ASUU is part of the problem now
According to ASUU, the government’s implementation in 2010 of two out of the eleven-point agreement was the motivating factor for suspending a strike action that was in progress at the time. There is nothing new about the federal government’s apparent lack of faith in implementing agreements with various unions. Government officials often attribute this […]
According to ASUU, the government’s implementation in 2010 of two out of the eleven-point agreement was the motivating factor for suspending a strike action that was in progress at the time.
There is nothing new about the federal government’s apparent lack of faith in implementing agreements with various unions. Government officials often attribute this to budgetary constraints and other challenges. However, this should have taught the ASUU leadership the lesson that disrupting academic activities at every whim and shutting down the universities do not exactly help in addressing their grievances. ASUU president, Dr Nasir Isa Fagge, enumerating what the union determined was the crisis affecting the Nigerian education sector, said this stemmed largely from the failure of successive governments to address the challenges that had stymied the development of the sector. While this may be true, it is no justification for the union’s zero-sum approach. Dr Fagge asserted that although government was aware of the enormity of the infrastructure, personnel and other forms of decay in the universities, it did not have ‘the courage’ to tackle them for the good of the nation. This is an unfair criticism, because the government, in spite of its limited capacity to act in any particular sector by financial and budgetary constraints, has done much more than Dr Fagge suggested, particularly through the intervention programmes of the Tertiary Education Fund, which ASUU members have also benefitted from.
Furthermore, there have been undeniable improvements, as can be seen in the renovation and rehabilitation of some structures in various universities and is in the process of constructing new federal universities. The irony seems to be lost on ASUU members, that while they blame the government for the rot in the system, the public has come to regard the incessant strikes they so easily resort to as the biggest cause of instability in the nation’s university system.
The strike option may have served ASUU well in the past, and there were many tangible gains from it. In those days, strikes were few and far between and were taken very seriously and only when all other options failed.
In the current case, the fact that government, by ASUU’s acknowledgement, has implemented two of the eleven points in the 2009 agreement, should have been the basis for further and continuing interaction to resolve the rest, not the justification for this sudden and unexpected jolt to the system. Having become almost an annual ritual, ASUU has all but completely lost public sympathy and support, and is gradually gravitating towards irrelevance and a nuisance of extremely irritating value.
A recent survey of Nigerian parents sending their children to universities abroad listed uninterrupted studies as being a deciding factor. Thus, the incessant strikes are more of a problem than the poor infrastructure, outdated syllabus, low intellectual content, and lack of modern teaching aids and library facilities. ASUU has to accept its own responsibility for the decay that it blames the government for.
The Minister of Education has said that the government made some offers which ASUU has yet to respond to. Although there were references to certain unresolved disputes in some individual institutions, the basic concerns of ASUU members for which they declared the current strike are about payment of earned academic allowance (EAA) and other sundry pecuniary issues.
This in itself weakens the union members’ argument when they seek to link their grievances to inadequate funding to revitalize the universities. It would have been far more understandable if ASUU were on strike because of matters affecting their students or the university system as a whole. What lesson are they giving to the youths in the art of negotiating peaceful settlements to disputes and learning to cohabit in harmony? Strike should never be considered as the first resort, especially when the issue is not about non-payment of salaries. This strike is uncalled for, because it amounts to further wrecking what the ASUU accuses the government of destroying, portraying the union as part of the problem that its members claim to be seeking restitution for. The strike should be called off immediately and the government must adhere strictly to the prevailing “no-work-no pay” policy to deter recourse to such frivolous conduct.