus decided to proceed on strike without any notice or meeting of any sort with government. ASUU simply met at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, FUTA and went on strike. This must be a novel. For the first time ASUU went on strike without notice. They simply claimed to have resumed a suspended strike. Yet these same ASUU members will wait to be alerted by the end of the month that their salaries have been paid. Talk to ASUU, they will say they have endured a lot but government is indifferent to their plight. According to them, government do not care about education because according to them, officials of government have their kids schooling abroad. They equally draw this lame equivalence of how monies are made available to failing banks to stop them from failing. This is ridiculous to say the least.
While I believe that government at all levels still have a lot to do for education and in some sense agree with ASUU on some of the points of their memorandum, I can’t bring myself to accept some of the parallels they draw. And I am certain that money is not the major challenge that upsets our education sector. The problem there is deeper and many of the deeper problems can be traced to ASUU members themselves. However, they have mastered the art of diverting attention of the public from their own deliberate inadequacies by focusing on poor funding alone. Else how can professors and academics with divergent areas of expertise not have proffered workable solutions to some of the problems they always point at? All ASUU does is to point out problems, they never proffer solutions except to ask for money. So where will the money come from.
ASUU wants about N1.3 trillion for revitalisation. N200 billion was paid last year. N20 billion was just released last month, I would have thought that this is progress. But ASUU knows best. After all, like government officials too, a lot of ASUU members, including their leadership have their kids either schooling abroad or in private universities. So their strikes don’t affect their kids and it does not affect them either because they get paid for going on strike! In the schools also, I have never heard how much they make. Let’s take University of Lagos as an example. That school can fund itself and still declare profit. There is nothing stopping that school from restructuring to be self sufficient, lead by example and show that universities should not just be lame ducks to be pampered by government where it is common knowledge that they make a hell of money from different schemes that they have operationalised. He who comes to equity must do so with clean hands so says the saying, yet universities and ASUU do not want to be accountable both in their own finances and in the work they are paid to do.
Universities have many consultancies. They have many academic and professional schemes they use to milk the public. They run commercial ventures including food related, production services, etc. They also award all manner of fellows and honourary degrees. They own halls and hotels. They own residences and students pay for them, yet government funds all procurement needs in the schools including repairs of damaged desks or chairs and replacement of ordinary writing markers. You can just imagine ASUU asking the government to include workers and teachers in primary and secondary schools it set up in its pay roll. This is funny, although we are not supposed to laugh. Yet these primary and secondary schools attract very high fees as though they were private schools. Nobody but ASUU and university leadership know what the fees are used for; however, almighty ASUU somehow thinks that they make sense when they ask government to pay the workers in those schools.

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