By Andrew A. Erakhrumen, PhD
Publications detailing personal opinions and official positions concerning industrial disputes in Nigerian public universities abound. These articles, most times, provoke reactions especially when outright lies are deliberately propagated by malicious elements. Honestly, whenever this writer have the opportunity of discussing authors that calculatingly propagate lies through their writings, the argument of yours sincerely has always been that they need assistance and the way to do this is to correct them (if they see it as a correction) by providing the correct account, in black and white, for posterity. This is because if these lies are not countered early they may be accepted as the truth by unsuspecting readers. This is an honourable task that must be carried out by writers but the question at this juncture is: Do Nigerians appreciate these efforts aimed at their conscientious enlightenment? Many good people get depressed, and justifiably so, when the sordid and worsening condition of our public universities is critically assessed while those that are to be part of the advocacy to rescue these public institutions display nonchalant attitude. It is more disheartening that efforts of these men and women of good intention concerning public universities appear not to be appreciated.
These men and women have used means available to them to call the attention of stakeholders to the progressively depreciating state of our public universities but we still appear to be moving in cycles because those that are to listen and act are not, some listen but pay lip service, some combine their self centred nature with escapism in addressing this issue while some believe that the revamping of these universities will be made realisable by a supernatural force in the spiritual realm. If we continue this way, how then will those disinterested “partners in progress” do the needful and the rightful? Permit the use of quotations from Niyi Osundare’s preface to his Dialogue with my country, in communicating these thoughts: “…….the book has generated a lot of responses, with a number of commentators wondering if a dialogue with a country like Nigeria is not a dialogue with the deaf”. We dare say that this is currently the true situation in our country, and can be discouraging to people of good intention! Nevertheless, the professor of English has these encouraging words: “Nigeria is not deaf, only hard of hearing. She is mute, but seemingly dumb from chronic disarticulation. She does sometimes listen, and she is not incapable of talking back”.
The implication of these Osundare’s encouraging words, in the context of this intervention, is that we should not be frustrated, even if we have cause to, by the actions/inactions of agents of darkness, within and out of this country, whose eternally incurable interest is not only to commodify education but also, as a result of this, plunge us into perpetual darkness and ignorance. These devious aims, collectively, is the kernel of the causes of the almost constant industrial disputes between Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the different levels of government in Nigeria. What is/are the issue(s) leading to these industrial disputes? It is sincerely believed that we all know! Nevertheless, for those who truly do not know and/or those who have been confused with half-truth and false propaganda, it may be necessary to quickly dash into history for some clarifications. Firstly, ASUU was established in 1978 as a successor to the Nigerian Association of University Teachers that was formed in 1965. This successor union covers academic staff in all of the federal and state universities in Nigeria. It is, therefore, important to note here that the various industrial crises (past and current) involving ASUU in our universities have their roots in its history.
However, permission is sought from the reader to limit this historical perspective of these ASUU struggles, as we call them, to the early 1990s. During this period, that coincided with the heyday of the military juntas, governments’ intransigence concerning their indirect insistence on justifying and sustaining the poor and deteriorating condition of universities, staff and students in the country led to strike actions by ASUU and its members. These actions were to compel government to take responsibility for these (their) universities. Record has it that the union organised strikes for demands, amongst which is the university autonomy. Of course, those struggles were not plain sailing as the different (were they actually different?) governments in power – whose extension are the perfectly cloned versions we have been having until today in civilian garb – attacked the union through several means (e.g. proscribing/banning of ASUU, disrupting ASUU meetings/congresses using state/paid agents, arrests and incarceration of union leaders, invading university campuses by security agents, ordering union members to vacate their accommodation on campus, illegal seizure of ASUU’s properties, stoppage/withholding of salary, verbal and written intimidation, forcing lecturers to sign registers indicating their opting out of strikes, wrongful dismissal, among others.
Eventually, after this turbulent epoch, an agreement was reached in September, 1992 between ASUU and Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) that met several of the union’s demands including the right of university workers to collective bargaining. Since then and arising from this 1992 ASUU/FGN agreement, several other suspended strikes were resumed that were aimed at compelling government to honour this and other agreements freely entered into with the union. Instead of honouring agreements towards finding solutions to the identified challenges in our public universities, the governments decided, in their wisdom, to adopt authoritarian measures as usual. For instance, between 1992 and 1998, in order to violate the agreement with ASUU and also to centrally control what happens in universities, government appointed sole administrators for some Nigerian universities such as a retired army General for Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria! Other public universities that experienced such anomaly in varying proportions were University of Nigeria, Nsukka, University of Maiduguri, Maiduguri, Edo State University (now Ambrose Alli University), Ekpoma, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, among others.
