The National President, Academic Staff Union of Universities, Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi, in this interview with TUNDE AJAJA explains the sanctions imposed on University of Ilorin, why the union may not stop using strike as a tool for pressing for its demands and other sundry issues in the education sector
There are insinuations that the sanction imposed on the University of Ilorin by ASUU few days ago was mainly because the institution refused to join your association. Why did you impose the sanctions?
The sanction on UNILORIN has a long history. That branch used to be a vibrant member of ASUU until 2000. Around 2000 or 2001, especially at the time we were negotiating our agreement with the Federal Government, authorities of the University of Ilorin were trying to severe relationship with the national body of ASUU, which led to some disagreements. I was the ASUU chairman at the Olabisi Onabanjo University Branch then and I remember we had a National Executive Council meeting at UNILORIN. We had a very good NEC meeting, but by then we had been seeing signs of attempt to discourage unionism in that university. UNILORIN went into union matter and tried to polarise our membership, in order to discourage unionism. The last straw that broke the camel’s back was when we had a long strike action in 2001 and our members at Ilorin joined that action but the university insisted that they didn’t want their members of staff to join. From that time onward, UNILORIN became antagonistic, which also led to its sacking of 49 lecturers. It was in 2009 that the Supreme Court gave the judgement that those lecturers should be reinstated because they were unjustly sacked. The court said as part of the freedom of association, they can unionise, and that is also in accordance with the International Labour Law; the convention of ILO, to which Nigeria is a signatory. So, our issues with University of Ilorin revolve around three major things; the orchestrated move to discourage or ban, outright, critical unionism; the diversion of union levies, like check-off dues deductions. We have taken that case to the National Industrial Court and the court gave the judgement that it was illegal for them to be taking the dues and not be remitting to the national body. They could do that in that branch because they had the backing of the authorities. Certainly, no union would be happy that that is happening. In the third place, the university has blocked every move that we have made to bring our people back into the fold. It is the only public university in Nigeria that lecturers of other universities cannot enter freely, all because they don’t want ASUU.
Don’t they have the right not to be a member of ASUU?
They do. People have freedom to associate, but what they have been doing is contradictory. They say they don’t want ASUU, but go to the school, you would see a structure named ASUU secretariat. So, it becomes an inconsistent thing and a matter of double-speak to encourage some people to be carrying, illegally, a name that they don’t deserve. We cannot have ASUU on a campus that is not known to the national body, and that is what is happening there which is why we will continue to challenge them. We have those that truly represent ASUU in that branch but the university is blocking them from effective functioning. The university is strangulating them, even with the funds they are supposed to be accessing, but they keep everything and spend it illegally. When they spend our money illegally, when they produce artificial division, when they profit from where they did not labour, we cannot be happy with them. As we speak now, ASUU will go on strike, they will say they are not joining ASUU, but by the time the dividend of such actions comes, they will be the first to draw from it. So, what is going on there amounts to shenanigans. We think until we can get it right, UNILORIN authorities don’t deserve any direct relationship with scholars that are part of ASUU.
Have you made any effort to meet the university authorities to resolve this?
That was why I said all efforts to reconcile have been frustrated by that university. We have written to them. In fact, we have held meetings with some groups that called themselves ASUU there, we have extended the olive branch for them to come to the table so we could discuss the issues. So, as for making attempt, we have sent close to 20 or 30 delegations to visit the place, relate with members, relate with the authorities, interact with the Governing Council, but all to no avail. Why are they doing that? It is opportunism. Today, they want to parade themselves as the public university with undisrupted calendar. But across the world, there are instances that your rights will not be given to you unless you ask for it. They cannot come out to say what we are doing is wrong, but they will come out to say they can’t be part of us because they don’t want their calendar to be disrupted. In the larger polity, if some people had not fought for democracy, would we be talking about democracy today? Some people put down their lives, some put their blood into the struggle, and that is why we say nothing ventured, nothing gained. We go out there and we win entitlements for our members, grants for universities, intervention funds, including when we called for the establishment of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund. These were part of the dividends of our struggles, but some people would sit somewhere and say they are not part of us, yet, you benefit from the proceeds. It’s moral bankruptcy.
Was the sanction imposed to compel them to resolve the issue or join ASUU national body?
