The Federal and State governments established the universities. They have an obligation to pay salaries regularly and equip the institutions to meet global standards. It is not ASUU that compelled the government to set up universities. The staff and students should not be made victims of the government’s ineptitude, myopic and clueless administration. Let Nigerian media do more than reporting the stalemate and government’s lame and hypocritical lamentation. The media should be a little more professional and audacious by finding out about the bizarre situation of one Federal government owning about 50 universities, the same number of polytechnics, teachers colleges and 104 secondary schools.
Is that the case in USA, Canada, Brazil, Switzerland, Belgium, Ethiopia, India or Australia and other federations? The Mohammed-Obasanjo junta took over viable state universities in the mid-1970s. Fifty years after, why not review the policy and return them to their original owners or even try the midway option of co-owenership with the respective states? If the opium of the oil boom years of the 1970’s encouraged the madness of nationalising universities, have the fortunes of the oil years not evaporated with the pandemic of austerity messures and currency devaluation introduced by the IBB military despots since mid-1980s? Why are Nigerian University wages the lowest in the world? Yet academic staff strength (with at least Ph. D degree) is not more than 50% of established quotas. Why are the Nigerian ruling bourgeoisie so heartless and ruthless in relegating intellectual capital to miserly position yet the pampered ruling elite in all parties luxurate in consumption of ideas and goods imported from countries where education enjoys primacy in development planning?
ASUU is not blameless either; it suffers from the problem of dogmatic and antiquated methods of agitation and advocacy. The weapon of strike was adopted during the reign of military tyrants, the strikes were a dialectical part of the overall strategy of harassing and rubishing the public image of; the strikes were extensions of civil rights crusading. Even then the strikes organised under ASUU leadership of Prof Jeyifo and Prof Mahmud Tukur were not prolonged. I was an ASUU leader in Ife then. After the 3-day strike of 1980, ASUU-FGN negotiation in Lagos lasted about a year. The strike was called off and normal academic programmes continued whilst ASUU leaders engaged the FGN in talks. A union of the creme de la cream of the country’s intelligentsia should not frequently shut down institutions indefinitely.
A single day of shut down results in closure of sensitive labs and suspension of going researches in numerous departments and units.
There is a worthy lesson from former apartheid South Africa. During hectic years of urban guerrilla wars with bombs and sabotage of public utilities, universities were never closed.
The result of that imaginative management of crisis is writ large in industrial transformation of the country evidenced in business behemoths like Multichoice/DSTV, MTN, Shoprite, Chicken Republic, Kilimanjaro etc, etc.
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ASUU may reconsider its age-long method of industrial dispute so that our campuses can reopen about 2 million students now frustrated and stranded in their academic career.