The Academic Staff Union of Universities of Nigeria. ASUU. ASUU is on strike again. Who cares? They are thugs, they are always on strike, nobody seems to know why, except that it involves being paid a boatload of money by their counterparts, those thieves euphemistically called the Nigerian government. ASUU. My contempt for that body of narcissistic thugs knows no bounds. There is really not much one needs to say about how these rogues in academic robes have colluded with any government in power (AGIP) to defraud and rob generations of beautiful children what is their right – a good education. To say ASUU is on strike is to state the obvious, they are nearly always on strike, even when they are at work, they are on strike. Their members want to have sex with every child that walks into their pretend classrooms, when they have satisfied themselves, they love-vendor their helpless wards, yes, they do, to their friends, constipated generals and pot-bellied rogue-politicians who have too much money in their thieving pockets.
If you don’t believe me, Farooq Kperogi has a disturbing piece here on the sexual harassment epidemic in Nigerian universities. You read that piece, and when you have stopped shuddering, you understand why fully less than 10 percent of Nigerian university dons have children living in that mess called Nigeria, let alone inside the filthy chicken coops that pass for classrooms from preschool to the tertiary level. In those criminal hovels, children of the poor and dispossessed are trapped and mis-educated by those whose children are being nurtured in the West. Their children will come back home from North America and Europe on holidays to the pretend suburbs of Abuja and Lagos island, wave a Cold Stone ice cream cone at the wreck built by their thieving parents and berate Nigerians for being wretched Nigerians. They often travel First Class. Ten percent? I made it up of course. I am a Nigerian intellectual. We are lazy like that. It could be less even.
Follow me, let’s go to the silly website of ASUU right here. Let us visit their officers, all of them mean looking men, except for one harried looking token lady who has the cringe-worthy patronizing title of “welfare secretary.” I am sure she does important things for the #OgasAtTheTop of ASUU. Maybe she is responsible for making pounded yam and bringing water so the men could wash their filthy hands. SMH. Yes, Nigeria is the patriarchy from hell, in Nigeria, misogyny reigns even in the 21stcentury and even among the men of the ivory tower. Hiss. Here’s ASUU’s list of men “leaders” and one token woman: Dr, Nasir Isa Fagge, president, Bayero University, Kano, Professor Biodun Ogunyemi, Vice president, OOU Ago-Iwoye, Professor Ukachukwu Awuzie, immediate past president, IMSU, Owerri, Professor Victor Osodoke, financial secretary, MOUA Umudike, Dr. Ademola Aremu, treasurer, University of Ibadan, Professor. Daniel Gungula, internal auditor, MAUTech, Yola, Dr. Ralph Ofukwu, investment secretary, FUAM, Makurdi, Dr. (Mrs.) Ngozi Iloh, welfare secretary, University of Benin, and Professor Israel Wurogji, legal advisor, University of Calabar. All the men and one woman have horrid looking pictures of themselves on the website, except for Professor Wurogii, ASUU’s “legal advisor” who either is too lazy or too busy to provide one. He is perhaps genuinely afraid for his life – not from the SSS but from irate abused students who have spent the past decade trying to get an education from these thugs.
If you think I am being harsh, ASUU is a body that works really hard to be disrespected. Read the message on the website from the president, Dr. Fagge. It is unprofessional, coming from an educated don, grammatically challenged and in need of a weed whacker, not just a professional editor. Somebody actually wrote that letter, proofed it and approved it for world consumption. ASUU should go hang its greedy head in shame. You go past that obnoxious letter written in the syntax of the 60’s cold war, and desperate for a reason to empathize with these guys, you root around for what it is they want (we know what they want, lots of money and in dollars please!). You find “Memorandum of Understanding, MoU that led to the truce in January, 2012. Government is still playing the ‘deception game’.” You truly want to do some serious research and contribute to the “debate” about “money, mo money for oga professors dem.” Nope, the link is broken, you can’t download anything. These people are not serious.
ASUU’s website is a dump, one that clearly advertises the mediocrity and incompetence of a body of people that only wants to be paid. If you cannot maintain a simple website, why should you be trusted with the education of children? If you cannot provide on one page, a simple summary of what the issues are and what your ask is, why should you be taken seriously? Click on all the pretend-links on the right hand side and weep for our children. If you can get two to work, you are lucky. When it works, it is unreadable, consisting of mostly dated material (try the one on conferences, SMH). This is not the first time I have called ASUU’s attention to that disgrace of a website.

