It’s that time of the season again, the perennial season when the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) fights to the fore of the news queue. After spending a seemingly unfair amount of time in the doldrums of the citizens’ attention, the academic union has reared its bespectacled head to trouble the waters again. This time, it is a familiar old problem – the failure of the government to honour a gentleman’s agreement.
Truthfully, it breaks the hearts when adults have to be pushed to the last available options due to negotiation failure. The members of ASUU agitating for the indefinite strike action are not some faraway Nigerians that we only get to hear about in the news. They are our lecturers who despite the frustrating conditions of Nigerian universities, they still managed to better our odds of success in the world. They are our project supervisors, our course counsellors, our quirky professors and our likeable teachers. Most of us have had an experience with this people and what they are fighting for is the reluctance of the government to meet their needs in cognisance of their efforts. That is a fair enough campaign.
But having spent twenty-something odd years in Nigeria, it is hard not to be converted to the opposing side of the discourse. It is a foregone conclusion now that the 6:3:3:4 educational system is more accurately like 6:3:3:6. No one spends four years on the average in a public Nigerian university anymore, you have to make allowance for the traditionally compulsory ASUU strike. And over time, the Nigerian mind has been conditioned to blame the incessant university strike actions on the prefix always attached to it – ASUU.
Because let’s face it, we are Nigerians and we are pretty good at one thing which is laying the blame. So let us play along and lay the blame on ASUU. First off, we have to ask the million dollar question – “Why does ASUU still expect the Nigerian government to come through?” You would think that years of experiencing the government reneging on negotiation terms would have taught the union one vital question which is – in Nigeria, the government only knows one language; language of the untruth. Vitally every thing the government has promised turns out to be a lie and I wonder why the academic union expects their case to be any different. So the government we are all used to promised to increase your allowances when they had the lower hand and then when everything became smooth, they failed to do as told? Well, good morning to them all. They might all need a cup of coffee because it seems they seem just to be waking up.
Also, why do the lecturers always have to choose during the academic calendar year to start their striking action? I do honestly understand that this is the period when their action would most likely receive attention but come on, is there no consideration for the lives of the million of students caught in the middle of this act. Everything has a ripple effect – you delay students’ graduation by a couple of years, you automatically weaken their position in the job market once they get out and they are left to play catch-up with their counterparts both local and international all their lives and consequently, the national economy which they are responsible for lags behind as well. If we truly practice democracy, then the needs of the students should outweigh the needs of the lecturers who they outnumber at least by 10 to 1 based on my experiences in a Nigerian lecture theatre.
The blame is not for the academic union to carry alone though. I am as at fault as the government. For every time in school that I and my classmates did not take to the street during university strikes, demanding the government give the lecturers what they wanted, I had further strengthened the government’s position and weakened the lecturers’. For every time I rather protested the marginal increase in tuition fees by the government while expecting the government to increase funds pumped into education in general, I was actually also protesting against lecturers receiving fair compensation. The government and I are the most responsible for the continuous strike predicament plaguing our universities but I would be hard pressed to find a citizen that would not easily agree that ASUU seem to resort to the old tactics too easily when things do not go their way. The truth is nothing goes anybody’s way in this country but for some reasons, once the going gets tough, ASUU calls a strike.
Photo Credit: Getty