The said sole administrators were appointed and backed by military decrees that conferred on them almost unlimited powers with some of them combining the roles of Senate and Council with that of the Vice Chancellor! This incongruity became another reason for the disagreements between ASUU and governments. Fast forward to the 21st century, these ASUU struggles got to another crescendo in 2009 and after three months of strike, ASUU and other staff unions signed an agreement with the government in October of that year. In the characteristic manner of the government, most of the vital components of this agreement were implemented in the breach, thus, leading to resumption of a suspended strike that culminated in a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between ASUU and FGN in December, 2013. This was the year (on November, 12) that our Comrade Festus Iyayi lost his life in a ghastly motor accident reportedly caused by a reckless convoy of the then Kogi State governor while on his (Iyayi) way to Kano State to attend the National Executive Council meeting of ASUU concerning the said 2013 national strike. As usual, most (if not all) items in this 2013 MoU were again unfortunately jettisoned by Nigerian government and this eventually led to another industrial action which gave rise to a memorandum of Action (MoA) in September, 2017.
It is noteworthy that because of government’s lackadaisical approach towards implementation of these MoUs/MoAs, there was another resumption of a suspended strike in November, 2018 which was conditionally suspended again by ASUU on 7th February, 2019 after signing another MoU with FGN. To a discerning mind, an annoyingly consistent unnecessary cycle, mostly initiated by government, will be noticed in this account of the different strike actions highlighted above. Let us summarily look at this cycle: ASUU raise issues concerning universities THEN government and its agents disagree with the union THEN seemingly “predetermined failed” discussions/negotiations take place (mostly after declaration of industrial disputes) THEN suspended strike action is resumed by the union THEN government resort to propaganda and a strong-arm method THEN government’s strategies fail THEN renegotiations resume THEN agreements are reached by the parties THEN the strike is conditionally suspended by the union THEN after some time government repudiates the agreement it freely entered into THEN same issues are raised by ASUU again THEN ……., and another cycle is activated as if there was never preceding similar cycles.
Based on experience over the years and what has been documented concerning industrial disputes, particularly between ASUU and governments, in Nigerian universities, there are questions some of us have been pondering on, such as: Is it true that the ONLY language understandable by government when there is industrial dispute is strike? Why do government still adopt the same failed and perennially failing tactics in addressing industrial disputes in our universities? Are there bureaucrats in government whose interest is that strikes be activated for their selfish interest? Are we actually ready to move with the world with the way our universities and their human capacity are treated? Are we, as a people, not playing out the script written by the imperialists and their foreign and local agents who believe that we cannot manage (public) universities and so we do not need them? These may be taken as rhetorical questions, but deep answers to them may help.
Expectedly, in line with the cycle described earlier, the 2019 MoU was also treated the same way the earlier ones were treated but with an ingenious introduction of a diversionary tactic, this time around, in the guise of Integrated Payroll Personnel Information System (IPPIS). The government and its bureaucrats, thinking Nigerian academics are dim-witted, decided to distract ASUU and its members from the main issue at stake, i.e. sincere implementation, by the government, of their part of the various agreements reached with ASUU. The government claimed that in order to checkmate payroll fraud, university workers must enrol on IPPIS payment platform designed by agents of imperialism. This is the same IPPIS that was rejected in the past by ASUU with informed arguments. They claimed that this “almighty” IPPIS (with its observed inherent and other newly introduced weaknesses) has helped them in federal ministries to discover ghost workers (they say about 7000) saving more than 273 billion Naira between 2017 and 2018 alone! We need to know what action(s) the government took against the perpetrators of this crime. Let us not discuss the absurdity of these claims as this our intervention will be limited to why ASUU kicked against IPPIS, a payment platform which government has decided to ram down university workers’ throat.