The dysfunctions in the Nigerian educational system are well documented on the Internet. You must read Okey Iheduru’s heartbreaking experience as a Fulbright scholar in Nigeria. If my rant sounds very familiar to you, it is because you have read me overand overand overagain on the ASUU wahala, since 2009. ASUU does not listen. I now believe that ASUU has earned the right to be banned. I personally believe in employee unions and collective bargaining, I don’t support bans, but these thugs are pushing my patience. It is a body of carcinogens inflicted on the children of the poor. As if poverty is not enough. ASUU is an irrelevance that Nigeria should get rid of. Until then, I say continue to ignore their blackmail, it should make no difference given the products of their laziness. We have writers that cannot tell an adjective from a noun (and sometimes win big Nigerian prizes for that honor), engineers that threaten to build things that would collapse on the innocent and now, get this, a postgraduate student of the University of Lagos, Nigeria hopes to win the Nobel Prize by trying to prove proudly, through the use of magnets, that homosexuality is unnatural.I would not be shocked if his “academic supervisor” is a member of ASUU. That my people is my generation for you. We are today’s intellectuals, today’s politicians. From Aso Rock to the moldy hallowed halls of Nigerian universities, we have MBAs, master bull artists who say all the right things to the masses and do all the right things - for themselves only. Our children do not attend public schools in Nigeria, our families treat their rashes abroad. When all of this is over, history will record that democracy came to Nigeria to prove once and for all, that we are incapable of governing ourselves. And of course it is all the white man’s fault. Na today? Hiss.
PS. And yes, I don’t need any patronizing lectures about how I am generalizing, prattle, prattle, prattle, we all know that not all ASUU members are self-serving thugs, we all know that not all our students are being abused in Nigerian classrooms. I am too lazy to put “most” in front of my sentences. Do it yourself!

By ONYEKACHI ENI
Since the formation of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in 1978, industrial action has remained its primary weapon of engagement with successive governments. In spite of ASUU’s textbook claim that its industrial actions are actuated by public interest, the reality is that ASUU has always manipulated the people’s craving for university education for the ends of higher pay. When ASUU embarked on the current installment of its endless circle of strikes on July 1, this year, the union said the action was warranted by the failure of the federal government to honour the agreement reached with it in 2009.
In the hysteria that followed the industrial action, the federal government made concessions to ASUU to persuade the union to end the strike to no avail. Consistent with its established modus operandi, ASUU has, since the commencement of the current strike, adopted a combination of blackmail, propaganda, public incitement and deliberate misinformation to mobilise public angst against the government. To mask the self-service of its demands, ASUU makes a song and dance of the 2009 Agreement which it claims the federal government has not honoured.
In view of ASUU’s belligerence, concerned citizens are invited to interrogate the issues at stake in the on-going stand-off. While no responsible citizen would advocate that agreements should be made and broken at will, it is crucial to stress that all agreements are subject to existential imperatives. Like other rules of engagement which govern social relations, agreements are meant to serve the mutual interests of the parties to same. Therefore, any law or agreement which works hardship on society is due for alteration; which is why every agreement is subject to the doctrine of impossibility.
When ASUU recites the mantra of government’s failure to honour agreements, it seems to forget the intervening socio-economic variables and the circumstances that gave rise to the agreement. An examination of the chemistry of the 2009 agreement indicates that it was an offshoot of an earlier one between ASUU and the federal government dating back to 2001 which both parties agreed to re-negotiate. The then Minister of Education Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili, inaugurated the Re-negotiation Committee on Thursday December 14, 2006 with Mr. Gamaliel Onosode as the leader of the government team and Dr. Abdullahi Sule-Kano as the leader of ASUU team. That re-negotiation exercise gave rise to the 2009 Agreement.

By ASUU’s admission, the federal government has implemented part of the agreement while some aspects are outstanding. Among the gains which accrued to ASUU from the 2009 agreement are the bumper emolument of university teachers via the Consolidated University Academic Salary Structure (CONUASS II) and the elongation of the retirement age of Professors from 65 to 70 years among others. Of the unimplemented component of the agreement, ASUU seems most touchy about the earned academic allowances the arrears of which amount to about N93 billion out of which the federal government has agreed to release N30 billion.
