President of the Academic Staff Union
of Universities (ASUU) explains his
views and thoughts regarding the
ongoing industrial action by ASUU.
Excerpts:BENIN ASUU
has gone back to the
trenches with the
Federal Government. Why are you on
strike?
The short answer is this: Government
believes that Nigeria should continue to
be not just a second rate country but a
third rate country because the quality of
development, the kind of society you
have depend on the kind of education
that the people have and the quality of
education that exists in the country. In
2009, ASUU reached an agreement with
government on how to rehabilitate and
revitalize the universities.
That agreement was a product of three
years of negotiation, from 2006 to 2009,
and government agreed that it will
provide funding for universities to bring
them to a level that we can begin to
produce graduates that will be
recognized worldwide, and our
universities can also be classified and
rated among the best in the world.
People keep talking about universities
rating, but no Nigerian university
features among the first 1,000 in the
world because of the issue of lack of
facilities. So, from 2009 to 2012, ASUU
waited for the Federal Government to
implement that agreement and what
government did was to believe and
present the argument that what ASUU
was looking for was money, and so, they
implemented part of the salary
component; they did not implement the
agreement on funding. As academics, if
you pay us N10million a month and we
do not have the tools to work with, that
money is worthless because we want to
be able to conduct research, teach
students the latest that is available in
the world of knowledge.
Those tools were not available and are
still not available. So, in 2011, precisely
in December, ASUU went on strike to
force government to implement the
funding part of that agreement. What did
the government do? They apprehended
the strike in January 2012 and the
Secretary to the Federal Government
invited the leadership of ASUU for a
meeting in his office. We went there,
discussed with them on the basis of
which on 24 January, 2012, we signed a
Memorandum of Understanding with the
government under the title, "MEETING
OF THE SECRETARY OF THE
GOVERNEMNT OF THE FEDERATION
WITH THE ACADEMIC STAFF UNION OF
UNIVERSITIES "and signed by Prof.
Nicholas A. Damachi, Permanent
Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education
on behalf of the Federal Government.
The most important of the items signed
was 3.0, that is, "FUNDING
REQUIREMENTS FOR UNIVERSITIES". And
this is what the Federal Government said
it would do: "Government reaffirms its
commitment to the revitalization of
Nigerian universities through budgetary
and non- budgetary sources of funds;
government will immediately stimulate
the process with the sum of N100billion
and will beef it up to a yearly sum of
N400billion in the next three years".
As we speak now, not a Kobo, not an
iota of intervention has taken place in
the universities. Yet, government itself,
in the various studies it has done, said it
recognizes the pathetic state of the
universities. In order to implement this
agreement, government first gave a
reason saying, 'oh, for us to apply the
funds, let us first of all identify the areas
of priorities to which the funds will be
applied'. Government also said, 'we are
not going to give the money to the
universities, what we are going to do is
to identify the projects, we will them call
on government agencies such as the
CBN, PTDF, ETF to deliver the projects to
the universities that would then be
estimated'.
So the money is not coming to the
universities, government will do the
costing and get people to come and do
all those things such as the rehabilitation
of the laboratories, classrooms and a
variety of other things.
Now what should be those things:
Government set up a committee called
the NEEDS ASSESSMENT COMMITTEE and
it went round the universities and what
it found was shocking. First, it found that
the students - teachers ratio was 1-400
on the average instead of being 1-40. It
found out that the classrooms were
grossly inadequate and could
accommodate only about 30 percent of
the number of students that needed to
enter those classrooms; they went round
and found students standing in their
lecture theatres with other students
writing on their backs; they found
lectures going on under trees in some of
the universities; they went to
laboratories where they found people
using kerosene stoves instead of Bunsen
burners to conduct experiments; they
found specimens being kept in pure
water bottles instead of the appropriate
places where such specimens should be
kept.
They found chemistry labs without
water; they found people doing
examinations called theory of practicals
and not the practicals and you will
imagine what the practical ought to be.
And when the report was eventually
presented to President Goodluck
Jonathan at the Federal Executive
Council, we understand that Jonathan
said that he was embarrassed and did
not know that things were all that bad.
No intervention It was on that basis that
they said that this money should be
spent.
