FG/ASUU faceoff: When education loses priority

THE year 2020 will go down in history as recording one of the longest of all strike actions embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in Nigeria. ASUU had commenced the strike on March 9, 2020 which was suspended on December 23, 2020.

Accordingly, the strike is likely to be resumed in 2021 going by the trust issues between the Federal Government mediation team led by the Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige and the representatives of ASUU led by its president, Professor Biodun Ogunyemi, on some contending issues.

Several meetings were held by both parties coupled with the interventions of President Muhammadu Buhari at a point and the National Assembly, yet it appears there is no permanent end in sight in what Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s legendary president, would describe as “pernicious British-style trade union practices”.

The government had insisted that ASUU members should enroll on the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) platform and subsequently withheld salaries of lecturers as a punitive measure for rejecting IPPIS.

An analysis of the timeline has indicated that the strike was exactly 290 days on December 23, after it was suspended translating into about 41 weeks of a protracted industrial action.

Before then, the strike in 2003 which snowballed into 2004 was the longest as it lasted 180 days. It was also observed that some of the strike actions dovetailed into a new year like in 2003, which ended in 2004 and 2011, which also ended in 2012.

This dispute, no doubt, took a toll on all segments of the society with students bearing the brunt of the dispute. Although some experts had criticised ASUU for embarking on the indefinite strike when universities should be opened and be part of providing solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ogunyemi had noted that though the country was experiencing a pandemic, the lecturers would withhold their services since the Federal Government had decided to use the weapon of hunger to fight its members.

 

The issue, the contentions

Professor Ogunyemi had, while declaring the indefinite strike, listed some of the key issues in contention to include renegotiation of the 2009 FGN/ASUU Agreement, establishment of visitation panels to federal universities, payment of outstanding arrears of Earned Academic Allowance, revitalization of funds for public universities and enrolment on the Federal Government’s Integrated Personnel Payroll and Information System (IPPIS), which was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

Ogunyemi had argued that the 2009 FGN/ASUU Agreement was long overdue for renegotiation and that the union would continue to resist any attempt by the government to repudiate it, noting that the agreement provided a blueprint for the revitalisation of Nigerian universities. According to him, since 1992 when a landmark agreement on the pathway to addressing the nagging issues of funding, conditions of service, university autonomy and academic freedom and other related matters was signed with the then military government, it had become easier to track the trajectory of Nigeria’s public universities.

The federal renegotiation team headed by Dr. Wale Babalakin (SAN) put together by the current Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, which started renegotiating the 2009 Agreement in March 2017, could not make headway as a result of what Ogunyemi described as “the leader of the government team is not disposed to the principles and ethics of collective bargaining.”

However, in order to resolve this issue, the Minister of Education, had on December 2, 2020, inaugurated the reconstituted renegotiation team with Professor Emeritus Munzali Jubril as the chairman.

On the visitation panels to federal universities, the Federal Government had in a knee-jerk response announced a few weeks ago that President Muhammadu Buhari had approved members of the visitation panels to the federal universities and would soon be inaugurated when gazetted. On this issue, it was gathered that government made it clear to the union leaders that until the strike was suspended, there was no way visitation panels could go about their work while students and lecturers were at home.

Senator Ngige, leading the Federal Government’s representatives on the truce with ASUU, revealed that during one of the meetings with the leaders of the union, government approved the payment of N40 billion Earned Academic Allowances/Earned Allowances that was already being processed just as the government approved N30 billion revitalisation fund, bringing it to N70 billion.

Meanwhile, what preventing ASUU from suspending the strike, early enough, according to sources and confirmed by the Ogunyemi, was the payment of the withheld salaries of lecturers ranging from six to 10 months. The Federal Government had in enforcement of “No Work, No Pay” policy, stopped the salaries of the striking lecturers.

 

 

Distortion of academic calendar

With the strike lasting about 10 months, a full academic session had been lost. Even though the strike lasted for the major part of the COVID-19 lockdown, stakeholders insist that skeletal academic activities could have been going on in addition to the possibility of migrating to virtual platforms by the universities if the lecturers had not been on strike. Many private universities in Nigeria had leveraged on this to graduate their students. However, the University of Abuja just launched its virtual learning platform while using adjunct staff to teach students in the place of ASUU members.

Findings revealed that some universities, especially state-owned, are at the verge of losing two academic sessions, owing to their accumulated internal crises.

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