Between the Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Nigerians are once again challenged to arbitrate, empathise or even choose. The attention on both is largely unmerited but nonetheless imperative because of the strategic nature of the issue on hand: education. On the one hand, a wobbly Federal Government that insists it wants to take Nigeria to the club of G20 by 2020 has shown less than serious commitment to education. On its part, a teachers’ trade union of controversial credibility that claims to represent the best interests of the university system has narrowed its claim to public attention, almost habitually, to bread and butter. Salaries and pecuniary benefits!
This latest version of the all too familiar ASUU distraction has to do with lingering issues of pay increases, the retirement age for professors and university autonomy. On the matter of an appropriate retirement age for professors, the argument should never have arisen in the first place. It was wrong headed to impose the same retirement age on professors as civil servants. Ordinarily, even the age limit of 75 which ASUU is insisting on is uncalled for. Proper professors are lifelong treasures, mobile repositories of accumulated learning, wisdom, experience and information. We need to harvest them until they can yield no more. Therefore, in my view, the only useless professor is a dead one. Similarly, the question of university autonomy should also not have been allowed to rise to the level of a trade dispute in a democratic setting. The democratic essence of our new polity dictates that both leadership selection and core decision making in our universities should be democratic and subject to the apex authority of individual councils. I doubt that any sensible elected government should dispute this as well except politicians want to continue to infiltrate the campuses with their surrogates for whatever reason.
On the matter of salary increases, I prefer to deal with the atmosphere in which the entire discussion is taking place. There has been a lingering charge by ASUU that successive government delegations to discussions with ASUU on remuneration have not displayed fidelity to agreements reached in the past. A situation in which representatives of government enter into agreements with individuals and organisations only to breach these agreements is not a compliment to the integrity of government. Even on this, ASUU should take solace in the fact that successive governments in our country have serially breached the most fundamental covenant that binds every government to the people: the social contract.
But as matters stand today, there is not enough evidence that this government has substantially breached any particular agreement with ASUU on this matter of salaries. At least that is what the Ministry of Education wants us to believe. I understand that the government has agreed to a higher retirement age for professors. It has also granted the relevant autonomy to the institutions and in fact offered the teachers some 40 per cent pay increase. It has also reportedly requested that subsequent discussion on the matter of remuneration should revert to the respective councils of the institutions in line with the new spirit of autonomy. Of course, ASUU cannot want autonomy and balk at the idea of negotiating with the newly empowered councils who will be controlling their internally derived revenues. ASUU has not yet disputed these concessions and developments to date. Instead, the association is reported to be insisting on a 109 per cent pay increase!
I would vote any day for a decent pay for all Nigerian workers more so those who ordinarily should be the custodians of our most strategic asset: national intellect. Similarly, since the Federal Government insists on remaining the owner of the federal universities, it has a responsibility to engage with ASUU on these matters. It is their employer. But the concessions almost end there. Thereafter, serious concerns about the implications of ASUU’s actions for the nation and its future as well as the overall credibility of ASUU itself take over. The issues at stake are far weightier than the narrow interests of ASUU as a trade union no matter how glorified the paper credentials of its membership might be.
First, the timing of this whole matter is unfortunate. That any group of people should be asking for such an astronomical pay increase at a time of demonstrable economic downturn is not the most edifying tribute to ASUU’s sense of enlightenment. Even our usually insensitive political leaders have made token reductions to their large pay packets as a symbolic demonstration of some sensitivity to the travails of our hapless compatriots.
Furthermore, that the association should turn its back on the mechanism of industrial arbitration that has been set in motion to resolve the matter on hand while adamantly insisting that only its demands be met is even more distressing. An association whose members act in locus parentis for our children has no business displaying the kind of arbitrariness, obduracy and wanton disregard for due process which we all condemn in our young ones.
Ordinarily, the way things are today, an ASUU strike, like that of PHCN, should not make news. Between the two organisations, the difficulty is in knowing when exactly they are on duty. For ASUU in particular, the real news would be a strike that is not informed by these all too frequent demands for salary increases. Even parents of wards in Nigerian universities have lost count of how long their wards stay in these universities because no one knows when ASUU is on strike or not. Because of this long period of unbroken interruptions, some of the more negative trends in our tertiary institutions (cultism, degenerate standards, commercialism etc) are vicariously traceable to ASUU’s all too frequent strikes and disruptive behaviour. Aided by a succession of insensitive governments, it needs to be said that later deformations of the original ASUU idea have ended up destroying the Nigerian university system.
However, it is perhaps a measure of its institutional resilience that ASUU has managed to attract and dominate national attention in a concerted fashion for perhaps the longest period of any other trade union in our national history to date. It has also managed to engage nearly every administration since the Gowon era of the early 1970s with, unfortunately, nearly the same central question: remuneration issues. Unfortunately also, in nearly all these engagements, the association has not varied its tactics and language: ultimatums, warning strikes, actual strikes, violations of standard observances of trade dispute and procedures of arbitration as well as the use of incendiary rhetoric to intimidate both its target governments and, by extension, the public that sustains the very institutions upon which it feeds.
But ASUU has not always been like this. It started as a forum for the articulation of enlightened views on national issues with a secondary but equally important role of maintaining the integrity and protecting the interests of the academic community. ASUU fought commendably, side by side, with enlightened civil society against the worst excesses of military rule. Its original leaders proffered systematic and practicable suggestions on critical issues of national development and thus compelled successive governments to listen to them. It was not always a rosy relationship but we were respected even by our adversaries.
Over the years, however, ASUU became more of a career in and of itself for some of our colleagues who have remained a perennial ASUU establishment for more than three decades. No one knows how much time these perpetual ASUU unionists spend on research and teaching, a matter which should engage the attention of the education authorities. People are free of course to make a career of ASUU unionism but they may need to relocate to proper secretariats instead of disturbing the peace of the campuses.
Tragically, therefore, after close to four decades of dominance of public attention, ASUU has metamorphosed in our collective consciousness from an association of patriotic and concerned intellectuals with penetrating insights into national problems to a national nuisance, an eccentric conclave of highly educated mendicants and supplicants before the altar of power and money.
In the face of the rot in our university system, the expectation of Nigerians is that ASUU should momentarily distance itself from these bread and butter strikes and engage with the education authorities to seek solutions to the most prominent and embarrassing problems of the university system. That kind of engagement would be the best justification for whatever pecuniary enhancements they are seeking.
In case they are unmindful of the more glaring ills in the system, Dr. Sam Egwu, the Education Minister, should sit down with the ASUU leadership and have a heart-to-heart talk on the following matters: corruption within university administrations, sexual harassment and exploitation (“sex for grades”), admission rackets (“cash for admissions”), sale of mimeographs, “hand outs” and obligatory instructional materials, racketeering in promotions, the casual award of professorships like chieftaincy titles to persons who are far removed from the universities as well as the commercialisation of honorary degrees etc. If ASUU is unwilling to collaborate with the education ministry on these, Egwu has a golden opportunity to do what Mrs. Dora Akunyili did in NAFDAC.
What the system immediately calls for is a very comprehensive overhaul in order to even justify the funds that are currently being deployed in the universities. The processes that immediately recommend themselves include a productivity audit, a personnel adequacy audit, a financial and compliance audit, the introduction of 360 degree evaluations of staff for promotions as an addition to the now jaded Appointments and Promotions Committee approach which has in many universities developed into a cartel as well as increased competitive benchmarking for appointments to academic positions.
For now, the immediate option of ASUU is to return to the classrooms while the industrial arbitration process resolves whatever lingering issues there may still be.