As we speak, the money has not been
provided, no intervention has taken
place and the academics are tired. We
negotiated for three years, 2006-2009,
we went on strike in December, 2011
and government apprehended that
strike; we signed an MoU in January
2012, between then and now, nothing
happened. That is why we are on strike.
We are saying, 'look, rehabilitate the
universities'. As a reporter, you can go
round our classrooms and you will see
what our classrooms are like.
In this era, it is the quality of knowledge
that you acquire that will determine the
position you occupy in any part of the
world. We did this and government did
not do anything. A professor came from
Bayelsa State recently to the University
of Benin, looking for journals. We went
to the library because we have an e-
library and he could not do anything
there because there was no light for two
days in the library. If you go round here
now, lecturers have generators in their
offices to be able to work, every
department has two or three generators
to be able to do their work.
Is that what a university should be like?
If you go to the students' hostels, they
in a sorry state, they live 12 in a room;
they are like piggery; they now have
what they called short puts, they excrete
in polythene bags and throw them
through the windows into the fields
because there are no toilets. If you
come into this building (faculty building),
there are no toilets and, if walk round,
you will find faeces sometimes in the
classrooms because students have no
place to use.
And it is like that in all other universities.
Enough is enough Academic staff has said
enough is enough, we cannot continue to
work under these conditions, especially
when government gave commitment in
2012 that this matter would be
addressed but up till now nothing had
happened. We had several meetings
between 2012 and now and they will say
'next week this one will happen; in two
weeks time that one will happen, give us
one month, this one will happen',
nothing has happened.
And when students leave here, they
apply for progammes in the United
Kingdom, United States and other
countries for their master degrees, PhD
or other postgraduate programmes and
they are told that they cannot be
admitted because their degrees are
suspect. Shell here in Nigeria spent
millions of dollars re-training graduates,
people who made First Class and, when
they test them, they found out that they
have problems. How can you take an
engineer who has not conducted an
experiment, all he did is the theory of
practical? He does not know how the
equipment works? If you want a properly
educated student population, you have
to provide the facilities.
That is why ASUU is on strike. What
government has done in the past is to
say that we are on strike because of
money, now they don't have that
excuse. It is true that part of the
agreement we have with the
government also talked about academic
allowances, but academics are saying
that we are not interested in that; we
are saying that government should
rehabilitate facilities and once they are
rehabilitated and they are up to
standard, we will come back to work.
If you go to our classrooms, we use chalk
boards, the situation of the 1960s but
people are using multi-media facilities,
mark boards where you can download
information. That is not available here
and government is not interested in
that. No country developed without a
sound educational system and the
foundation is not the primary school
incidentally, it is at the university level
because it is the university that trains
other levels.
For instance, if you want to teach in
primary school, you need people who
attended the Colleges of Education; if
you want to be teacher at the Colleges of
Education, you must have a degree from
the university; so, the university
provides the manpower for other levels
of education and that is why you must
concentrate efforts on the university
education. If you don't do that, other
levels of education will suffer and that is
what has been happening in Nigeria.
Against this backdrop, of your complaints
more private universities are being
approved by government. Will this help
to solve the problem?
Even the National Universities
Commission (NUC), which is licensing
private universities, has now drawn
attention to the crisis of quality in many
of these private universities. You know
what government does: We have
refineries in Port-Harcourt and Warri; I
was just talking with some people
recently and they said, oh, Port-Harcourt
refinery is in a state where it can refine
whatever amount of crude oil sent to it;
its plants are all now working,' but, as at
today, government has not send crude
oil to it and they cannot process
anything because they want to import.
Nigeria is the only OPEC member
country that sells crude oil to its
refineries at the international price?
Does that work? It doesn't work, but
they use international price to sell crude
oil to refineries, to make it impossible
for the refineries to process crude and
then they go to Spain and other
countries to import refined products. So,
what is happening is that government
wants to kill the public universities just
as it has killed its own enterprises so
that it can invite people to come and buy
over the public universities?
Unfortunately, it will not work because
universities are not like enterprises.
In the UK, most of the universities there
are public owned; in the US, most of the
universities are state owned; the one
you hear about, HARVARD, is a private
one, but most of the universities in the
world are owned by government
because education is a social service; the
revenue and tax collected by
government comes from the people, the
commonwealth, that is the fund that is
used in funding education.