We are not compelling anybody, people have freedom to associate. If they say they don’t want to associate with us, they should not call themselves ASUU. If you are close to them, just tell them that there is no branch that exists without a charter from the national body, and the body also has the right to withdraw that charter. So, if we don’t recognise you and you are not part of our National Executive Council, you don’t have the right to call yourself ASUU. They should call themselves another name. The sanction is to also tell the whole world that there is a lot of hypocrisy going on at UNILORIN. Let people begin to see them in their true colour. If they want to join private universities, let them go ahead; you know in private universities, it is illegal for you to unionise, even though we disagree with that. It’s an infringement on workers’ rights. At the appropriate time, we would still challenge that. But if UNILORIN authorities want to go that way, let us know that for now, they don’t have respect for the rights of workers to unionise, they don’t want people from other universities to come to their campus, so they too don’t have the right to say they want to go and invade other campuses. It is moral bankruptcy to be taking from others what you don’t expect people to ask you. It is morally not correct for UNILORIN to say it is not part of ASUU but it is enjoying the benefits of ASUU’s struggles. We wrote to the authorities we wanted to hold our meeting on their campus, since they also have ASUU there, but they said they could not guarantee our safety. When you see that kind of hostility, it’s an open declaration of war.
Part of the sanctions your union imposed on that school might affect the students. Did you put that into consideration?
One good thing you would notice is that even the students are beginning to talk. What has been happening there is pretence. They are suppressing and oppressing both the staff and students. They are discouraging unionism because union leaders are like watchdog; which is a risky, thankless job. All we do is to bring out the issues and engage the relevant authorities. If we don’t blow the whistles, many of our campuses would have become shadows of themselves. If we don’t tell Nigerians that we have an extended regime of rot and decay on our campuses up to the time that we went on strike action in 2013 and government was forced to set up a team to go and investigate, which revealed that what we said was true, who would do it? We established the benchmark for intervention, renovation, restoration and transformation on our campuses. You would see that with the students protest, University of Ilorin is trying to sit tight. In that institution today, if you get a letter of employment, they will tell you expressly that you cannot join ASUU national body. You must join their own local body. It’s like calling yourself a Nigerian when you don’t qualify to enjoy the rights and privileges of Nigerians as defined in the constitution of the country. The students too must find their voice and speak out, because they cannot be reared in isolation. University education takes you beyond the four walls of the university. So, if you discover that a university is trying to put you in a pigeonhole that will not benefit you outside that environment, you have the option of not going there at all. Same thing with lecturers there, some are already protesting that the system could not continue to treat them like that. That is what we are aiming at. We are moving towards a state where we must tell them that they are free to start any association that is not called ASUU, but you cannot call yourself ASUU and be attacking the body that should define your relationship.
But we have found that more students want to go to Ilorin because of the uninterrupted calendar. Such students would ask you the essence of unionism that would make them stay longer in school?
That is the contradiction of the Nigerian society. It is contradictory because it is when they come out that they will realise that they have not been given the real university education which is about universal knowledge.
Is it strike that makes university education to be complete?
That’s not the point I’m making. You can get a degree from Nigeria Defence Academy, Naval College or Police College, that has been conditioned, but it is when you leave and you want to work that you would realise that you have gone to a specialised college. But if you want to get a degree from a conventional university, which is about liberal education that has to do with the widening of horizon, you must be able to engage with every situation and interrogate your reality. It will not last, and you know why? There was a time when private universities were springing up from everywhere because of unbroken calendar. We (public universities) had three years uninterrupted and there were no strike actions. Some of them (private universities) are fizzling out now. We don’t want students to be at a disadvantage. If our union tightens the noose, it’s only a matter of time. Let me tell you that there are those who are already saying it that if you are a graduate of UNILORIN, you may not be able to take postgraduate programmes in some universities today. So, their students might have to do their first degree and other degrees and stay there. At the end of the day, how many can they absorb? That is the disadvantage of being reared in isolation. You would find that something would be missing in their lives. It’s because they have not had the full benefits of university education.
Their graduates seem to be doing well, are you implying that being on strike is one of the full benefits of university education?
That is what makes you tick. You must ask the question, why the strike? That is what is important. Lecturers don’t take delight in shutting the gates of their universities. It is situation that pushes them into that. Lecturers are like medical doctors; when you put a doctor in a clinic and he doesn’t have the tool to work with, you would turn that doctor into a killer. The same thing with lecturers; when lecturers don’t have access to current books, facilities, laboratory equipment, etc., the best you would get from them would be under-performance, and if lecturers are honest to themselves, they would say no to such. The same way, if you don’t give them the best level of motivation, you cannot get the best out of them, and that is why if you still want to attract the best and brightest, you would have to go the extra mile to retain them. It’s not just teaching for the sake of it, lecturers would operate better when they have the requisite facilities for research, which is actually the main purpose of universities. You teach from the products of your research and you have to renew that product from time to time.
Will that not be making excuses because some people feel we can still manage what we have to come up with ground-breaking research findings?
