For Nigeria’s ruling class, destroying public education is a task that must be done. It is actually an existential imperative, so that the private universities of the elite class would become the only game in town.
This predilection of our country’s ruling class reminds me of Cato, the Roman senator, who famously obsessed: “Carthago delenda est.” For him, the singular non-negotiable objective in the war between Rome and Carthage, was the total destruction of Carthage, which he perceived as an existential threat to the survival and prosperity of Rome.
Rome eventually accomplished that goal: it laid waste to Carthage, and sold off its inhabitants into slavery. In the same manner, public university education is regarded as a veritable existential threat to Nigeria’s privileged ruling class, hence the real if unspoken Universitas delenda est!
What makes this deliberate destruction of public universities rather sad is that those who are ruling Nigeria today, perhaps with the singular exception of President Buhari who only attended secondary school, are beneficiaries of free or highly subsidised public university education, a case of willfully destroying the ladder by which they had climbed to the top.
The crisis bedeviling higher education in Nigeria is a function of elite mindset, an unspoken elite pact, not the product of mistake or ignorance as some would have us believe. My unbroken 39 years’ experience as a university scholar have led me to this conclusion.
There are those who honestly believe that the present government’s attitude to the paralysing ASUU strike is a mistake; some even subscribe to the notion that President Buhari has good intentions but is wrongly advised by his ministers, while many others are of the view that government is not able to address the challenges facing education because it is hobbled by dwindling national resources. The last group insists the government alone cannot fund education!
Correct as that position may seem, it casually excuses the government’s ineptness in devising additional means and sadly ignoring all the funding avenues that ASUU has over the years recommended. Knowledge production is a universal enterprise, and no group knows this better than the academics for whom it is a daily pursuit. But this is not where I’m going with this discussion today.
For me, the systematic destruction of education under this administration is merely emblematic of the ruling class mindset. What the Buhari government has done for seven years (and would do till the end of his tenure) is to continue the destruction that he wrought until 1985 when his own colleagues ousted him. According to a colleague, Buhari has merely returned to the scene of his previous crimes. How? It was his despotic regime that callously cancelled cafeteria feeding in higher institutions in 1984, ostensibly due to dwindling resources. Sounds familiar?
Government’s latest propaganda is that it cannot borrow N1.3 trillion to fund education! In the meantime, the same Buhari government has no qualms borrowing $1.9 billion to build a rail line for Niger Republic, or donating N1.4 billion worth of exotic SUVs to that same country. He simply doesn’t see anything amiss in extending Santa Claus-like benevolence to another country whilst Nigerians are being denied access to quality education, healthcare and even basic security.
Since I joined the university system, academics have gone on nationwide strikes multiple times under every government, without exception, from President Shehu Shagari right to President Buhari. Check this out: the issues in contention have always been the same: (a) adequate funding so that the universities would not deteriorate to glorified secondary schools, (b) university autonomy and academic freedom, and (c) conditions of service of teachers! From one government to another, it is “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” That, unfortunately, has been our experience these past four decades.
Now, the big question is: will things change for the better? I’m no clairvoyant but the situation is bound to remain the same or grow worse, unless and until there is a definitive shift in the anti- intellectual predilections of our ruling class. Until they are reconciled to the aphorism that no nation can develop beyond the capacity of its universities, and thereby embrace education as a critical national imperative, nothing will change.
I’m not persuaded by the noisy admonition that we should “vote wisely” in the next general elections so that we can have good, responsible and responsive governments at all levels. My skepticism is predicated on the fact that democracy does not necessarily allow the best to emerge, only the most popular, and that elections do not resolve deep-seated national problems. Since 1999, ASUU has had to embark on several strikes, and for exactly the same reasons, under our so-called “democratically elected” Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari. And what, if anything, has changed?
Let us remember that this is the third strike under Buhari in less than two full years: twice during the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, and now for six months in 2022 and still counting. And guess what again, the government’s response has always been the same: seize lecturers’ salaries to starve them and their families into submission!
Not only is the government now weaponising propaganda against lecturers, it has also callously wielded the brutal weapon of starvation as well, all because it will neither respect nor fulfill agreements that it had willingly entered into with its own citizens. How can a nation that so callously breaches agreements with its own citizens at home expect to be taken seriously abroad?
Since the First Republic ended in 1966, successive governments have never treated education as imperative for national development. They destroyed public primary and secondary education, and handed it over to shylock proprietors of private institutions, while public universities have been severely targeted for similar privatisation, to fulfil the neoliberal agenda that so-called market forces must be allowed to drive education.
ASUU is the only obstacle to this satanic agenda, thus explaining official resolve to crush it by starving lecturers to obtain their unconditional surrender. Reality check: if ASUU surrenders, the nation surrenders the right to public education!
The National Assembly will rather pad budgets for elite self-aggrandisement and crude wealth accumulation than vote enough money for education. And Vice-Chancellors and Rectors always have to grease the palms of NASS members to pass their budgets, and kleptocratic bureaucrats before even the paltry sums are released.
Ask yourselves, why are governments unwilling to fulfill agreements that they signed? This is not a mistake; it is a ruling class mindset to which civilians and soldiers alike subscribe. It is not a function of the state of the economy. After all, was it not during the oil boom era in 1973 that Gowon ordered lecturers out of their university accommodations to break their strike?
The earlier Nigerians reconciled themselves to this reality, and joined forces with ASUU to checkmate the Buhari government from helping Boko Haram fulfill its ignoble objective of totally destroying education, the better for us all, else our country might just go under completely. Shutting down primary and secondary schools in many states in the North, and locking up the nation’s public universities is tantamount to aiding Boko Haram.
- Prof. Fawole writes from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State