And what the government is doing is to
under-fund public universities, give them
a bad name and provide an excuse to
license private universities many of
which borrow lecturers from public
sector universities, many of which do not
have the equipment which public
universities ought to have. And many of
the private universities focus on the
social sciences, law and arts; they do not
go into engineering, medicine or sciences
because you need a lot of capital outlay,
you need to spend a lot of money
building laboratories.
I went to Oxford University last year and
they showed me a laboratory that was
built last year, a huge building where
people from different parts of the world
went there to conduct experiments. It
cost billions of pounds and no private
sector person will like to invest such
money because the returns on
investment cannot be recouped. So,
private sector universities are gimmicks
by government to say that they are
better than the public sector
universities, but then, how many people
are there how much fees do they pay
and how many people in Nigeria can pay
the sum of N350,000 and above paid in
private universities?
Those universities are not meant for the
children of ordinary Nigerians and
development has to be about the
ordinary people, it cannot be about the
rich. So, there is no way, not in this
century, not the next or in a life time
that private universities will become
more important than public universities.
Prof. Iyayi So what is The Way Forward?
The way forward is that the ruling elite in
Nigeria must be sure of what they want.
We have an example; many years ago,
Ghanaians were here; they flooded our
universities; when the Ghanaians rulers
saw what was happening, they took a
step back and said, lets us change
direction'. They closed down the
universities for three years or so,
rehabilitated all the facilities in the
universities and brought the students
and the lecturers back. Now, the CBN
Governor Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi
disclosed that Nigerians spent about
N62billion paying school fees for 75,000
Nigerian students in Ghanaian
universities. Our people are in South
Africa paying fees there, but who are
those going there; they are the children
of the rich.
Ghanaians are in Ghana universities but
they are not paying what Nigerians are
paying there. So, the way forward is that
government makes up its mind that
Nigerians must have a place under the
sun and that place under the sun can
only be guaranteed with a sound
university system. It must make up its
mind; is it to close down the university
system for three years or so, do what
should be done and then invite students
and lecturers back? For instance, in the
University of Benin, you don't have a
foreign student and if you go to other
universities in Nigeria, I don't think
there are foreign students.
When I came to the University of Benin,
I was interviewed by Prof. Smith, a
Briton who was the Dean at the time
and many people from different parts of
the world were here as teachers and
students. But, right now, they are not in
Nigeria; instead, Nigerians are
everywhere. That shows that the system
has collapsed. When we went to the
National Assembly, Sen. Uche
Chukwumerije and his colleagues told us
that they were on their knees begging us
to recall the students because they are
on the streets posing dangers and
problems, and we said, it is better for
them to be on the streets than on the
campus of universities learning
ignorance.
You cannot teach ignorance to people or
half knowledge to the people because
they will be more dangerous to the
society. 'Not asking for money for
ourselves' If you have a doctor that is
not well trained, and you say 'go and
remove an appendix', and he goes to
remove your heart because he doesn't
know where the appendix is; it is better
not to have doctors than the one who
will go and remove your heart than the
appendix.
That is what the Nigerian government
wants us to do and the academics in
universities are saying no, for once, let
us do the right thing; we are prepared to
stay at home for between three and five
years until these problems are resolved.
We are not asking for money, facilities
must be provided to make the
universities truly what they ought to be.
In terms of how to solve the problems in
the universities, when the financial crisis
broke out in 2007 and banks declared
that they were in trouble, government
brought out N3trillion to bail out the
banks.
First, they gave the banks N239billion,
another N620billion and N1.725trillion
making a total of N3trillion. Then the
aviation sector said that it was in
distress, they gave the sector,
N500billion and they gave even
NOLLYWOOD billions of Naira. These
sectors are important, but they are not
as important as the fundamental which is
the education sector.
If you can give the banks N3trillion and
all the universities are asking for is about
N1.5trillion, the same way in which they
sourced the money which they gave to
the banks which they are now saying
that they should not pay back, they
should be able to do more for education.
So, nobody should come to us and say
that government has no money.
If they can bail the banks with N3trillion,
banks owned by the private sector, they
cannot tell us they cannot fund the
education sector because the World Bank
told them that Africans do not need
higher education, that what Africans
need is middle-level technical education;
that is what the Okonjo-Iwealas and
Goodluck Jonathan are for. So, let them
do what they did in the case of the
banks to education and if they do that,
the problems will be solved.
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