Violent protests negate university idea —Soremekun, FUOYE VC

The vice chancellor, Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Professor Kayode Soremekun, addressed newsmen on the recent violent protest by non-academic workers of the institution. SAM NWAOKO brings excerpts of the interview.

Workers accused you, among other things, of charging the highest fees among federal universities, and arbitrary award of contracts. How do you react to these?

As far as I know, students of FUOYE don’t pay as much as the N132,000 they claimed that students were paying, although I don’t know the exact figures. This may happen probably among the new students who might have to pay caution fees and acceptance fees, because being a federal university. I was very naive when I was coming here as I thought we were not going to have students; but I found that for every space available, there were four people struggling to have it. I think the fees fall within N100,000 and N105,000.

As to the award of contracts, again that is not true. It is impossible to award contracts arbitrarily because there is a Procurement Act in place. Then, there is a committee through which contract awards are effected. There’s a specialised committee: Finance and General Purposes Committee. If you take anything outside there, you will be in trouble. But of course, the VC has a threshold. The VC can award contracts of up to N2.5million, and in some cases up to N5 million. The only time you can award contracts without reference to anybody is when there is a pressing emergency. Then there would not be time to tender and to advertise. People just say all sorts of things that are not true. I might have sinned as the vice chancellor, because I am not a saint; but I think I am more sinned against.

You talked about over-bloated administrative staff. How did you come to that problem?

I met them on ground. If you get into a job and you begin to unravel all the boxes, you will not move on. Secondly, I said it is possible to tackle the administrative staff problems in a structural way. If you say you have an over-bloated workforce and you want to begin to downsize, the people in Abuja will not like it, because you will be creating problems for the administration. I then said, okay, is it possible to tackle this problem structurally? One of the ways to tackle it is to create more programmes, create more faculties and by the time you spread them out, you will begin to ease the problem. This I have explained several times to my colleagues. Create all these things, create a micro-finance bank, start a postgraduate school and that way, you spread the existing workers and you ensure that you don’t bring in more people into that administrative cadre. I did not recruit the workers that they are alleging. In fact, the reports said they said they signed an agreement five years ago. I am the one contending with the agreement they signed five years ago, and that is one of the problems.

You were forced by the unions to jettison promotion exams. Are you not concerned that you have been blackmailed into sacrificing merit in handling this?

Sometimes, you have to be pragmatic when you’re faced with certain situations. When they started complaining, I asked around and I found that on one hand, I was right; on the other hand, I was wrong. This is because initially, the plan was to have exams from Level 1 upwards. I was then told by some people that in a lot of universities, they don’t do exams for the junior staff cadre; that they only do exams for the senior staff cadre and that in some places they only do exams for people who want to move, say from SAR upwards. So, because of that, we left the initial thing we wanted to do, the whole idea of exams for the junior people. We then focussed on the senior people. They were still kicking and trying to make life unbearable.

Is promotion in the institution now stalled?

It is not stalled. We are going to work out modalities. We have to promote because some people are working and they are working hard. We have to promote them; but we cannot promote all of them.

With what is on ground now, what is the way forward? Have you contacted the union leaders for a meeting?

We are still going to meet and we are going to find a way around the issues. Salaries are going to be paid and once the salaries are paid, it would lower the tension.

During the protest, some of the union leaders, based on the experiences of the past, were dodging camera because about 10 of their colleagues were sacked after a similar protest in the past. Are these protesting workers safe from sanction?

I’m not against people going on strike. There has got to be what you can call a ‘creative tension’ between the unions on one hand and the management on the other. But having said that, when people now, in the name of unionism, do not give notice that they are going on strike to formally convey their grievances (I only learnt about those grievances while the protest was on and I learnt fully from the newspapers), that is wrong. When you barricade the gate and begin to inflict violence on other people in the name of going on strike, that is carrying things too far. When you get intoxicated with something and decide to go and harass them in the Health Centre, that is counter-cultural. That is not strike. When you attack ASUU members that are not on strike, that is not strike. The whole idea of a liberal temper is that where your freedom stops, another man’s own starts. If ASUU members have decided that they don’t want to go on strike, then you must allow them to act out their own convictions. Why do you want to harass them? That is the only thing I quarrel with and I was very disturbed by that. That kind of situation is very dangerous. It is very dangerous at the practical level, it is also very dangerous at the level of the university idea. That is one of the problems with this country. You have universities but nobody is subscribing to the university idea. University idea is about tolerance of the other person’s views. That is my only quarrel with their protest. So, I can sympathise with them but when they lie and begin to effect an organic linkage between strike and violence, it begins to assume a very dangerous turn which I think should not be allowed in any university because it is a negation of the university idea.

Students of FUOYE are already asking for their own union, an idea which they alleged you are stoutly against. How do you see this?

There are two models of unionism: One that is linked to National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) and students representatives in each of the faculties. For now, we prefer the model in which we will be talking with the students’ representatives in each of those faculties. You know we are talking about a five-year-old university and already, people want to introduce militant unionism into the place. For now, we are not ripe for that. We have presidents of faculties, secretaries of programmes we bring them together, dialogue with them periodically on issues. Once we grow older, we get into that other kind of unionism.