ASUU and FG: Two rotten heads

Whenever ASUU and FG bring a solution to a problem, the action invokes the images of Rube Goldberg’s machines. They both do not appreciate the simple. Elementary problems are tackled with the most nauseating complexity which causes solutions to disappear without trace.  It’s lost on them that the most enduring inventions or solutions are the […]

Whenever ASUU and FG bring a solution to a problem, the action invokes the images of Rube Goldberg’s machines. They both do not appreciate the simple. Elementary problems are tackled with the most nauseating complexity which causes solutions to disappear without trace. 
It’s lost on them that the most enduring inventions or solutions are the most simple. Take electricity, for instance, some of it is yet to be understood by man but its basic principles have been abstracted into so simple terms that we’re able to command it to our service.
We’re taught that current is the flow of electrons and that these electrons travel more freely in some materials (conductors) but less so in others (insulators) and there are some materials in-between (semi-conductors). Because of these basic facts, we use conductors wherever we want current and use insulators where we don’t want it – and if we want to control it in only one direction, we use semi-conductors. Simple. Useful. 
However, nobody is asking these bodies to reinvent the wheel.  Just adapt the solutions found elsewhere to solve our needs, but that seems to be impossible for FG and ASUU to achieve.
The federal government has not given us one enduring solution for many of our problems for decades: electricity, roads, food security, security of lives, housing, water, national identification, corruption, election and so forth. Ditto ASUU. Besides the fact that it hasn’t given us any solution – even in its own classrooms – ASUU members have turned our universities into zoos and the students, animals. After that, they’ve visited them with every inhuman action imaginable: sex for grades, money for grades, slavery for grades, etc.
Our people now regard one as an overgrown kook of an insensitive giant while the other as a vindictive lazy sadist.  Nigerians disbelieve in them both. And this is saying a lot, because Nigerians believe in everything.
However, the shenanigans of ASUU and FG have made some things quite clear. One, ASUU is producing unemployable graduates (the ASUU president said this himself). Two, ASUU wants the FG to solve the problem. Three, FG is unreasonable and certainly not responsible enough to solve the problem – in short, it’s been established that the FG will not solve it. Four, strikes have not worked.
It’s into this last point that I want to delve.
Although the ASUU president said strikes have kept the system going and from collapsing, I disagree. 
Yet, the man struck me as a reasonable man in that interview with Nasiru Abubakar and Boco Edet in Weekly Trust of last week.  But when we do the math, it’s difficult to conclude that strikes have helped our universities. For how long have they been going on strike? Decades, that is. Yet, the man himself said they’re still producing unemployable graduates. If the strikes have caused progress in the system, it must be a painfully slow one indeed. At this rate, it may take a couple of 100 years to graduate employable graduates.
However, the strikes have achieved one thing. They’ve caused an increment in lecturers’ salaries. Before the increase, we were inundated with the reasons why lecturers needed to be motivated. After the increase, has anything changed? Are they motivated? I communicate with their students regularly and nothing appears to have changed.
One of the demands of ASUU, I read, is that the FG should invest 100s of billions into the universities – I think this is not too much to ask – even a trillion naira for universities is not more than necessary, provided the payment will not be done in one year.
However, how do we know the system would be better after the injection of this fund?
And what exactly will ASUU do with the money? The president answered in that Weekly Trust interview: “If you pay me N1 million per month and I go into my research lab I cannot conduct research because there are no research facilities there. If I go to my classroom I cannot teach my students new knowledge then I cannot be happy”.
OK, they want research facilities so that they can create new knowledge. Now two questions beg for answers. Why so much emphasis on research when you’ve not taught well? And if the research facilities are to be used to produce new knowledge, does new knowledge have to be produced in Nigerian labs before we can use it to teach our students? If not, then we can find new knowledge everywhere: on the internet, in new text books, in journal papers and so forth. 
Now, please don’t tell me you need billions to subscribe to journals. There are free access journals; and many which are subscription based have given free access to universities from developing countries.
Also, what about the courses that don’t need laboratories? Are our Accounting students better or more employable than our Science students?  Are Math students better? Do we have better English graduates? Are the graduates from the business departments employable?  What about Economics graduates?
My recommendation?
Fire half the lecturers. Send students home. Convert the universities into web pages. Put most of the academic programmes online; complete with reading lists and e-libraries.  Students can come to campus to write examinations. Open more similar universities to absorb qualified students from outside the system. Is this too simplistic for our country? Of course! But even Oxford and Harvard have some academic programmes online. At least this recommendation features a reading list.  Many of our students go to campuses to receive dictations (not lessons) from lecturers.
Or, provide another simple solution. But stop turning up with strikes like a bad penny and complicate matters like Rube Golberg’s machines.