ASUU’s unwinnable battles: The need to change tactics

By Prof. Tunji Olaopa ASUU has always been in the news. And the news has always been about ASUU’s grouse with the Federal Government of Nigeria over the deplorable state of the higher education nay university system in Nigeria. It is however left to decide whether ASUU’s public presence or is it struggle, is achieving […]

By Prof. Tunji Olaopa

ASUU has always been in the news. And the news has always been about ASUU’s grouse with the Federal Government of Nigeria over the deplorable state of the higher education nay university system in Nigeria. It is however left to decide whether ASUU’s public presence or is it struggle, is achieving its desirable objective. There is a reason for this query. This is because it is as if ASUU’s rhetoric and action are more like lots of sounds and fury with little to show for it if the future of Nigerian universities is anything to go by. Almost on every count of its strike, ASUU extracts some sort of financial commitment from government. And this seems to constitute some kind of a win, until the next strike. Unfortunately, these strikes add their own damages to the university system that ASUU is so intent on rescuing. The other side of the national calamity is that government by its own actions has not given anyone the confidence to think that it is ready to achieve anything different with the federal universities. In fact, there is that collective narrative that outside of ASUU’s militant activism on behalf of university education, the Nigerian university system would have been far worse off than it currently is. And to make matters worse, you have the federal government floating more universities that are, to all intents and purposes, dead on arrival.

It is then logical to ask, within the context of the axiom that the government owes its people and its national development plan, a blueprint for educating her citizens; what Nigeria’s masterplan is in this regard? In other words, given the diversification of tertiary education system with the exponential growth of private universities, how is the federal government’s education blueprint a significant platform from which to engage ASUU, other trade unions in the university system, as well as other stakeholders in the education sector? This is a critical question for me. And its sense derives from my experience not only as a former coordinator of the education sector analysis project at the federal ministry of education and head of its policy division, but also as a former permanent secretary at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity. One of the cogent issues I had to engage with is the adversarial industrial relations dynamics that undermine the national productivity profile of the Nigerian state. The tension generated by these actions are rooted first in government’s non-strategic tactics circumscribed by system breakdown that undermine strategic communication founded on a vision of what should be. And second, there is the better organised trade unions deploying their own industrial relations approach designed to exploit government’s tenuous legitimacy and mistrust by the populace that has resigned itself to fate in the face of government’s dysfunctional policy architecture that has scant impact on its well-being.

Unfortunately, strikes are not working. The several concessions that ASUU and the other trade unions have exacted from the government are too marginal to amount to any tangible impacts on the university system. The question for ASUU then is: how long can a good case be fought with a tactic that seems jaded and wearying, and has really not won any of the battles decisively and in any revolutionary sense? Let us face the fact—ASUU has a compelling case to make. The Nigerian university system is in a terribly bad shape. This one statement of fact captures the entirety of ASUU’s activism for as long as the trade union has been established. No one can grudge this fact. And it is because it is founded on the axiom that the greatness of any nation is measured in terms of the crop of its patriotic human capital who are willing to deploy their competences to rebuilding their fatherland. Unfortunately, the debilitated Nigerian university system churns out human capitals that did not get the best they could have gotten, and that lands in the unemployment market where they are not able to give anything to their fatherland. Well, they are not able to give anything except hatred and deep animosity that could become inflamed any time. And as the Minister of Education once wrote before becoming the minister, the struggle by ASUU “is to save the university system so that it becomes what it is supposed to be—a system for producing a culturally literate society, and for generating and harnessing ideas and knowledge, initiating and driving social and economic innovation, and ensuring national competitiveness on the global scene.”

ASUU is genuinely and significantly placed to champion this noble course of repositioning the university system. Indeed, ASUU should not be left alone on the matter. This goes beyond just being a sectoral matter that the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), for instance, will just lend a mere voice and support. It is a national emergency that ASUU cannot fight alone. One begins to really appreciate the depth of the worrying future the university system faces when one takes a long look at the parlous state of Nigeria’s public primary and secondary schools today. Only those without the means dare to send their children to public schools.  And the public universities are not far from that point. They are losing students at an alarming rate. Those with the means either send their wards to private universities, or send them outside of Nigeria. And who can blame them? And when all is said and done, we lose both the students who struggle to go through the university system in Nigeria and those who traveled out to the diaspora. Saudi Arabia recently benefitted from the few doctors we have who had been struggling with livelihood in Nigeria. 

Concluded on www.dailytrust.com.ng 

Olaopa is Retired Federal Permanent Secretary and can be reached via [email protected]