The ASUU strike

Last week, the  Academic   Staff   Union  of  Universities (ASUU) declared an indefinite strike following the inability of the Federal Government to honour the agreement it reached with it. National president of ASUU, Professor Biodun Ogunyemi, declared: “Based on a nationwide consultation with our members, an emergency meeting of the National Executive Council (NEC) of ASUU rose on August 12, 2017 with a resolution to embark on an indefinite strike action starting from Sunday, August 13, 2017. The nationwide action is total and comprehensive. During the strike, there shall be no teaching, no examination and no attendance of statutory meetings of any kind in any of our branches.” As was to be expected, the statement threw millions of Nigerians, in particular the long-suffering and already traumatised students and their parents, into despair.

On Friday, the meeting held between the Federal Government  and ASUU to resolve issues ended in a deadlock. Speaking after the meeting, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, said: “The  major issue is for us to see that the strike is called off so that our children can go back to school and ASUU graciously said they would come back to us on a date within the next one week.” On his part, the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, who admitted that the government was at fault, however, promised that the strike would be called off this  week, as the sum of N53 billion would be released to the union. Speaking during his appearance before the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and TETFUND, the minister disclosed that the Federal Government had commenced plans to ensure that it honoured the agreement with ASUU. He noted that  “ASUU  asked for N23 billion to be paid, but we said the condition for getting the N23 billion  was for them to account for the N30 billion they had taken and they were not able to account for it. The Minister of Finance undertook to do the audit from the ministry and we agreed that the result would be know in six months. During the six months, government undertook to be paying ASUU N1.5 billion each month.”

It is indeed heartening that there is a glimmer of hope of regarding the immediate resolution of the current strike. For one thing, the nation has recorded far too many losses arising from strikes to allow the current one to linger. In any case, while the varsity teachers eventually get paid for work not done, the students whose lives are disrupted during strikes get no reprieve. Sometimes, the students  spend as many as seven years on a four-year programme as a result of the strikes embarked upon by their teachers, and many of them who desire to participate in the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) orientation programme either give up on the desire or alter their dates of birth, bearing in mind the difficulties that graduates who are above the age of 30 face in the  Nigerian job market.

Indeed, to say that we are uncomfortable with the  actions of the Federal Government and the academic union regarding the extant issues would be an understatement. It is unconscionable for the government to wait for ASUU to declare a strike before taking steps to honour the terms of the agreement it freely reached with the union. And if, as the Education Minister said, the government had been hamstrung by the refusal of the union to account for the N30 billion it had collected previously, it should have made its position known to the public before now. That done, it would have been easier for Nigerians to have a clearer grasp of the issues at stake.

With respect to ASUU, we find it disturbing that it needed to be asked to account for the money previously collected before doing so. We believe firmly that a union attuned to the values of accountability and transparency would not have needed to be told to do the right thing. But even more fundamentally, we fail to see how meeting ASUU’s immediate demands can be a realistic solution in the long run. The cold fact is that the economy, in its present state, cannot support ASUU’s demands, let alone the needs of the education sector. Every effort must therefore be made to grow the economy. In this regard, the government needs to pursue aggressive diversification of the economy while eliminating the wastages associated with its humongous recurrent expenditure.

As ASUU members hopefully return to their classes this week, we urge the union and the government to institutionalise viable frameworks for regular intercourse. The nation cannot afford to continue to endure the pains that strikes inflict on its psyche.