Don’t fuel Boko Haram agenda, Lukman, PGF DG tells ASUU leaders

Director General of the Progressives Governors Forum, Salihu Lukman, has urged lecturers in public universities to show moderation and patriotism in their demands from the federal government.

The umbrella body of academics in public universities, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), suspended a nine-month-old strike last week.

Amongst other commitments, the federal government has promised the release of N40 billion earned academic allowances and another N30 billion revitalisation fund.

Unresolved issues include the demand for the replacement of the Integrated Payroll and Personal Information System (IPPIS) with University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) and implementation of the FG-ASUU agreement of 2009 bordering on university autonomy and funding.

Announcing the suspension, President of ASUU, Professor Biodun Ogunyemi, however, dropped the hint that the lecturers would not hesitate to withdraw their services if the federal government reneged on its commitment as he noted that “no amount of sacrifice would be too much to get the matter resolved as long as the government is consistent with its commitments.”

The DG of the forum of governors on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), however, warned that by their intransigence, the lecturers could inadvertently be promoting the agenda of the terror gang, Boko Haram: the destruction of Western Education.

Lukman in his statement entitled, “ASUU and Indeterminate Power Struggle – The Boko Haram Logic,” cautioned that the lecturers should give utmost priority to the fate of helpless students at the mercy of their ceaseless face off with the government.

He said: “Many respected Nigerian academics have publicly celebrated the point that ASUU has never lost any struggle against the Nigerian government, whether military or civilian. These are being said without any remorse or acknowledgement of the damage ASUU strikes has done to the Nigerian education system.

“That we are even thinking that closure of universities and our schools can produce any form of victory with reference to any form of outcome demonstrate our nasty state of mind, which brings us closer to the Hobbesian reality that civilisation would have long resolved. How can anyone with a child whose dream and aspiration should include being educated, celebrate in any form the closure of schools? What difference is such a logic from the Boko Haram objective of abolishing western education?

“It is very sad that it is common knowledge now that in the last twenty-one years, ASUU was on strike for a record period of more than four years. Worse still is the fact that we have people who claimed to be public intellectuals that present such a reprehensible scorecard and by any standard a scandalous credential as achievement is sickening. At this rate, we may as well accept that Boko Haram terrorists are also public intellectuals. In any event, who is a public intellectual?

“Aren’t Boko Haram terrorists engaged in critical thinking, research and reflections? If their mission is to abolish western education, how farther away from that mission is the activity of any group that cause closure of our universities for nine months in one academic calendar? If our universities are closed for nine months, what does that mean to the remainder of the education system? Assuming that secondary students are able to pass their exams, will they gain admission into universities? Where will the space come from when existing students have not graduated..?

“However selfish we want to be even as airbrushed portraits of individuals thinking only about our material gains, we must try to reawaken our patriotic sense of duty as products of an education system that was never interrupted for one day in our formative stages. Maybe the story is different for younger Nigerians, but every Nigerian that went to school between 1960s and 80s would attest to the fact that there was hardly any strike at all levels of the Nigerian education system, even for one day.

“This is not because everything was working. In fact, between 1981 and 1983, in the case of primary school teachers, there were periods of non-payment of salaries running into months. Most of the academic disruptions in our universities and tertiary levels around this period were as a result of students’ protests largely demanding for better welfare conditions for students.

“No need to go into a long excursion of records and dynamics of academic disruptions due to students’ protests in Nigeria. The dynamics and relationship of those protests with challenges of developing the Nigerian educational system is a different matter entirely. One can however say, without fear of any contradiction that protests and strikes were the last resort.

“This is hardly the case in the present reality facing us as a nation. It is almost impossible to cite any country in the world with a pathetic record of strike in universities for nine months in one academic calendar. As Nigerians, we should be ashamed and traumatised. We must all be worried, concerned and committed to resolving this problem permanently.”

Seeking a panacea to the intractable feud between ASUU and the federal government, the DG, PGF called on President Muhammadu Buhari administration to see education and health sector as social services and make adequate budgetary provisions for the two critical sectors in the long term.

“Issues of education and health are irreducible minimum, which as a nation we must all work to succeed. These are not sectors that can be downgraded into some convenient analysis of citizens vs government debate. Any suggested consideration of any failure simply just condemned the nation and our children into aligning with the criminal logic of Boko Haram, which is more or less about bringing whatever is called civilisation, including public education to a terminal end.”