It is important to reiterate, without claiming to be ASUU’s mouthpiece, that the union considers this IPPIS matter as a non-issue and distraction, so it is the least of our headache, if it ever was. However, the government and its propaganda machine have decided, as usual, to use ASUU members’ collective resistance to this IPPIS payment platform as a basis for trying to blackmail, hoodwink and coerce them into submission. This is the reason why you hear government and its agents shouting that ASUU is resisting IPPIS because it is harbouring corruption. To give a specific example in this regard, the Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF) was purportedly quoted to have described ASUU’s opposition to IPPIS as “an open endorsement of corruption”. Interestingly, a former Auditor-General of the Federation, when giving a presentation on the same IPPIS, was also purportedly quoted to have said that “IPPIS has become a platform for perfecting corruption.” Can you imagine the claim against ASUU by government and its agents like the AGF, when we know where Nigerians will first point to if asked of the residential address of corruption in the country? Apart from IPPIS not having legal backing from the National Assembly and the fact that in its present form, cannot take care of the peculiarities of the university system, it has also been well articulated by ASUU that IPPIS ab initio contravenes the Principle of University Autonomy as enshrined in section 2AA of the Universities Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment) Act 2003.
The union has ceaselessly asked the government to give one example, just one example, anywhere in the world, where IPPIS or similar centralised payment platform is used in managing payroll system of university staff. Up till now, the government has not been able to provide one example! Let us go back to where we were before we engaged ourselves with the distraction known as IPPIS. The FGN, as usual, has decided to turn its back on the 2019 MoU. This has not deviated from the descriptions in a comment by our current ASUU President, where he states that “ASUU’s advocacy on the need to stem the continued slide into rot and decay in public universities since the 1980s has fallen on deaf ears. Our experience, as a trade union, shows that successive governments in Nigeria always entered into negotiated agreements only to placate those pleading the cause – be it education, health, transportation, employment or any other issue of meaningful living.” After much entreaties to FGN to honour the collectively reached agreements, and the failure to do this, their preferred language understood by workers was again spoken to them by ASUU on the 9th of March, 2020 by declaring a two-week warning strike that eventually snowballed into the resumption of a suspended total, comprehensive and indefinite strike at the end of the two-week warning strike.
Coincidentally, the National Universities Commission ordered universities across the country to close for a month, due to the outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19), beginning from the 23rd of March, 2020 (the same day ASUU’s resumed suspended strike began). Resuming a suspended strike during a period when the universities are officially closed and students sent home is to call the attention of stakeholders to the plight of the union concerning the state of the universities and show that students are never the target of ASUU strike actions as against the official watery government propaganda during past strikes. Also, this is a period that appears perfect for discussion between ASUU and government and it is ASUU’s expectation that the issues leading to the current strike action will be resolved before the students return to our campuses. Fortunately, ASUU is not against academics engaging in research to fight against the ravaging COVID-19 pandemic. Although, we all (including government) know that our universities are not presently equipped to carry out novel research that can produce results at that level. Is this not an irony? We need to clarify this statement by informing the reader that our public universities have many competent scholars but their case can be likened to a good seamstress or tailor without a sewing machine!
How to provide working tools (if we are allowed to be that simplistic), expected from government, to these researchers in public university, has been one of the major struggles of ASUU for decades. For the avoidance of doubt the issues between ASUU and FGN, as at today in 2020, according to ASUU President, after the union has reviewed the level of implementation of the 2009 agreement, has to do with the followings: “The skeletal implementation and actual non-implementation of provisions of the 2009 agreement which include funding, conditions of service, university autonomy and academic freedom”. This gave rise to series of earlier actions by ASUU to get the government to fully implement the agreement. He further states that “the point must be made that the various memoranda all have their roots in the 2009 government/ASUU agreement which was due for renegotiation way back in 2012. [In fact], ASUU agreed to the MoUs and MoAs only as stopgap measures to track issues in the four key aspects of the 2009 agreement.’’ The MoUs and MoAs being referred to by ASUU President are those we talked about earlier in this article.
In other words, the current strike is to compel the Federal Government of Nigeria to honour the agreements, it freely reached with the union. The content of these agreements, if well implemented as agreed on paper, are obviously pivotal to the advancement of Nigerian universities. For the sake of emphasis, comprehensiveness and clarity, these include the 2009 FGN-ASUU Agreement, the 2012 and 2013 MoU, and the 2017 and 2019 MoA. Specifically, ASUU wants government to take care of funding of the revitalisation of public universities, payment of outstanding balance of arrears of earned academic allowances (EAA), and salary shortfall at the Federal University of Technology, Akure. Other issues include under-funding and proliferation of state universities, payment of EAA to loyal ASUU members in the University of Ilorin, visitation panels to federal universities, renegotiation of the 2009 Agreement and the IPPIS that was brought up as a diversionary strategy.
