ASUU’s unending strikes

Ever since I concluded that Brian Acton and Jan Koum who started WhatsApp in 2009 could not have imagined how some Nigerians would use it, I paid little attention to most messages on the platform. If you are not being added to groups without your consent, folks will be asking you to send particular messages to others for their own kind of blessings.

But when a former boss and friend sent me a message last week tagged “National Alert: For those who do not understand why ASUU is on strike” I paid closer attention. Since he also is an academic and researcher, though not teaching in any Nigerian university, I decided to engage him further. Speaking later on phone, he rounded off with a claim that my submissions were too militant just as ASUU’s claims too were extreme and unrealistic in some areas. “The solution is in between, Wale,” he concluded.

While I disagree with most of the reasons ASUU put forward as reason for this latest strike, one cannot but agree with some. By the way, apart from a press release riddled with grammatical errors that made one wonder the rigour and attention to detail going on in our universities, there has not been a concrete engagement with the public on why our lecturers are on strike again. The public, who bear the brunt of these periodic strikes, as parents and guardians or as employees regularly forced to retrain products from our ivory towers – if they can still be called that – and as the larger society which have not really benefitted from research products of these schools, and who can be mobilized to persuade our government to act, remain in the dark.

Wholeheartedly I agree with ASUU that what we call universities today is a total mockery of the Old French word universite, from Latin universitas – “the whole” as our universities have become fragmented. Our problems, however, go beyond funds and cannot be solved by increased funding alone. As a matter of fact, as recent as yesterday, a British professor in The Guardian of London gave enough statistics that universities in Britain have “significant financial challenges” He added that “the university pension scheme is £17.5 billion in red” and so funding will always be an issue with universities but this does not translate to comparison between our universities and British ones. They are thousands of miles apart.

It is strange that the strike cabal, which has held ASUU hostage since the 1990s is still exerting a grip on the union as a thorough evaluation will reveal that not a lot has been achieved through flippant recourse to strikes. Good enough that its internal debate is well established, but ASUU’s militancy is not grounded in reality. By the way, I’m always intrigued by ASUU members I encounter regularly – friends and family members – who seem unwilling to hear other sides of their usual arguments. Their rhetoric is well known and their tyranny of opinion is not in doubt. Whose fault is it that our universities don’t have enough professors? Since the National Universities Commission is a political organ at a level, could ASUU please tell us who are the members of accreditation committees, which regularly vet courses in our universities? Are they not the ones that have consistently shut out professionals who could serve as professors of professional practice as commonly done in other parts of the world through insistence on possession of PhDs before you can be recognized as a university lecturer? Who are those involved in the practice of allowing their profiles to be on private universities’ staff lists to fulfill accreditation criterion even when they are still serving in public schools?

The shenanigans that accompany appointments of vice chancellors cannot make any politician respect our lecturers. Issues like ethnicity; quota system and religion are regular features in such moments so much that vice chancellors become attenuated on assumption of office. The point is that our campuses are not different from what we have outside and so expecting the situation to be different is a tall order. Good enough that the federal government had admitted that it was in the wrong regarding previous agreements, it is up to ASUU too to admit that the way our universities are being run now cannot guarantee good products. Our lecturers seem insulated from cutting edge thinking needed for this century. Issues like appointment of governing council members who can position the universities better and not the usual crowd of politicians we have presently deserve attention.

A way of bridging the funding gap is better alumni relations but this has not been explored fully. People graduate from universities completely alienated from the institutions based on what they experienced as we no longer produce ‘total person.’ Dissent is no longer seeing as a mark of freedom in the academia and students are regularly hounded because of their union activities. A result of this is the lack of intolerance permeating our country in political debates and low civic education. We can take our universities back and return them to their glorious days, but ASUU members should keep their house in order first by removing the log in their eyes.