ASUU: Time to end nightmare of students and parents, By Jide Oluwajuyitan

The ongoing war, now six months, between the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the government remains intractable because of the incompetence of the warring parties. The duo of Ngige and Adamu are round pegs in square holes. ASUU, on the other hand, because its cause is right, thinks it can give what it does not have.

The primary role of egg heads is the preservation of civilisation. And this they do with their physical scientists caged in laboratories searching for what they have not lost, an endeavour that has yielded great dividends for humanity in forms of various inventions in engineering and medicine. Their counterparts in Social Sciences perform the same role by providing philosophical justification for religion, the opium of the poor, and economic model such as slavery, which also goes by other elegant names as capitalism and globalisation.

Finding itself in an unfamiliar territory, ASUU could not advance a good argument to support its just cause beyond bellyaching about lawmakers’ humongous salaries, President Buhari’s misapplication of funds, and massive corruption in the bureaucracy, all of which have no bearing on the underfunding of education.

Suddenly they want to be politicians without politicians’ temperament. I am not sure ASUU members can undress and engage in a brawl inside the market as recommended by Lamidi Adedibu, the late garrison commander of Ibadan politics. Given an opportunity to fix their own salaries, it is most unlikely university dons will corner 25 percent of the national budget. Above all, with all the bravado inside their campuses, I am not sure they will order the execution of their best friend over power struggle.

But ASUU, which hardly listens to other peoples’ views outside the conclave of eggheads, must be reminded that closing down universities for six months is a betrayal of erudition. Strike is a reality for 30 years. It is lazy to say there cannot be a new reality. Besides, it is inconceivable that a group of workers will shut down Lever Brothers, Cadbury, Shell Petroleum for one month and expect employers’ applause. Parents are not amused with ASUU’s undertaking to carry a six-month backlog of work with their new semester work. Under the market economy model we operate, it is evidence of a bloated work force that calls for downsizing by as much as 60 percent.

Sadly, even with our restless youths pleading to be allowed to return to schools, some ASUU zonal coordinators who are not yet battle-fatigued are threatening to prolong the nightmare of students and their parents. They are questioning why government jettisoned the 2009 collective bargaining (Stanley Ogoun, Port Harcourt), threatening “No retreat, no surrender” (Dr Gbolahan Bolarin, Minna), while Dr Ashiru of Lagos was expressing irritation about “Government insensitivity and disrespect for scholars.”

But I think it is time for ASUU elders to come in and ensure our children return to school. Buhari has a mindset that he is doing what is best for Nigeria without necessarily asking Nigerians. He listens only to himself and his ‘‘loyal gate keepers,” This is a leader who has no apologies for failing to deal decisively with Fulani terrorists as advised by Obasanjo, Soyinka, Ortom, Masari and El-Rufai, even now that the north has become ungovernable. He freely frittered away the goodwill of those who hailed him as a messiah in 2015. He undermined his own political party. Rather than change after seven years, he has continued to shoot himself in the foot. Scholars should understand that going to war with such a leader would amount to an exercise in futility.

But ASUU must also stop misleading Nigerians with the false claim that its opposition to payment of school fees by university students was driven by a desire to protect the children of the poor. How many children of the poor can secure admission to our federal Universities? As Prof. Hakeem Olaniyan of the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos, recently submitted “Take a census of the children we are teaching, they are not children of the poor. They can afford to pay fees.”

From experience, half of students’ intake into the University of Lagos are sourced from the diploma class where prospective undergraduates paid as much as N450,000 school fees and an additional half a million for private hostel accommodation outside the school for the one-year preparatory class. The other half comes from students who did exceedingly well, with distinctions at WAEC and must have scored over 200. The only people that fit into this category are children of the rich that attended expensive fee-paying secondary schools with school fees ranging from N500,000 to N3m.

These along with the diploma students, by ASUU’s argument, suddenly become children of the poor who would not be able to afford to pay anything above N20,000 for tuition and N16,000 for hostel. ASUU’s battle, I think, should be for provision of scholarships for children of the poor, reinstatement of the federal government loan scheme supported by state bursaries as obtained in the seventies. That is what sustained children of the poor who could not afford even the N90 tuition and hostel fees. When ASUU romanticises the past when university students ate chicken, they ignore the fact that the majority of admitted students of the period were the children of middle class, professors, lawyers, doctors and successful business men.

At Ife, I still remember some of our poor friends who are today successful lawyers in Lagos who could afford neither the N70 hostel fees nor the 20 kobo per plate food. They often slept in class pretending to be doing overnight-reading, coming early in the morning to take their bath in their friend’s hostel before stopping at the cafeteria to fill their flask with free coffee enroute to the “bukateriat’ where they could buy 5k bread.

I think ASUU should also show interest in wastefulness, mismanagement, and corruption, which today define many of our federal institutions. ASUU must also look inwards to see how to check their members who hide under academic freedom to visit horror on students.

President Buhari might have not met the expectations of Nigerians but ASUU, as part of a whole, cannot claim to be holier than the whole. Leading ASUU members contributed to the nation’s current travails. It is on record that it was a University of Lagos ASUU member that drafted Ironsi’s unitary decree 34 of 1966 that destroyed our federal system. The take-over of the most widely read newspaper in Africa south of Sarara, the Daily Times, and its sister Sunday Times, by Obasanjo, was spearheaded by University of Lagos dons.

Those responsible for an aberration, the federal government created and funded local governments, included University of Lagos dons. Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), which destroyed our budding industries, our naira, turned our country into an importer of labour from other societies was the brain wave of some dons. Landslide and sea slide victories in the opposition stronghold’s fake theory that led to the collapse of the Second Republic was by a Unilag don. The fraud called military ‘decreed political parties,’ was from the fertile imagination of a University of Benin don. Bank consolidation that consolidated wealth in the hands of a few that today pay slave wages of between N50,000 and N75,000 to university graduates employed as contract staff was postulated by a Nsukka don.

ASUU that provided intellectual support for the political, economic and military elites that have held our country hostage since 1966 cannot now play the victim.

First published in The Nation Newspaper