Government should ignore ASUU
By
THE poor quality of university education in Nigeria today is really not the fault of Government alone as more than anything else the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is a principal contributor to this national calamity. Over the years ASUU has gradually lost relevance in advancing the cause of qualitative education. ASUU is bereft of any worthwhile ideas aimed at moving Nigerian university education forward. ASUU is still closeted in the anachronistic Marxist philosophy of yesteryears and is not able to situate the problems of university education in the local context of Nigeria.
In the process ASUU has lost steam, has become the beacon of educational disruption and a benchmark for assessing the level of anarchy prevailing in the Nigerian universities. In the past, students went on strike and held demonstrations to attract the attention of Government to their plight but today lecturers go on rampage, addressing small groups to sell their grievances and has perfected the class boycott strategy not minding the consequences their unholy course of action would visit on their students.
Funding education in Nigeria is a problem, just like the funding of health care, transportation, road construction, agricultural development and a host of others. The solution is a reasoned response to the delicate problem facing parents, students and guardians, rather than the adoption of a scotch-earth strategy that seeks to blackmail, annihilate, obliterate, intimidate, frustrate and enrage the various interest groups in this country. ASUU is a self -serving, egocentric, anarchist union which encourages its members not to work but to insist on getting paid. ASUU is a central 'trade union organisation' whose time is past and must be exterminated from the list of respectable institutions in this country.
Many ASUU members do not teach because they all have one business or the other to take care of in town. A typical ASUU member with five lecture slots in a week hardly takes more than two and just doesn't show up in the others without even an explanation. In the face of ASUU, its members sell outdated handouts at exorbitant prices to students without these lecturers making efforts at publishing or being authors of useable text books in a manner that professors and academic in other countries do. If ASUU were a responsible organisation it would tell the Government the home truth.
The overriding truth is that the era of free tuition education is gone. The grand deception that takes place in federal government colleges should no longer be allowed in the four walls of the universities. Students whose parents had paid massive school fees to go through nursery, elementary and secondary schools suddenly find themselves in universities that pretend not to need money by way of school fees and yet lecturers keep asking for enhanced salary package every noon. The role of a responsible ASUU would be to educate both government and the students on why fees have to be paid and jointly agree on the utilisation modalities. The students in state universities have always paid tuition fees and so what is special about students in federal universities paying more fees?
Similarly, the students who pay N180.00 a semester for a bed space and turn around to immediately sell such a bed space to fellow students for a price of N50,000.00 should be made to face the consequences of a market system. Students accommodation must attract the same or higher rate than the prevailing commercial rates on residential accommodation in each university locality. There is no sense in students paying a fee of less than N25, 000.00 per semester and a bed space of less than N15,000.00 per semester. The proceeds from these fees can be adequately managed to provide financial resources to augment better funding of universities. ASUU works against such suggestions because their elementary notion of the national cake does not include baking the cake but merely sharing it.
The problem of funding university education in Nigeria is not whether government officials should purge themselves of corrupt enrichment and direct such resources to education. Nobody in his right mind should condone blatant corruption in this country but different problems must be addressed uniquely. Funding university education today is not what it was in 1974 when tuition fee was abolished in universities. Today's national population of 120 million people is radically different from the 59.9 million population recorded in 1973. If ASUU were a more sensitive body it would work with government on the need for an immediate imposition of tuition fees and in the design of measures to ameliorate the impact of such imposition on the poor and indigent students in the universities.
The one clear solution is the return of the Nigerian Students Loans Board whose major task will be to grant loans to poor students at a rate that covers their tuition, feeding, accommodation, books and essential supplies for each of the number of years they spend in their chosen undergraduate degree courses. These loans become payable six months after the students complete their national youth service scheme and on securing a gainful employment and repayment spread over a period of seven to ten years. If the 400,000 undergraduates in Nigerian universities have access to this type of low or no interest educational funding, ASUU would have no excuse to hold government to ransom in demanding the famous 25 per cent minimum provision in the national budget for education.
It is really an unacceptable mode of operating a university curriculum, for students to just idle away, not because they are unwilling to learn but their teachers have other interests to pursue. If a university governing council dismisses some of its lecturers for breaching the terms of their employment contract it does not mean that all the universities in Nigeria must be closed down. This is an unconscionable way of settling local disputes in a country that has a democratic government with much reliance on the independence of the judiciary. If ASUU cannot go to court and all the way to the supreme court in pursuing a matter of principle then it is not worthy of existence, particularly if its only recourse is to go on strike an endanger the nation's manpower supply.
Since Nigerian universities were closed down in November 2002 on account of ASUU's intransigence, it is only a matter of conjecture to appreciate the number of students who may have died in motor accidents, been involved in criminal operations and got killed in the process, or those whose NYSC call-ups have been delayed because their scripts could not be graded or the university senate could not meet to ratify their results. This mode of academic pursuit is inimical to national growth and development.
Even when ASUU is at its best and the members are at work, what does the nation get? Cases abound where lecturers will pointedly tell female students to either give sex or fail. Where such female students protest to what would ordinarily be a higher authority a brick wall is the result. Even male students are not free either as they are often asked to bring large sums of money or shirts or bags of rice and beans or such odd non-academic demands to be able to obtain a pass mark. ASUU does not see anything wrong in the approach adopted by its members to demand their fair share of the nation's resources.
More ruefully is the university products that have become the affliction of the Nigerian economy as they are half-baked and having been perpetually at home on account of strikes and crises and leave the university system with little or no acquired education. The only education students now receive is either purchased in cash or in kind or it is through personal efforts. No wonder the typical Nigerian university degree that was the toast of the worldwide academic community 20 years ago has become a worthless document and now assessed at the same level as the OND. Personnel managers get so often tormented each time they have to take fresh Nigerian university graduates through a competitive interview for job placement.
The solution is for ASUU to be dismembered and each university teaching faculty is allowed to unionise and negotiate directly with their respective councils. A central unionised body of university teachers will lead this nation to its doom. Besides, since the environment of each university cannot be said to be the same it is now time to ask if all the different categories of lecturers should attract the same compensation package nationwide. The re-election of President Obasanjo should give us the opportunity to ask critical questions about ASUU and the future of our university system. The blackmail and greed must stop. ASUU must give way for the universities to move forward.
The government should discontinue any further negotiations with ASUU. The dictatorship of ASUU must be halted. ASUU is satanic and must be prevented from wreaking further havoc on our children. If the government ignores ASUU for another six months, the strike will collapse and each University will redefine its destiny. As a matter of fact, more than half of the lecturers want to go back to work but for the belligerent attitude of the leadership of ASUU. Government should direct that those who want to work should go back.
May 2003