The information above is contrary to what government and its bureaucrats, through their canard, want the public to believe. The falsehood is that the withheld salaries of lecturers for the third month running since February is the main reason why the suspended ASUU strike has been resumed. Let us even assume that such an incongruous submission is correct, please, look at it critically, lecturers’ salaries are being withheld for three months now, even after providing services to their employer! What kind of government will withhold the salaries of its workers during a virulent pandemic like COVID-19 that have led to lockdown and compulsory stay-at-home in many countries including Nigeria? Yes, including Nigeria where her government has declared war against its lecturers in federal universities using hunger as weapon of war! This is happening when reports have it that citizens of many countries, even here in Africa, are being availed of cash and other palliatives running into thousands of US dollars. Not in our dear country! Government will not use this kind of initiative as an example to be imitated for transparent implementation here but will be quick to explain that Nigerians are under taxed so value added tax has to be increased from 5–7.5%.
This government’s industrial dispute resolution strategy belonging to the stone-age era that applies crude and barbaric tactics of withholding salaries of university lecturers (or any worker at all) is wicked and callous and an ugly reminder of our despotic past governments not wished for again. According to President of ASUU in an interview with one of the newspapers, he states that: “At a time you’re talking of palliatives, you are denying thousands of families their sources of livelihood and you think you’re solving a problem, you’ve declared war against your intellectuals. So, it’s like the government of the day has declared war against ASUU and members. Nobody is talking of the welfare of these families that have been thrown into disarray in the face of lockdown. People are helpless and can’t go anywhere, and you’re using hunger as a weapon of war against them, it is genocide”. Owing to this wickedness and cruelty by a supposedly elected civilian government, it is the opinion of this writer that they do not deserve respect from Nigerian academics. Well, we should not be surprised as we have a government that do not even obey their own laws!
At the advent of the current fourth republican government of Nigeria in May, 1999 it was enthusiastically expected that tyrannical conduct will be consigned to the garbage bin of history within a short time. However, the reality is that our government, being an extension of the past, as said earlier, with the counsel of their hanger-on (military apologists) want to re-enact that part of our dreadful past but they must and will be resisted. Why will they not want to trample on academics? They know that university scholars are paid slave wages that ASUU has described as “my take home pay that cannot take me home”. Poor salary is one of the veritable tools for workers impoverishment that the government is struggling to perpetuate in order to muzzle viable objective criticism most especially from the intelligentsia community. This writer has the inkling that most of these people that are referred to as political elite in this country (some are referred to as Excellency, Honourable, etc.) do not care if the country remains underdeveloped. Nonetheless, let us remind those that care (if they know before now) that no geographical entity can develop above the level of its knowledge industry particularly where universal knowledge is generated and disseminated.
Where do we go from here? Simply put, the government should collaborate with ASUU in finding solution to identified challenges in our universities. It is on record that ASUU do not identify challenges without proffering possible solutions. Examples are Education Tax Fund now known as Tertiary Education Trust Fund (a successful brainchild of ASUU that has been overstretched now), and NEEDS Assessment Intervention Fund that also resulted from ASUU struggles. The problem has been that people with inferiority complex who find their way into government including the bureaucrats like them in the core civil service and corridors of power perceive academics, (those that are worth their salt), as being arrogant and pushy and so they are irritants that must be dealt with. There is bad news for these groups of people! The news (that is if they are not already aware of it) is that they cannot – in the long run – succeed in this their venture, since ASUU has a pact with the Nigerian people, to protect their legitimate interest against tyranny from any quarter, even as the union’s efforts have encountered thanklessness from some Nigerians on several occasions.
Furthermore and similar to above suggestion, it is time our governments came down off their high horse and purge themselves of that “omnipotent” mentality and seek for support and partnership from our local universities and intelligentsia community towards the quest for national development. Leakages (already identified and yet to be identified) through which our common patrimony are being drained need to be blocked, proceed from which should be invested in our universities. This is one of the ways those countries, they run to for treatment when they have headache, went about it. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only exposed our governments’ ineptitude concerning their poor management of, and investment in, our health sector but has also made the ruling class know that such occurrence can make them vulnerable since (as it is in this case of COVID-19) they may not be able to “take off” to those foreign hospitals as they are always quick at doing. Unfortunately for them, the hospitals are overwhelmed with cases of COVID-19 patients while governments in those countries are busy sourcing for funding and medical solutions to the increasing number of people contracting the virus even amidst lockdown and stay-at-home.