Determined to collect the Earned Academic Allowances booty in full, ASUU insists that all the terms of the 2009 Agreement are sacrosanct and inviolable. In spite of ASUU’s propaganda, any wholesale condemnation of the federal government for failure to comprehensively implement the agreement misses the vital point that the agreement is patently inoperable for the reason that it is a product of blackmail and intimidation arising from a poisoned universe of negotiation. By now, it should be clear to the discerning that ASUU uses the prevailing political temper in the country as the barometer for timing its endless strikes. For ASUU, the current political situation in the country obviously presents a fertile climate to strike!
In the mean time, opposition parties will attempt to make political capital out of the strike. In the mix, parents’ frustration on the plight of their wards will rent the air while genuine and fake civil rights groups will seize the moment to jostle for visibility and relevance with some journalists in tow. To sustain the heat, the national leadership of ASUU would direct all its local branches to address press conferences and issue public statements to the effect that government is anti-education. With elections around the corner, many in government would begin to find a nexus between their electoral fortunes and the industrial action. If anyone is discerning enough to condemn ASUU’s underhanded tactics, the union will descend on such person charging that he must have been bribed by government.
Recently, the President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), Mr. Yinka Gbadebo, let the cat out of the bag when he stressed that over the years, ASUU has used the students as cannon fodder in its fight for better emolument. With public opinion massively stacked against it, the government would back down, accept ASUU’s demands, sign any agreement that will ease the situation and avail it a temporary reprieve.
At this juncture, Nigerians must come to terms with the fact that far from its altruistic posturing, ASUU is chiefly concerned with the welfare of its members. The fact that it is in a position to shape the fate of the students is simply a weapon on which ASUU has leveraged to pursue its agenda of self-gratification. The time has come for the nation to call ASUU’s bluff. The union should be persuaded to abandon its culture of impunity and stop behaving like a parallel government or pseudo-political party. It is now clear that ASUU relishes incessant industrial actions because of the multiple benefits that accrue to its members from same. First, because the Federal government has never found the courage to enforce section 42 of the Trade Disputes Act which provides for “no work no pay”, strikes translate to extended holidays for lecturers who receive their full pay for doing no work. Second, industrial actions usually give rise to improved emoluments for ASUU members on account of which they are minded to go on strike at the slightest provocation.
In recent years, the success of an ASUU President seems to be measured by the number of strikes staged in his tenure. If Nigerians are outraged by the level of corruption and miss-governance among the political class, the case of ASUU is even worse because it is not insulated from corruption in addition to profiting from the anguish of the citizenry. In spite of the consensus that the nation’s university system is in dire need of urgent reforms to address such critical issues as content, manpower portfolio and funding, no one should pretend that the sector is the only one in need of attention.
When ASUU talks about the United Nations’ benchmark of 26% budgetary allocation to the education sector, it seems to forget that the UN takes for granted, the existence of basic infrastructure in member states. At Nigeria’s current level of development, it cannot afford to ignore other critical sectors such as infrastructure, energy, health etc which constitute the drivers of a sound education system. Besides, improved education funding does not necessarily translate to giving the lion share of education budget to the universities. The unpleasant reality is that at present, primary, vocational and technical education are more relevant to the contemporary needs of the nation than university education.
While no one is oblivious of the trajectory between the universities and national development, we still cannot afford to sacrifice other critical sectors to fund the universities. Besides reforming the education sector, all stakeholders must come to terms with the fact that a lot of delicate balancing and trade offs are now inevitable and that the federal government cannot continue to pretend that it can give university education to the citizenry free of charge. It is unhelpful for ASUU to continue to blackmail the nation with the issue of corruption in government and the hefty salaries of political office holders as justification for its outrageous demands.
It is emphasised that no one approves of corruption in government or elsewhere. Regrettably, the universities have increasingly become citadels of corruption for which ASUU members are seriously implicated. Rather than compounding the problems bedevilling the nation through acts of impunity and self-service, ASUU should help to find solutions to them. Nigeria has had enough of ASUU’s tyranny from the ivory tower.
•Dr. Eni, a former lecturer, is the Chief Press Secretary to the Ebonyi State Governor