With Uche Nnadozie
Having read a December 14, 2018 article by Professor Johnson Olaleru over the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU on-going strike it is important I return to this subject as the year rolls to an end.
The erudite professor of mathematics is completely against the strike and he gave his reasons. Chief among them is his aversion to the ideology behind ASUU strikes in Nigeria generally, which according to him, is anchored on the Marxist ideology of the state doing everything within the state. And more importantly, he argued that the method by which ASUU continually deploys to achieving its objective are also Marxist as it relies on this adversarial strike option at the drop of a hat.
The good Prof is of the opinion that strikes may have worked during military regimes, as by nature such regimes needed to be challenged to shift ground, but we are practicing democracy as such according to him, lecturers being the nation’s repository of brain power must devise new ways of engaging with government at all levels. He went into details to make his points very clear and sustained his opposition to the current strike. He calls on the teachers to return to school if for nothing else, for the benefit of their students. Moreso as these issues are centered on finance even as the professor noted is not always available.
It is refreshing to see lecturers, senior ones at that aligning with my thought over this matter. It is shocking that our lecturers will take strikes as serious as they do. They take pride in announcing to the world that they are embarking on โtotal and indefiniteโ strike.
This statement gets them high. It is as if they wished and got their wish to get back to a petulant girlfriend. How this statement gives them orgasm bothers me. There is no way they should not be embarrassed reeling out that phrase from one interview session to the other. If they are not embarrassed then they haven’t learnt a thing or two since the return of democracy and their conduct does not show a group that is modernised even in the way it talks to the public.
Except you have not had cause to be at our campuses for one academic reason or the other, you won’t understand our lecturers. They mostly simply don’t care. They care more about strikes than the work they are paid to do. They care more about salaries, allowances, travels, ladies and bribe than their work as shapers of our future. In fact, they don’t shape much. They talk down on everything in the country. They abuse government, promote their personal religious ideologies, pressure students for sex and money and threaten students that do no know-toe to their inclinations. The school environment with our lecturers is like one big cult organisation. Speaking up is a problem.
Victimisation is rife and that is why when they come out to talk about โrevitalisationโ of the education sector, you take them serious to your disappointment.
Any little thing, they start blackmailing everyone, especially politicians. They mouth off about the cars politicians drive or the allowances they collect. They talk about the houses they live in and the allowances due to them. They also talk about corruption and the value of money stolen. To them, if government can take care of itself that much and have more that can be stolen how come it doesn’t have money to give them. This is queer. If our lecturers want to become politicians, they are free. Are the politicians not the ones making the money? As a society, we have always complained about the money politicians’ waste not that does not give impetus to the whining of lecturers either.
How much does University of Ilorin or University of Ibadan or that of Lagos generate, do we know? Why should it be hidden? Why should the VCs of these schools not be held accountable? Why should they pretend that all is well in the universities when it comes to corruption? Can we know from ASUU how much each university earn from their local activities. Areas such as school fees (where applicable), acceptance fee, medical fee, library development fee, studentsโ union fee, alumni fee, departmental fee and several other fees. Some of these schools equally set up ancillary, yet money spinning schemes to fleece the unsuspecting public. Such schemes are: Distant Learning centres, SANWICH programmes, part time programmes, post graduate programmes. They also collect post JAMB fees even when it has been banned by the government.
Again, I ask what is the problem with paying fees in federal institutions- in order to raise more money? Apart from probing how the other cash raised from those schemes are disbursed, how about paying around N50, 000 by undergraduate students. This will help shore up financing for the schools. Can we have the schools run properly for once? How do we make the schools so unattractive to some parents that they decide to send their wards to mushroom universities in some West African states? Reports estimate that Nigerians spend about N300 billion yearly on these half baked schools.
Part of the reasons they rather pay the huge sums to West African schools is because of the incessant strikes by our lecturers. We are demarketing our educational sector. We can make a lot of foreign exchange if our universities were stable for other countries to send their students.ย Apart from teaching, which they do not do with all dignity, there are other things that lecturers can do to make money. Also, I need to see ASUU engage and proffer solutions to government on a regular basis as problems of our nation-state escalate. Those solutions must not be Karl Max type of solutions. Nigeria is basically a capitalist state; yet government and the union must find a middle ground.
