A caveat: this intervention is not about Nigeria’s university lecturers as individuals. As a product of the system, I am immensely grateful for the part Nigerian academics have played in my life. However, I must look the outfit called Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in the face and express my reservations about its extortionate, diversionary and incendiary tactics. ASUU, the main academic union in the country, is no longer an outfit associated with sound logic and patriotism: it has become an arrogant, ignorant, mean and decidedly insidious organisation that studiously ignores the pains of even its own members, many of whom have been bullied into silence, while pontificating on a socialist Utopia.
As an organization, ASUU has a sense of entitlement that borders on criminality. That’s why, this week, its president lamented that none of its members currently on strike had been paid since February. Speaking during an interview on Channels Television, ASUU’s president, Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, accused the Federal Government of using hunger as a tool to end the ongoing strike. Hear him: “This is the sixth month our salaries have been held. They thought that if they held our salaries for two or three months we would come begging and say ‘please allow us to go back to work.’ But we as a union of intellectuals, we have grown beyond that. You can’t use the force of hunger to pull our members back.”
ASUU’s lamentation about payment for work not done captures the behemoth that it has become following years of pampering by corrupt politicians. The current strike, like the others before it, is not about the mythical education sector and certainly not about students; it is about money and more money for ASUU members, which is a legitimate quest. But ASUU just cannot avoid couching its demands in grandiloquent terms.
On the question of increased pay, a committee headed by Professor Nimi Briggs reportedly recommended a 180 per cent pay rise for lecturers, but the government favoured 100 per cent. But what did ASUU do? It insisted that any agreement reached with the Federal Government must be binding on state governments! ASUU only mouths federalism only when it suits its whims. Just how do you force federal and state governments to pay the same rates in a federation when the purse is not the same?
Expounding tired and over-flogged arguments, ASUU suggests, fraudulently, that all the problems in the university system are caused by the government. ASUU lacks reflectivity; its intellectualism is fickle and bogus. That’s why it can bellyache over payment for work not done. A university is supposed to be centred around students, but ASUU as a murderous tyrant continually messes up the lives of generations of students with its endless strikes. It claims to be fighting for education in the country while being completely silent on primary school education. It hardly joins students’ struggles but feeds off the adulation and support of the Organised Labour. ASUU has become a pharaoh in the university system and must be unbundled. If Nigeria is too bad for you, resign and go abroad: stop fouling the system with Animal Farm charade. ASUU stinks very badly with its annual ritual of “mother of all strikes.”
Many lecturers, riding the high horse of ASUU arrogance, are morally bankrupt, criminally oppressive, intolerant of dissenting opinion, and given to Bolshevik verbiage. Just consider the ASUU president, who does not realize how horrendous he sounds. Only recently, ASUU wasted an entire academic session on an unproductive strike. This year, it’s been on strike for six months and decreed yet another month of idleness, making students’ lives a misery while pretending to fight for them. ASUU is mentally retired: the only language it understands is habitual strikes with pay, an infernal tactic.
If the university system is broken, ASUU with its underhand tactics played a big part in that sorry outcome. I am a Christian and I frown on collecting payment for work not done. It is evil, maniacal and Machiavellian. ASUU has never done anything reasonable for students in decades. To ASUU, Obasanjo was bad, Yar’Adua was unserious, Jonathan was useless and Buhari is irresponsible. So who can ASUU work with? If ASUU doesn’t change its ways, the day will come when its own students will launch an #EndASUU movement that will rock the universities to their foundations. Whenever ASUU goes on strike, students’ lives are jeopardised and the government’s reputation lost. ASUU members, on the other hand, simply face their other jobs, teaching in the private universities and engaging in other “side hustles.” Then at the end of the day, they get paid, teach for only a few months, then embark on another round of strike.
Whoever wins the presidential election in 2023 will be derided by ASUU as an anti-education demon. ASUU thinks itself, without any evidence, to be superior to the rest of society. How can a union be more powerful than its employers and the government and hold the society down perpetually? It is a fact that ASUU members are far more dictatorial than the politicians they habitually harangue. Give ASUU all the billions in the budget: it will never be satisfied. It is permanently lodged in the clouds, scoffing at reality. I have considered ASUU’s case for years and thrown out its arguments for lack of merit. Do not just tell me how much lecturers are paid abroad; tell me the size of the economy and the academia, the population and the rules of engagement. No one in the USA gets paid for classes not taught. If you are bold and principled enough to stay off work, you should be bold and principled enough to stay off pay. ASUU strikes are no longer funny. ASUU is a present and abiding danger to this republic. Many lecturers are hungry, ill and tired of the ongoing strike, but the bloody union does not care. It is only a devil that would avoid work for a year, then gladly collect wages for doing nothing. What is pay without work if not fraud???
For years through trickery and pretended patriotism, ASUU has made students’ lives miserable. It has hobbled their progress and attacked dissenters with venom. It must be denounced by right-thinking members of the Nigerian society. The Federal Government should stop being an accomplice in ASUU’s crime by paying it for work not done. The nation cannot afford to perpetually nurture ASUU’s expansive heart of darkness.
My advice to the government: change your poor attitude to education, proscribe ASUU, and commit more money to the varsities. Let Governing Councils do their jobs and hold their employees accountable. Enforce no-work-no-pay to the letter. Journalists are never paid for work not done, and neither are soldiers and doctors. Why should varsity teachers?
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