IMPENDING RETURN OF HOSTILITIES AT THE IVORY TOWER

FG should learn to honour agreements, writes Bolaji Adebiyi

This weekend, university teachers under the auspices of the Academic Staff Union of Universities would hold a meeting to determine when to carry out their threat to down tools. The threat was issued a couple of weeks ago and when the federal government continued to play the Ostrich, the lecturers began sporadic warning strikes from last Friday. All things being equal, what they call a comprehensive and total strike may begin next week. It’s likely to be a long haul.

“[We] will utilise the work-free day to further mobilise and sensitise the public about the justification of the proposed action,” said Ajao Moyosore, a professor and chairman of the University of Ilorin branch of the union, in a statement announcing the start of the warning strike, explaining: “It is also to convince the federal government to be responsible, do the needful and avoid a situation whereby Nigerian universities will be closed down again.”

The subject matter is not new. It is about the serial failure of the federal government to honour a 13-year-old agreement signed with ASUU in 2009. Since it issued the strike threat many policy analysts and social critics have expressed concerns at the prospect of another nationwide lockdown of the nation’s public universities. And not a few have upbraided the university lecturers for lacking alternative tools for the enforcement of their demands. This they did without offering their own panacea for the lecturers’ action.

Interestingly, none of the critics has faulted the legitimacy of ASUU’s demands that is the fuel for the action. A little background would be useful. In 2009, the union after a spate of strikes entered into an agreement with the federal government on the funding of public universities. The agreement itself was not new. It was a renegotiation of a subsisting agreement that previous governments walked away from. Taking advantage of his close knowledge of the higher tertiary education system, President Umaru Yar’Adua gave a firm commitment to better funding as well as deal with the adjourning sundry issues of earned allowances and revitalisation of the universities.

Shortly after, however, Yar’Adua died and the task of enforcing the agreement fell on his successor, Goodluck Jonathan, also a former lecturer who committed to increased funding of education. Although he increased the funding to the sector and enlarged access to tertiary education by establishing 12 additional universities, the increment somehow did not substantially address the agreement reached in 2009 leading to another lengthy strike in 2012.

It took the direct intervention of Jonathan to end the 2012 strike as the lecturers decided that owing to serial reneging on agreements by the federal government, the only official that they would accept as the guarantor of the impending Memorandum of Agreement was the president. Even with the imprimatur of the president, the MoA was substantially unimplemented till he left office in 2015.

If two former lecturers who found themselves at the helm of affairs had difficulties implementing MoUs and MoAs, it should have been fairly obvious to the lecturers that a president who had to engage eight senior advocates of Nigeria to prove that he had a secondary school certificate would not care a hoot about their concerns for better infrastructure for higher education. It would take two years for ASUU to realise this. Frustrated by the indifference of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to the 2012 MoA another strike would force another MoA in 2017. Yet there would have to be another massive strike in the year of COVID-19 for another MoA in 2020.

Despite the nine-month strike that birthed the 2020 MoA, it would take another three-week ultimatum the following year to get the federal government to partially implement the agreement. The payment of N22.1bn earned allowances and the release of N30bn revitalisation fund to the universities aborted that strike.

As it was the way of the federal government, once the lecturers accepted palliatives and returned to work, officials who were saddled with the responsibility to follow up on the implementation of the remainder of the agreement would go to sleep, precipitating another round of disputes. When this became the situation earlier this year ASUU warned about the possibility of a return to hostility.

With the imminent resumption of hostility, leaders of the Nigeria Inter-religious Council, Muhammad Abubakar III, the Sultan of Sokoto, and Samson Ayokunle, the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, visited Buhari over the looming strike. As usual, the president committed to fulfilling the promises made to the union. Yet his government remained in substantial breach of an agreement it signed two years ago.

This is the background to the impending hostility that threatens to once again disrupt academic activities in the ivory tower. Yet some social activists and public policy commentators have yielded their space to the critique of the lecturers’ strike option. What more should the lecturers do to get the federal government to honour an agreement it freely entered into?

As much as the sentiments of parents and students, who would be adversely affected by the strike should be appreciated, the solution, however, does not lie in harassing ASUU to do away with the strike as the effective strategy to compel compliance with the agreement. The more effective resolution is for all stakeholders to persuade the federal government to make the implementation of agreements a strict policy of the state.

When it is recalled that the federal government has serially breached agreements freely entered into with many other public interest groups, including medical and labour organisations, it would not be difficult to come to the conclusion that what is being dealt with here is the habitual inclination of policymakers to be wayward and irresponsible. The solution to this is not tolerating but getting rid of its addiction to the bad habit of flouting agreements.

Those expressing concerns at the foreseeable adverse impact of the impending strike, therefore, need not join in the orchestrated campaign demonising ASUU. Rather, they should focus on the root of the problem, which is the federal government’s serial failure to take seriously the running and funding of public tertiary institutions. And when it enters into an agreement in this regard, it should dutifully implement it.

Adebiyi, the managing editor of THISDAY Newspapers, writes from bolaji.adebiyi@thisdaylive.com