Since November 4 this year, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has been on indefinite strike that has crippled public university education in Nigeria.
The lecturers’ union said the federal government had failed to implement a funding agreement both parties reached in 2009 towards revitalising university education in the country following two years of negotiation between the lecturers and a government team appointed by the then education minister, Obiageli Ezekwesili.
The government team was led by the then Pro-chancellor, University of Ibadan, Gamaliel Onosode, while the ASUU team was led by its then president, Abdullahi Sule-Kano. The agreement reached at the negotiations included conditions of service for university lecturers, funding of universities, university autonomy and academic freedom, as well as issues that required legislation to implement.
Part of the agreement was that each federal university would get at least N1.5 trillion between 2009 and 2011 while state universities, within the same period, should receive N3.6 million per student, plus a provision that at least 26 percent of Nigeria’s annual budget was allocated to education, and half of that allocation to universities.
The agreement, which demanded a heavy financial commitment from the government, was an adaptation of an earlier agreement reached in 2001.
Unfortunately, this agreement has never been implemented, leading to many industrial standoffs between ASUU and the government. On September 26, 2017, ASUU and the federal government signed an MoU for the suspension of a strike started in August. ASUU again in September 2018 threatened to embark on a nationwide strike following federal government’s failure to implement the 2017 agreement.
ASUU president, Prof Biodun Ogunyemi, identified the grey areas federal government failed to act on according to the deal both parties signed in September 2017 to include failure to carry out a forensic audit of the earned academic allowances of the lecturers since 2017 and the payment of N20bn out of an agreed N220bn annually. Ogunyemi called for a renegotiation with the federal government in the best interest of the university system, which he described as grossly underfunded. According to him, government released only N20 billion out of the N220 billion agreed for it to release annually for five years.
Finance minister, Zainab Ahmed, had on September 24, 2018 announced the release of N20bn to the education sector as part of the federal government’s promise to revitalise public universities. But ASUU noted that the N20 billion ought to have come earlier if the government was committed to its agreement to revitalise the university system.
Efforts made by both parties to resolve the dispute have not been successful so far. On Monday, December 10, 2018, the parties met again without an immediate resolution of the dispute. The meeting held at the Federal Ministry of Labour was the fourth meeting both federal government and ASUU would be holding since the strike began in November.
No doubt, the strike has further set our university education system backwards. Parents and students, especially those on the verge of graduation, are bearing the brunt of federal government and ASUU’s intransigence. The parties should without further delay resolve the dispute and save the country’s university education, which was already in dire straits even before the latest strike, from total collapse.
The parties, as responsible entities, are bound by the agreement that they signed and the federal government should fulfil its part of the agreement so that students can return to the classroom and resume their studies. Successive governments have shown disregard to agreements it willingly signed with the university lecturers, which is unacceptable and unhelpful in the country’s quest for development anchored on sound education of the youths.
Government should also be proactive in response to its inability to fulfil any part of the agreement by reaching out to the lecturers earlier instead of waiting till they threaten to down tools. Given the precarious state of our economy, it is not unusual that government may from time to time be unable to keep to certain agreements because of other competing needs, but it must make the situation clear to the partners with which it has binding agreements. This will stop strikes before they happen.
On its part, ASUU, as a union of intellectuals, should also take it into consideration that the economy is just recovering from recession and that it is difficult to meet all their demands, as government’s disposable income is significantly less than when the pact was signed.
It is our opinion that the ongoing dialogue should be intensified and a middle ground reached between both parties without further delay. There should be urgency on the part of government and ASUU to end the strike. Sadly, this urgency seems to be lacking.
Consequently, we urge President Muhammadu Buhari to intervene and break the deadlock in the negotiation between ASUU and federal government to save university education from further decay.
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