To come up with ground-breaking research findings, you must have cutting-edge research facilities. If you look at a laboratory in Nigeria and look at a laboratory for the same purpose in any of the western countries, you would be marvelled with the level we are. Whereas, university is supposed to be a universal market place of ideas. If I have access to current literature materials like my peer in Germany, then we can compete, but when you operate from the position of (inferiority) complex, because of lack of access to materials, you cannot give your best. Nigerian universities are poor. In fact, they are suffering from chronic poverty. Nigerian lecturers are among the least paid scholars in the world and you want them to compete with scholars in Europe and America. When you talk of shelter, go to our campuses and see the structures. Go to our laboratories and libraries, even the basic things like power supply, constant flow of water and tarred roads, adequate furniture are lacking in many of our campuses. We need to first talk about addressing the fundamentals, part of which was the NEEDS assessment of public universities, which the Federal Government carried out in 2012. We threw the challenge at them and they took it on. We applauded the initiative because it showed them the true picture. I led a team to some of the first generation universities. You would be surprised that some of the equipment they were using to train their students in engineering were purchased in the 1960s and 1970s. How can you expect the best from them? In one of the first generation universities that I visited, in Chemistry lab, they were using kerosene stove in place of Bunsen burner. They were fetching water with buckets to go and perform experiment in the lab, in a 21st Century university, and you want us to come up with ground-breaking research findings? Nigerian government has not always put research at the priority level it deserves. Until we do that, we cannot have the ground-breaking research we are talking about.
ASUU seems to be synonymous with strike actions. Is there no other way to press for your demands than going on strike?
Let me first correct an impression; ASUU is not synonymous with strike actions. It’s a campaign of calumny. ASUU does not go on strike until it becomes inevitable. We take strike action as the option of the last resort, which is also legally valid, according to ILO convention. A worker has a right to use strike action as an option in labour advocacy. Before a union goes on strike, certain steps would have been taken. With ASUU, we would present our demands, engage government and on many occasions, government would make promises. There are timelines. We are a union of intellectuals, and if there is anything academics are trained to do, they are trained to pursue their goals, achieve milestones in their fields and track their activities. At the expiration of the time we agreed on when we do a review, we remind and engage them again. What infuriates our members most of the time is that government would even ignore you. In other words, there are three stages of our own struggles; we notify, engage and declare. Even when we declare, we still give ample room for further negotiation. It’s the same thing that happens in the larger polity. Every politician signs a social contract with the constituents, but how many of them remember their manifesto, and why do they go scot free, because Nigerians don’t ask them. What we do in ASUU is that we ask them and that is what makes us unique. For example, we had a strike action between July and December 2013. Before that action, we had written close to 50 letters to the government, we had over 20 meetings and we had contacted everyone who could prevail on government. We told them universities were dying and since it had done the NEEDS assessment, we wanted the report implemented, they started to dilly-dally. At that point, we said no. If government was used to that, scholars should show the way to fix this society and that is what we are doing. Imagine if every critical sector in the Nigerian social system is doing what we do; holding leaders accountable, the Nigerian society would be a better place. We are not taking pride in strike actions; we are doing it as a matter of training because we cannot stomach such. So, strike is not our first option, it is the last, and before then, we could have gone into many stages. The warning strike last year was part of our tactics. People thought it would snowball into a long strike, but we said no. It was just to draw the attention of the public into what was going on.
Government would always tie its inability to meet ASUU demands to dwindling revenue. Don’t you believe them?
After General Yakubu Gowon, which government in Nigeria has ever told you that ‘we have more money than we can spend, and so, come and take?’ The registered language of Nigerian politicians is that there is no money. It is about asking and getting. If you don’t ask, you will not get. If you don’t hold them accountable, everything will remain a promise. The principle is that nobody will give you your right unless you ask for it. Nobody will give your dues to you unless you show them that you are aware and you are conscious. Education is a right in Nigeria, but they are treating it as if it’s a privilege.
During the last negotiation, ASUU and the Federal Government signed an agreement that government would release N200bn for universities and then N220bn annually for six years. Has the government been paying the money?
The 2013 Memorandum of Understanding states that government should intervene in public universities within a time frame of six years and that government should release N200bn in the first year; 2013. Then, from 2014 to 2018, government should be releasing N220bn annually. We had requested that the intervention should not stop in 2013, but they have not paid after the first one. What we are trying to guide government to achieve is to put our universities at a vantage point where they can compete with others in the world. If government had been faithful, things would have been better. But, we held a meeting at the level of the implementation monitoring committee for the NEEDS assessment fund, and the Ministry of Education, under the Minister (Adamu Adamu) has promised to demand for the payment of that of 2014. I would see that as part of the dividends of our warning strike action. We believe that if we had not gone on that warning strike, maybe members of the public would have even forgotten about the MoU. I believe when we go back to the negotiation table, all these issues would be refocused and put in proper perspective.
Is it deliberate that ASUU didn’t say anything between then and the time you had the warning strike?
