The Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities, ASUU, whose strike has grounded all activities in almost all government-owned universities in the past six months, may have finally over-reached itself. At its last meeting with representatives of the Federal Government, all hopes of worried parents and students, kept away from their studies in the period, were dashed when the University dons’ leadership announced that they were not ready to return to the lecture theatres.
The meeting had gone as badly as previous ones.The FG stuck to its earlier policy of processing academic staff’s pay on the controversial Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, IPPIS, which also serves all Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government. ASUU had asked that the emoluments of its members be paid on a separate platform, preferably, the Universities Transparency Accountability Solution, UTAS, developed by its members to take particular note of their peculiar remuneration structure.
Worse, Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, in charge of ASUU members’ putative employer, the Ministry of Education, told newsmen that he would apply the “no work; no pay” principle enshrined in the nation’s labour laws. This means that the striking lecturers would not be paid for most of the period they shunned the classrooms. Unsurprisingly, Adamu’s stance poured fresh fuel into the glowing embers of discord.
Stalemate. Infuriated by the impasse, the college professors have vowed to continue the classroom boycott. The Federal Government, already being accused of insouciance and inordinate focus on the retention of power in the fast-approaching 2023 general elections has gone back into what a critic called its “trademark who-cares” mode.
Remarkably, public opinions on the ASUU crippling of the university system are as diverse as there are interest groups.For those who worry over the continuous slide in Nigeria’s standard of education and vaunted brain drain, the Federal Government cannot be excused in any way. Pleas about paucity of funds are particularly unacceptable, they say, as government continues to fritter away resources it can deploy to the all strategically important social sectors on a wrong-headed fuel subsidy programme every economic thinker and analyst flays as a dumb, wasteful, counterproductive policy. Ironically, President Buhari himself, who once debunked it as despicable has transmogrified into its greatest advocate and enabler, unconcerned that that it will cost an economy-wrecking N4.4 trillion this year and to and indefensible N6.7 trillion next year at current rate of disbursement.
On the flip side, are those who think the university dons ought to be “patriotic”, to subsume their own needs and grand vision against the greater needs of their students and society at large on the tenuous argument that virtually all strategic economic sectors in Nigeria are under-funded. To be sure, this group has its opponents who argue that such sacrifice should begin at the nation’s legislative arm, believed to harbour the World’s highest-paid lawmakers despite Nigeria’s reputation as the World’s global Capital, where 80 percent of the population, individually, lives on less than 2 dollars a day.
Perhaps the greatest unintended fallout of the protracted strike in the tertiary subdivision of the education sector is its potential to spark off copycat industrial actions, nationwide, precipitating a season of strikes. Already, the country’s umbrella labour union, Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, has organized minor actions in solidarity with the college teachers and threatened larger disruptions. Not to be slighted, rival and sister unions such as Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics, ASUP, Non-Academic Staff Union of Universities, NASU, the Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria, MHWUN,have since fired warning shots of their intension to down tools to protest similar government neglect of their members’ welfare and career aspirations.
The big national question: How long then shall Nigerians wait for the government they invested with the power, mandate and authority to deploy resources for the common good to fulfill its self-imposed campaign vows to deliver good governance and sustainable, socio-economic development?
For keen economy watchers, President Buhari has unwittingly given a hint. For reasons known to him, his kitchen cabinet, and intrepid political analysts, he has given the word, not just his famous “body language” that he intends to keep the controversial, economy-crippling fuel subsidy going until the general elections and his exit in May, 2023.
To borrow from the words of an American statesman, never in the history of Nigeria has the well-being, unity and continued survival of its embattled people depended on the outcome of an impending election!