ASUU AND THE ENDLESS STRIKES
Funding university education has become a fundamental issue. All the stakeholders must sit down and address it
For the umpteenth time, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) last Monday declared a one-month strike to press home its demands. While we hope this crisis is resolved quickly, we cannot shy away from the fact that under-funding the education sector, over the years, has had collateral damaging effects on the country. But dealing with the challenge requires more than seasonal strikes by the lecturers while the federal government also needs to understand the primacy of constant dialogue, especially given the current realities.
It is unfortunate that the government and ASUU had for years been locked in running battles over the implementation of agreements on the funding of the country’s public universities. The consequences have been lengthy industrial actions by the lecturers, with the attendant debilitating effects on educational development in Nigeria. Our country is poorer for it in terms of the quality of human resources turned out. Our graduates are yielding to diminishing returns as they are ill-prepared and ill-equipped for the society and the world at large. The universities, particularly the public ones, have continued to slide down the ladder of academic rankings, even among their peers in Africa.
Public disenchantment with ASUU is understandably high because of its bullheaded approach, perceived insensitivity to the academic progress of students and the frustration of parents and guardians. However, the reality is that government is reneging on agreements it signed. If those agreements are unenforceable in the light of new realities, government and ASUU need to come together and review them and agree on new, more realistic terms. But ASUU must also understand that it has lost significant respect and goodwill in the eyes of stakeholders and the public.
There is no doubt that the nation’s public universities are facing hard financial times. This is a corollary of government’s meagre attention to education, a fact attested to by its poor annual budgetary allocation to the sector. Despite the increasing challenges in the sector, the share for education in the federal government 2021 budget, for instance, was a miserly N743bn, out of N13 trillion. Reports on education from the 36 states of the federation are no better. And there is every likelihood that the situation will persist, or even get worse at an age when knowledge is the most important factor of production. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) recognises this in recommending 26 per cent of annual budgets for developing nations.
With low budgetary allocation to education, it is little wonder why universities are in financial straits with the attendant decay of their infrastructure as well as lowering of standards of teaching and learning. Thus, while we support the clamour for increased funding, we nonetheless think that given the dwindling resources of government, the tertiary institutions need to think out of the box and find more creative solutions to the problem. Elsewhere, universities have explored several ways of raising money to fund their operations. In this regard, ours need not reinvent the wheel. The common avenues include donations, endowments, scholarships and bursaries, professional chairs, gifts, grants, and consultancy services, and more. We note that many of our universities have embarked on these, but their performance needs to be stepped up. More importantly, it has become increasingly inevitable for students to pay reasonable fees to acquire good education. The best universities are those that can fund research and attract the best hands.
The lingering crisis between ASUU and the federal government has gone on for too long. There is an urgent need for a lasting solution in the interest of public tertiary education in Nigeria.