It is not that ASUU didn’t say anything. That was why I said before you hear our shout, we would have taken many steps. We had written and we have been using that platform to ask for the continuous flow of funds. Everywhere in the world, they are looking for the best and brightest. So, if you want to retain our brightest, we must do everything to encourage them to stay
Recently, government proposed moving education from the concurrent list to the exclusive legislative list. What’s your stand on this?
It’s highly political. If you analyse it critically, you would find that many state governors are compounding the situation of education in this country. On one hand, state governments would hold tenaciously to the constitutional provision of concurrent provision on education. On the other hand, they would go to the Federal Government for assistance when they run into problem. Up to the primary school now, Federal Government is intervening; the UBEC law which covers primary and junior secondary school, not to talk of university. Education Trust Fund is what most of them draw from. I suspect why Federal Government is toying with that idea is because it is virtually present in education financing across all levels. So they are thinking they should just take it as their responsibility. But I can assure you that it’s not going to come easy, especially when people are already saying Federal Government should release some of the things it is holding on to. But at the same time, we also have to send words to our state governors; they should stop politicising education. There are many states proliferating universities now. A state governor that cannot fund one university is establishing three. What happens is that the state government would find it difficult to fund the university. I’ll give you the example of Ondo State. It used to have one but now it has three. In the three universities, they are owing their staff salary arrears. Governors have turned university education into constituency project. It’s like a project you bring back to your constituency when you have gone to serve. Same thing with the establishment of federal universities now; because somebody wanted a federal university in his town, he established several others. So, it is political.
Are you saying that creating more universities is not good? On one hand we say we don’t have enough universities, but on the other hand government is creating more, yet something seems to be wrong with it.
You can create more in a situation where the outcome of your feasibility study has laid out for you plans to run that university for the next five to 10 years. Many of these universities spring up without any projection or plan. Some of these new universities find it difficult to pay salary, and these are universities that are less than eight years, which means somebody did not do his home work. Even now, government is planning to establish six new universities. They would always run into the same problem because university education is a capital intensive project. In a situation where you have to duplicate principal officers with a retinue of allowances and perquisites, you are not going to escape problem of shortage of funds and deficit of facilities. The new universities are welcome because they help to expand spaces for students, but in some other climes, they would have just expanded facilities on existing campuses, and with that, you would not need registrars, VCs, DVCs, etc and new everything.
But the ‘new everything’ would provide employment for people…
They can still work on the existing campuses. Once you expand facilities, you would need more hands and the system would be close knit. There is no university in Nigeria that probably has more than 60,000 students. But we have universities elsewhere with close to about 250,000 students, which means some of our universities can still be doubled in capacity. And with effective management and facilities, they would cope effectively. So, with the expansion of facilities on our campuses, we can take more students without necessarily proliferating universities.
Aren’t you worried that private universities seem to be taking the shine off most public universities?
I don’t know what you mean, but if what you mean is that they have uninterrupted calendar and they proliferate first class, those are the hallmarks. What you call shine is a relative term. Let’s talk about the content and substance of the private universities. I’m not denying that there could be one or two that are exceptional, but on the whole, most of these private universities poach from public universities. Let me give you an instance, eight new private universities were approved about three months ago, if you read carefully, you would find that those eight new universities were put under some established public universities to mentor. You are starting a private university and you are putting them under the supervision of a public university. I don’t know where that is done. What does that tell you? They don’t have what it takes. If your organisation or faith-based group is well positioned, you can get an approval. If you investigate, you would find that two-thirds of those lecturers in the private universities are drawn from public universities. So, they are poaching. We just need a government that is clear-headed and is ready to fix our universities.
Apart from uninterrupted academic calendar, some parents are also apprehensive of public universities because of some randy lecturers who abuse students, which we rarely hear of in private universities…
(Cuts in)… I have just told you that majority of lecturers in the private universities are drawn from public universities. So, you ask yourself, are these cases as rampant as people say? I’m not saying we cannot have few bad eggs but it is not always the case. If you say it doesn’t happen in private universities, then, it depends on your level of investigation. This thing comes in some other ways. What we say about money changing hands and illicit relationships. They come up in some other forms, maybe in a more sophisticated form in private universities, because you would find that the average person in a private university is from a middle class home. So, all kinds of things can happen, sometimes even with the connivance of parents. I’m telling you that in private universities, the way some of these things would be happening would certainly be at a higher level of sophistication, because of the classes of people involved.
What is the way out of the mess in the education sector?
Stability is a function of the support system; policy support, financial support, human resource and external support and all forms of support. In the university system, the productivity in the system is a function of input – process – output. But you cannot treat that in isolation without looking at the base. The economic base is the foundation for all these levels. If you look at our document on negotiation and renegotiation with government, we have addressed all these issues systematically. We believe that if government is faithful in embracing and implementing our proposal, our university system would soon be transformed and positioned enough to compete globally.
Punch
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