Asuu strike: Moving from illusion to reality

Since July 2, 2013, lecturers in all but one public university in the country have been on strike. This strike has been necessitated, nurtured and sustained by the Federal Government's failure to implement fully all components of the ASUU/Federal Government agreement of 2009. Ever since the strike commenced, there have been series of meetings held between ASUU and the Federal Government that have yielded no tangible results. The result is that the strike has been allowed to escalate resulting in loss of several weeks that would have been used for serious and rigorous academic studies while thousands of students have been idling away at home. Some have already taken to various nefarious engagements.

As a result of the strike, the Federal Government has taken some measures to assuage the union to call off the strike which has not been convincing to ASUU. The measures so far taken by government need to be critically examined. The N100bn released by government for infrastructural development in all public universities is grossly inadequate to meet the appalling and compelling infrastructural needs of these institutions that have deliberately been starved of necessary funds over the years. Again, the inflation in the country will surely make a mess of whatever sum each university will receive from this government 'largesse'. In any case, it has been authoritatively said that no university has received a dime of the sum accruable to them from the money so far after over five weeks ago. And so the unpleasant drama continues.

Now let us also discuss the N30bn released for the payment of earned allowances to lecturers. The Finance Minister, Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, affirmed that it was all that the Federal Government could muster and that ASUU should either take it or leave it. Very interesting indeed! Government's offer is quite commendable but did ASUU unilaterally concoct the figure of N92bn and foist it on the government to pay its members? The answer is an emphatic no. ASUU reached and signed an agreement with the Federal Government in 2009 and payment of earned allowances was a major part of that agreement. Government in its wisdom refused to implement that agreement. In 2012, ASUU signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Federal Government as a road map to implementing the 2009 Agreement. Despite all these patriotic and laudable efforts by ASUU, government treated the issue of implementation of the agreement with monumental disdain and orchestrated levity. The arrears that accrued from the non-payment of the earned allowances since 2009 are what account for the N92bn. In any case, ASUU has since explained that the afore-mentioned sum is for the payment of the earned allowances to all university workers and not just the lecturers alone.

The offer of N30bn by government is as unilateral as it is despotic in outlook. In the course of this strike, government's negotiating team had offered to pay 10 per cent for the earned allowances out of the 15 per cent already agreed by the Implementation Monitoring Committee composed of both government and ASUU representatives while ASUU insisted on the 15 per cent agreed with the government ab initio. The offer of N30bn, which is less than five per cent of the agreed sum, smacks of insincerity. The bogus claim that the sum is to help the various University Governing Councils pay the earned allowances is both hypocritical and deceitful. Where and how on earth can these councils raise the sum of N62bn differentials in order to pay the earned allowances in the various universities? This is an indirect way of telling the lecturers to stay at home in perpetuity. Just recently, the Federal Government added another N10bn to the earned allowances fund bringing the total to N40bn. ASUU has however insisted that the sum does not address the issue of the payment of the earned allowances as agreed by both parties.

Those who do not understand ASUU's stance on this strike have called the union a selfish organisation. We do not intend to join issues with such people since ignorance according to Plato the great philosopher is a vice. But even if that is the case, do such people also forget that ASUU is a trade union which has the primary mandate to fight for the welfare of its members? If fighting for the welfare of its members amounts to the union being selfish, so be it. Again, those who accuse ASUU of selfishness should ask the political class how much they are paid. While a university professor with all his unassailable contributions to nation building receives a paltry N6m per annum as his entire emolument, a minister gets a whopping sum of N32m per annum. The National Assembly members, on their own, take home outrageous sums as wages per annum and the nation continues to wobble under such a vast and tremendous illegality.

Dragging the current strike to a religious angle as some government officials have tried to do is most unfortunate and smacks of critical irrationality. Yes, that the current President of ASUU, Nasir Fagge Isa, is a Muslim. But what has he done to warrant being called a religious bigot or seeing the current strike as having a religious coloration? This is only a dirty ploy by government and its agents to discredit the union which will surely fail. ASUU in the past has also been on strike during the tenure of Christian presidents. It is pertinent to condemn in its entirety the statement credited to the Minister of Information Labaran  Maku, that the country will collapse if government were to meet ASUU's demands. May we ask Maku some salient questions. Did the nation collapse when the nation's billions of dollars were squandered on President Olusegun Obasanjo's ill-fated and disastrous power projects which brought us more darkness than light? Did the country collapse when this present administration pumped in over N3tn to stabilise some ailing banks as a result of the financial recklessness of some prominent and highly connected citizens of this country who borrowed monies excessively from those banks and refused to pay back? Again, we may wish to ask whether the nation crumbled when this present government pumped in over N500bn to revamp the aviation sector? What about the billions of naira this government doled out to Nollywood as if government has become Father Christmas?

The pretentious and deceitful intervention of Governor Gabriel Suswam and the so-called NEEDS Assessment and Implementation Committee is disappointing and unfortunate. Again the governor's assertion that the strike has become political is false, dishonest and calculated to deceive the general public and also divide the union. It is not true and can never be. Suswam is just being economical with the truth. The current strike and even previous ones never had any political undertone. If the President was looking for a governor to be appointed to such a very sensitive position, certainly Suswam is not among the best performing governors in the country to warrant his being given such an appointment.

Finally, we appeal to the Federal Government to toe the part of honour by implementing fully its 2009 agreement with ASUU and save the nation's public universities from going into extinction. Appealing to the lecturers to call off the strike in the interest of the students as they have regularly done since the strike began is hugely hypocritical as the nation's universities need highly motivated intellectuals in order to become true centers of academic excellence. Instead, the government should save these helpless and deeply traumatised students the misfortune of having a truncated future by ensuring industrial peace on our universities. To do otherwise will amount to pursuing shadow and not the real substance. It must be stressed that those in government who state that Nigerian graduates are unemployable without making critical efforts to fund our universities adequately so as to produce employable graduates are simply unpatriotic and should bury their heads in shame.

•Okaneme wrote in from the University of Abuja