Consequently, our “big men” are constrained to stay in Nigeria against their wish! It was laughable when a high ranking government official in Nigeria was quoted as saying that: “I can tell you for sure, I never knew that our entire healthcare infrastructure was in the state in which it is until I was appointed to do this work. If developed countries of the world are stretched [by COVID-19] despite their good capacity, then Nigeria needs to improve its own. My prayer is that Nigeria’s situation does not escalate to that extent because the country lacks what is required to handle the situation”. What did he think ASUU and other well-meaning Nigerians have been agitating for all these years? Has it been for “bread and butter” or “stomach infrastructure”? His unpardonable ignorance (or gaffe?) is either because he does not live in this country or he is one of those government officials who “take off” to treat headache in foreign hospitals. These people and their imperialist collaborators are the ones sustaining the wrong notion that we Africans are incapable of providing sustainable local solutions to our developmental challenges. This has to stop as experience during this COVID-19 pandemic has shown again that local solutions to our challenges are possible.
The government and its agents should desist from ego trips and discontinue forthwith further use of force on university workers to enrol on IPPIS payment platform meant for core civil servants (even against the law). It has been said, by ASUU, times without number, that this platform does not take care of the peculiarities of universities. We need not dwell on this because information is already going round that those member of staff in federal universities forcefully migrated onto IPPIS payment platform are already grumbling and agitating after experiencing, in unimaginable proportions, what ASUU saw long time ago that made the union (ASUU) kicked against IPPIS in its current form. The government should encourage ASUU by giving complete approval and necessary support to the deployment of its software known as the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) developed locally by our scientists, proposed for payroll management in Nigerian federal universities. This UTAS will be domesticated within the university system in compliance with the Principle of University Autonomy as enshrined in the Universities Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment) Act 2003 and in line with global best practices.
In the interim, outstanding payments including withheld salaries should be made payable using the earlier mutually agreed platform known as Government Integrated Financial Management Information System. Non-payment/withholding of ASUU members’ salaries and other entitlements has never worked, in the past, in breaking our collective resolution; it only worsen issues for government as this strategy make members more resolute. Put succinctly, this particular government strategy of using hunger as a weapon to coerce academics (we are talking about members of the intellectual community here) has always failed in the past and based on experience, it is condemned to everlasting failure. It is better for FGN to swiftly eat humble pie now by paying to ASUU members their withheld salaries/entitlements before students are recalled to campus for business after this COVID-19 pandemic has been successfully contained worldwide. This advice is expected to be heeded because FGN has deployed their best weapon, in its arsenal, in fighting ASUU members leaving them to fight back. This kind of “war” will always be difficult to wage against an organised union like ASUU, since they say “a man that is already down fears no fall”.
To you, the fifth-columnists in ASUU and those that deliberately flouted the well informed directives of our union, not to enrol on IPPIS, there are some words for you too. Anyway, let us leave that for another day but one of those stories told to this writer, as a primary school pupil, will be relayed to you instead. It goes like this:
Once upon a time, the fox and the rooster were friends but whenever they visit each other or have any cause to meet, the fox always stayed far away from the rooster or at best kept the rooster at arm’s length. One day the rooster asked the fox why it was fond of staying far away whenever they were together. The fox’s response was that the “fire” on the rooster’s head was a source of fear that made it keep the rooster at a distance always. The rooster laughed in an unbelievable manner and told the fox that the red-like object on its head was not fire as being misunderstood; the rooster told the fox that what was misunderstood as fire is known as comb which is a meaty outer part of its head and the rooster even allowed the fox to confirm its softness and fleshiness. That was the turning point in their relationship as the rooster was immediately seized, torn into pieces and made into a good meal by the fox. That is the reason, according to our primary school teacher, why the rooster (and other chicken) became prey, and when captured, good meat, for the fox until today.
To those sitting on the fence today saying “e no concern me” or those that are happy that “dem don dey deal with those stubborn ASUU people” listen to Martin Niemöller (1892–1984):
“First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me”
This is one of the translated versions of Niemöller’s poetic form of a prose. I hope I have been able to communicate.
For us in ASUU, the struggle continues, and of course, victory may come slowly but it is certain. The forces of darkness will not defeat those of light! Education is the light that illuminates our path.
Aluta continua, Victoria ascerta!
Dr. Andrew A. Erakhrumen, writes from Department of Forest Resources and Wildlife Management, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria
