The Federal Government and Academic Staff Union of Universities announced a truce last week after almost a year of a maddening display of state irresponsibility. Government acceded to some of the university lecturers’ demands and the strike has been temporarily halted with a caveat that if government fails to honour all the agreements, the strike may resume sometime in February 2021. This is a temporary relief. It is not the good news we expected to hear.
A good part of the reasons informing perennial strikes in the education sector is the penchant of the government to sign agreements it has no intention to implement. Thus, the political leaders reduce agreements in the education sector to promises made on the soap box to an undiscerning people and without any iota of intent to keep their side of the bargain. As soon as the ink on the paper runs dry, government will fail, refuse and neglect to implement its agreements. Another round of strikes kicks in. This is not the way forward for the sector.
Media reports indicate that the government had agreed to pay the N40bn Earned Academic Allowance, N30bn for the revitalisation of the education sector, and the arrears of salaries to the university teachers. The only outstanding issue is the disagreement over the payment platform. It had been earlier reported that the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) expressed surprise that ASUU will stay out of classrooms for so long and expressed the need for our elites to understand the challenges facing the country. Evidently, the major issue that led to this strike is the funding of tertiary institutions and government’s position that it cannot afford to meet the demands of the lecturers. It is imperative to contextualise these issues.
First, the fact that both sides agreed that N40bn was an “earned academic allowance” says it all. Why should government sit on earned allowances of a set of Nigerians who are so poorly paid while they train the future generation of Nigerians? Lecturers who take home peanuts are not candidates to be owed until they have been on strike for 10 months. If the government is getting insolvent, let it not just be a statement, it should reflect on the way we spend and manage available resources. We do not remember and make a song of paucity of resources when it comes to key sectors like education.
The same government that declares that it is bankrupt finds the billions for routine maintenance of buildings and electrical appliances in the presidential villa every year. It is the same government that votes N128bn every year as the entitlement of the legislature and which allows legislators after their official salaries to share not less than N10m every month – a sum of money which they know is illegal and illegitimate but they still authoritatively and shamelessly “steal” the same. It is still the same government where a N100bn is set aside every year for constituency votes and legislators nominate projects worth over a N100 million each which for the most part is either unimplemented, the sums mismanaged or are fancy projects of frivolity.
But when it comes to national priority, there will be no money to pay earned allowances. Most federal universities hardly get up to N1bn in capital votes every year. Libraries, laboratories, learning facilities and environments that are decrepit cannot be the proper training ground for the children of a country that seeks to compete to take its rightful place among the comity of nations. The folly of poorly educated and misguided politicians who dominate the governance scene makes them believe that their personal ego and comfort should take pre-eminence over resources needed to fund education which is the future of the country.
The presidential sermon for the elite to understand the challenges facing the country seems to be targeted at the very wrong set of the elites. That statement would have been apt as a soul-searching message for the President and his fellow politicians whose take from the public treasury is unparalleled.
What will N30bn do for the dilapidated Nigerian universities? This sum will not scratch the surface. If the Federal Government can come up with intervention funds in other sectors, why is education not listed as a recipient of such interventions? We have a scenario where the little resources spent in the education sector lacks value for money. We cannot continue to establish new federal and state-funded universities at a time we are unable to adequately fund existing ones. If the intent is to meet the capacity for increased student intake, instead of building brand new institutions, we can increase the carrying capacity of existing institutions and improve facilities for appropriate distance learning through the deployment of information and communications technology. Take the security sector for instance, we have the Nigerian Defence Academy in Kaduna as a degree-awarding institution as well as the War College; then an Army University, which is the first of its kind in Africa. Also, we have an Airforce University. Do we in good conscience need all these duplications if the intention is just to train security personnel?
With the way the education sector has been handled, governments across the federation led by the Federal Government are at war with citizens, especially the youth who have been specially penciled down for decimation. Allowing universities to be locked down for 10 months means that every student of a public university has lost one academic year. There is no magic that would overturn this fact except the government simply asks students to proceed to the next class without learning, examination and certification. When students in the final year cannot graduate, those in the third year cannot come to the final year, while the fact that first year students 10 months ago are still in their first year means new students cannot be admitted until those in the first year proceed to the second year.
To compound matters, vested interests have acted beyond imagination. The leadership of the students’ body has been turned into the usual Nigerian political theatre of the absurd where a man in his 40s now assumes the leadership of a purely youth body. The youths must organise to reclaim their space, and their future because the crop of leaders currently in charge of the country have absolutely no plan for them except the youths are their own children and relatives. To the silent majority of youths who have no god-fathers and god-mothers and whose relations have not found favour in the corridors of power or contributed to the economic adversity of the state through stealing large sums of money, your job is cut out. Your destiny is your hands.
For these youths, mobilise and strategise for your future; do not be a willing tool in the hands of the two leprous fingers that have dominated Nigerian politics since the return to civil rule in 1999. They are beyond redemption and have nothing new to offer. Our problem is that we allowed the wrong set of people to lead us and they should be prevented from continuing at the appropriate time.
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