ASUU: Make this the final battle

IT is such a distressing thing to see undergraduates who should be engaged in rigorous academic activities play football in the morning, pore over snooker in the afternoon and devote the whole night to a game of scrabble or cards all because their lecturers have turned their backs on lecture rooms to drive home the point that the government should spare no effort to improve the state of university education in the country. Reports even have it that with lecturers on strike, some girls have turned to the streets, engaging in unwholesome and untoward deployment of their natural endowments. Some boys are also said to have turned themselves to tools in the hands of unscrupulous politicians just as some others have also become adept in fraudulent Internet transactions. It is a shame that the precious time of the nation’s youths is being mindlessly wasted.

Consequent upon the foregoing, some parents and other stakeholders have been imploring the university lecturers to reconsider their position, call for a truce and return to work so as to save the students from the wastage of their productive years. Even some universities are said to be pulling out of the strike action for the love of their students.

But painful as the ongoing strike action is to students, their parents and the entire system, I am persuaded that this is one battle from which the university lecturers should not retreat until their demands are fully met. This is because going back to work before the government commences full implementation of the 2009 and 2012 agreement will be tantamount to a mere postponement of the evil day. Nigerians are tired of the endless face-offs between the government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), what they want now is a definite resolution of the crisis that will guarantee that academic activities will run uninterruptedly in the nation’s ivory towers. What Nigerians want is a system that will bring out the best in our youth, not an educational system that will produce Lilliputians, who cannot compete favourably with contemporaries from other parts of the world.

Sequel to the 59-day December 2011-January 2012 industrial action embarked upon by the lecturers, the government entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with ASUU on February 1, 2012 to inject about N400 billion into the university system between 2012 and 2013, starting with a tranche of N100 billion in 2012.

The Federal Government also committed to providing assistance to state universities, providing funding requirements for revitalising the Nigerian universities, progressive increase of annual budgetary allocation to education to 26 per cent between 2013 and 2020, paying up academic staff’s earned allowances and amendment of the pension/retirement age of academics on the professorial cadre from 65 to 70 years.

Other aspects of the MoU were the reinstatement of prematurely dissolved governing councils, establishment of the pension fund administrator for universities, the transfer of Federal Government’s landed property to universities and setting up of research and development units by companies operating in Nigeria and teaching and research equipment provision to laboratories and classrooms.

Of all these, the government, in my reckoning, has only faithfully implemented three: these are the release of N300billion to universities, amendment of retirement age for lecturers on professorial cadre and the reinstatement of prematurely dissolved governing councils. It was not until the lecturers embarked on a warning strike in November 2016 that the Federal Government set up a negotiation team to discuss with the union on the 2009 and 2012 agreements. But according to ASUU, nothing has happened after the submission of its document to the Dr Wale Babalakin-led negotiating team.

How can we have a government that fails to keep to an agreement it freely entered into and hope to make any meaningful progress? It is an open secret that the university education system has hearkened to the law of gravity, hence some multinationals operating in the country no longer recruit graduates of the nation’s universities, they prefer other nationals and Nigerians who had their education abroad to those trained within the country. Should we continue to patch the system until it completely goes to the dogs?

The question those asking ASUU to call off the strike should ask and answer is this; do we want a university system that will produce outstanding products, who will provide solutions to the nation’s problems, or mediocre who will add to the woes of the nation? Truth be told, to have omelet, you must break eggs. Scholarship thrives on adequate funding. It is time we resolved to either have a world-class university system or have none at all.

It is unfortunate that my children and other undergraduates of the public university system have to pay for the nonchalance of the nation’s leadership to ensuring the provision of quality education. But it is a price they have to pay now to avoid a more calamitous occurrence in future.

ASUU, on this matter, there should be no retreat from the battle front and no surrender to subtle or direct blackmail.