rexmozee0167:
Stop caring fake news

Unclebestwin:
Nigerians do not like the truth; they prefer self-comforting narratives. Since doing a short update on the just-declared ASUU strike yesterday, many who are suckers for ASUU’s propaganda have continued to spew the predictable ASUU talking points without much critical reflection on them. My American hosts say that the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. That is what ASUU has been doing in the last 15 years or thereabouts. The golden age of the ASUU struggle ended about 20 years ago. For the past fifteen years or so, the union has been struggling to redefine itself and find a new identity but has ended up simply reinventing the proverbial wheel even when the challenges of today’s university system call for a different toolkit than periodic strikes that worked in the 1980s and 1990s but that are increasingly less productive and are even counterproductive. Here are the problems with ASUU’s lazy, unimaginative resort to strikes every five years.

The current strike is not about a plan by the federal government to introduce fees and student loans. That is just ASUU propaganda, designed to curry sympathy with parents, students, and the general public. If you believe it, you’ll believe anything. The strike, of which ASUU has been warning for at least a year, is about the government’s non-implementation of the revised 2009 agreement — revised because it was renegotiated in 2013 after a prolonged strike. But as with other recent strikes, ASUU leaders said that they’re on strike because of “poor funding,” a vague, misleading, recurring, and overused propaganda in ASUU’s rhetorical repertoire. Much of what they’re fighting for are actually their own benefits (nothing wrong with that, but why not be honest about it?).

But realizing that a public skeptical of their struggle will not support the strike if it is couched strictly in terms of their earlier agreement with the Federal Government or in terms of earned but unpaid allowances, ASUU leaders recycled, as they’ve always done, the hackneyed narrative of poor funding. For additional emotional appeal, they decided to highlight an old, largely discredited federal government proposal — a mere proposal — about the introduction of tuition fees and the establishment of education banks.

ASUU Strikes have become counterproductive in several ways. The government usually waits it out until ASUU is desperate for a deal — any deal — because of financial hardship occasioned by several months of its members going unpaid, and because of pressure from parents and students, who, in recent years, have turned decisively against ASUU, influencing public opinion that now sees ASUU honchos as selfish, money-grabbing activists who do not have the interest of students at heart. Whether this is fair to ASUU or not is not the point. The point, rather, is that a wise, self-reflective, and self-critical body of activists tries not to overplay its hand or lose the support of its constituency or the public. A wise trade or professional union knows when to fight and when not to, and knows when a particular method of struggle has exhausted its effectiveness, its lifespan, and has begun to yield diminishing returns. ASUU’s laziness prevents it from making this realization. As things stand, the government has mastered the game, playing ASUU leaders like a set of drums.

But ASUU leaders are willing participants in the theatre. ASUU people themselves are complicit in the cyclical ritual of strikes, negotiations, agreements, and more strikes. They always willfully enter into agreements that are dubious. The agreements are fantastical, aspirational promissory notes that the federal government cannot realistically deliver because the only way it can do so is either for political office holders to give up their perks or abandon their own political promises and patronage networks and channel the resources previously dedicated to those endeavors to ASUU. That w