ASUU’s sledgehammer and the fly within - By Azubuike Ishiekwene (azubuikeishiekwe@yahoo.com)

I do not know what the Academic Staff Union of Universities intends to achieve by an indefinite strike. But I think it is pretty clear what it will not achieve. The union will not get the conditions of service it wants; and even if it does, we will still not get the schools that we deserve. Not with the way the union is currently being run. It is insanity to keep doing things the same old way and to expect a different result. But this is precisely what the union insists on – calling its members out on a strike, for the umpteenth time, to pressure the government to comply with an agreement signed about eight years ago.
Under former President Olusegun Obasanjo, ASUU had signed an agreement with government, which, among other things, called for a review of university teachers’ salaries; an extension of the retirement age of lecturers from 65 to 70; allocation of 26 per cent of the yearly budget to education; and a bill to free universities from the apron-strings of government. ASUU and the government quibbled over the list of demands and after a series of strikes that plunged the schools into new depths of decay, Obasanjo’s government signed the agreement, with the intention of honouring it only in the breach. It’s not ASUU’s fault that government has failed to honour its promise. If Obasanjo, being Obasanjo, can be excused on the grounds that he is lawless by nature, how can one explain the fact that Umaru Yar’Adua, who makes a song and dance about the rule of law and due process, cannot get his education minister to honour an agreement which government signed?
This appears to be ASUU’s main point – that if government has refused to honour an agreement that it freely entered into eight years ago, and will not be moved even by a recent two-week warning strike, then the union is perfectly entitled to use other legitimate weapons within its powers to secure compliance. But this strategy misses the point. The question is not the legitimacy of the weapons at ASUU’s disposal but the efficacy. Anyone with a brain half the size of a walnut should have seen by now that strikes have not only lost their impact, they have developed a reverse potency that leaves the school system more damaged each time.
It is a measure of what our universities and schools of higher learning have become, that lecturers who ought to be at the vanguard of finding creative solutions to our problems have become a part of the problem. And those among them who dare to think differently are either not interested in union activities or never get a hearing at meetings where key decisions are taken. The academia, like most spheres of life, is imitating politics. Unfortunately, the academia is not just imitating politics, it is imitating its worst aspects. My heart bleeds not only because two people who have had a most profound effect on my career – Olatunji Dare and Ralph Akinfeleye – taught me in a Nigerian university but because my daughter, who is an undergraduate, will have a hard time believing that going to a Nigerian university is not a waste of her future. And yet, there’s just a difference of 25 years between her generation and mine.
A lecturer in one of the first generation universities told me over the weekend how a dean brushed aside her objections and went ahead to borrow computers from staff and hire fitness tools for two days to impress a visiting accreditation team. According to her, “The faculty had introduced two new courses without any preparation and for months, students were left to wander off, borrowing courses. A day or two before the accreditation team came, the dean arranged a show to impress the team. What she couldn’t borrow to set up the classrooms, she hired; insisting over the objections of a few staff that it would not be in her own time as dean that an accreditation team would cancel a course.” It didn’t matter that this was a hollow ritual.
What kind of ivory tower is this that seeks to overcome its most salient problems by yielding to the lowest common form of resistance? Why is ASUU engaged in a gutter fight with a government that doesn’t know its own left from its right, and doesn’t even care? And why should the Minister of Education – and interestingly, former lecturer, Sam Egwu, care? He established a private secondary school in Abakaliki in 2003 and might, like Obasanjo and his former deputy, Atiku Abubakar, award himself a licence to operate a private university before he leaves office! His daughter, Sandra Chiamaka, graduated from a university in the United States in 2005. But he is not alone. I was informed that at least one of the children of the Chair of the Senate Committee on Education, Joy Emordi, graduated from a school in the US too. Jonathan Mark, son of the Senate President, David Mark, studied in King’s College, London, and went on to Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Science. Key ministers in Yar’Adua’s cabinet, including Information and Communications Minister, Dora Akunyili, whose rebranding is conveniently silent on the future of our schools, also have their children schooling abroad.
What do I propose instead of a strike? One, ASUU should obtain and publish the names of all key government officials whose children are schooling abroad and the schools they are attending. That may not affect the price of fish, but it surely will help provide an insight into why the government does not care about what happens to our schools. Two, instead of making bread-and-butter issues the heart of its campaign, ASUU should press for the passage of the higher education autonomy bill. The passage of the bill does not absolve government of responsibility to fund education properly, no. It will, however, create the competitive environment that will stimulate school administrators and alumni to find ways of attracting and retaining the best faculty and staff.
Whatever teachers may earn now, even if it is reviewed every three years as contained in the agreement, they will still feel short-changed by a structure that yokes everyone under one miserly pay structure, while the perception lingers on that not many lecturers can even justify their current pay. The current travesty that leaves vice chancellors eating out of the hands of the President or Minister has stunted growth and left the schools evading the tough question of what they must do to stand on their own feet. Local problems can also be handled locally, instead of the present situation where the entire school system is brought to a halt as a result of ‘hyper-local’ problems. The bankers’ union used to be a regular nuisance until competition and reduced government interference forced the banks to sit up.
Finally, it really does not make sense punishing innocent students when ASUU can take the fight directly to those concerned. ASUU can either get an order of mandamus compelling government to honour its own agreement or take the fight to the doorsteps of the chairs of the Senate and House committees on education, and the Minister. They can picket their houses in Abuja and insist they will not move until something gives. But to embark on an indefinite strike that will further erode confidence in the system and leave innocent students as the worst victims is neither sensible nor defensible.