Annual strike has become a recurring decimal in the life of public universities in Nigeria. There is no country in the entire world that experiences this terrible phenomenon without immediately tackling it to ensure that it does not happen again. But not in Nigeria, a country where any goes. This speaks volume for the decadence and lack of economic planning for development in our country. It is also a total disregard for the knowledge industry characterizing the planning for development seen in other countries of the world including even our poorer African neighbors.
While I understand the reasons of my colleagues in the universities in their annual industrial disruption of academic life, I do not understand why industrial action seems to be the only strategy employed year in year out to confront the situation. Even in war there is always a place for peaceful resolution through dialogue and negotiations. The problem is that the government especially the current government does not seem to understand the nexus between knowledge and development and between peaceful academic sector and security. The constant closure of our universities and other tertiary institutions has a direct link to the insecurity in the country fueled by youthful restlessness and hopelessness arising from unrealized academic ambitions.
What does a young person studying for a four-year course or six-year course in the universities but remaining there for a decade due to incessant strikes by the staffs of their institutions do to express his or her anger with society than to cause mayhem and chaos or join others to bring the evil system killing them down on all our heads? This makes them prone to destructive tendencies. I am writing as a father and grandfather witnessing this in the families of my children. This constant closure has serious effects on the mental conditions of these children and the medical conditions of their parents. Even though there are no jobs to absorb the new graduates streaming out of our universities and parents know their children may not get jobs after graduation, nevertheless they would like their children to graduate so that they can feel their mission is accomplished waiting to cross the unemployment bridge when they get there. There are loads of social problems tied to the constant strikes which the people in government do not seem to understand or care enough about. The students genuinely feel there is no resolution to their problems because the leadership of the country, not just the political leadership but all those in positions of leadership including people in the academic community itself, do not care about them. Young people know that the children of the ASUU and SSANU leaders or at least some of them send their children to universities abroad or to local private universities where academic terms are predictable because industrial actions in private universities are not allowed. The people in government and those in the private sector have the financial muscle to send their children abroad where courses run their normal terminal times and children return home to snatch the few jobs available in the public and private sectors thus perpetuating the division between the privileged educated elite and the locally certificated ones who are rushed through their courses after the ending of the perpetual industrial disruptions in our tertiary institutions. I hope we know that we are sowing the seeds of future explosion in the country which our current actions are sure to lead. It reminds me of the book by the Malian author Yambo Ouologuem with the forbidden title “Bound to Violence” (le Devoir de Violence) in which our actions inexorably leads to violence.
Is there any logic in a country that cannot pay living wages to its academic staff constantly establishing public and private universities? Or is the constant licensing of private universities being done to replace the public universities the government is unable to fund? This cannot be the answer because it does not answer the reasons for the armed forces, the police, other armed institutions of government and some departments establishing universities. It just does not make sense. Announcing the establishment of universities or licensing of private entrepreneurs and religious and other organizations to run universities is not the end of the story. There does not seem to be any thought about staffing and equipment. Most tertiary institutions’ laboratories and other inputs are gotten from abroad. At a time when the country is broke if not outrightly bankrupt or at least is foreign exchange challenged, where will the forex needed to equip these mushrooms of universities come from? Even if the forex were available, where will the staff come from? The existing universities are poorly staffed. The possibility of recruiting foreign staff is absolutely ruled out. Academic staff will not come from Benin, Togo, Ghana or Sierra Leone where salaries are much higher than in Nigeria where a full professor earns less than a thousand dollars a month and where electricity is mostly not available 24 hours of the day.
I honestly don’t know how our universities run their laboratories in the absence of electric power. We hear of PhD dissertations in the sciences sourcing data online instead of through laboratory experiments. Is it then surprising that knowledge for development is not coming out of our universities? One just has to go to our teaching hospitals where flowing water in the taps is a rarity. The lifts installed in the University College Hospital, Ibadan in 1954 has remained there as museum specimens. Relations of patients sometimes have to carry their sick relations on their backs to admission wards in the upper levels of the hospital. While there, they have to carry buckets of water for toilets and baths of their wards in the hospital and yet we call these institutions “teaching hospitals “and we are still establishing new ones Doing the same thing which failed in the past again and again is regarded as absolute madness. This generally describes the state of tertiary education in Nigeria or better still, the state of education in Nigeria at primary, secondary and tertiary levels.
Even most poor people except in the villages don’t send their children and wards to government schools at primary level anymore and perhaps only patronize the sectarian secondary schools which still remain tolerable as places of learning. In short, the foundation for orderly development is being eroded with our eyes wide open and it does not seem we are aware of it and if we are aware of it, we just don’t care because we have existential problems of physical survival in the face of absence of electricity and potable water not to talk of security both physical and increasing food insecurity. Life in Nigeria is gradually becoming unliveable. We are just merely and barely existing without arts and civilization. We hardly have recreation facilities which are way beyond our pockets and time spent in running after the wherewithal to have a life and some living!
How did we get here? This requires deep thinking and interrogation because it was not always like this and certainly it was not like this in my youth and adulthood. Even after the civil war, we were able to pick up the pieces of our lives and find social and political stability and equilibrium. We seem to have gone beyond the state of irredeemability in every aspect of our national life. We seem to have reached the nadir of our descent into decay. My worry is that we don’t know this fact and certainly our leaders are oblivious of this fact. They all seem to worry more about 2023 and who will be in and who will be out of Aso Rock. They forget that government is about people and the disconnect between the rulers and the ruled are daily widening into a yawning gap. The people now seem to abandon their reason and to abdicate their responsibility while transferring their duties as a people to the Almighty God presumably the God of Africa alone to save them from the impending political Armageddon. This seems more apparent among Christians than Muslims who are yet to begin to yearn for the imam of the age the Mahdi to liberate beleaguered humanity in Nigeria.
Perhaps what my more religious compatriots are telling me is true that these signs in Nigeria are the signs of end times as contained in the Holy Bible. The end will probably creep in on us like a thief in the night. But before that time comes it may be the right time for our country to begin the struggle for moral rearmament or some kind of ethical revolution so that we are at least are prepared for better times whether the end times come or not. The incessant disruption of our educational sector and consequential disruption of our lives as a people if not addressed quickly may hasten the collapse of civilized life in Nigeria.