By Undertow
THESE are not the best of times for the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). Buffeted from the inside by sex scandals, assailed on the outside by federal pressures over the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS), and distracted by a proposed bill on sexual harassment targeting the universities, the union is reeling under crushing weights. Irrespective of whether they are right or wrong in their perspectives over these matters, ASUU is lucky to have a self-willed, erudite and eloquent national president, Biodun Ogunyemi, who has stood resolute in the face of all kinds of attacks from various quarters.
Years ago, ASUU’s main war was against poor conditions of service in the universities, poorly equipped laboratories, overcrowded and dilapidated hostels, abysmal teacher-student ratios, half-hearted autonomy, and hopelessly low funding of education. While that war was still ongoing, and did not even look like it would ever be won, and while ASUU itself was still under a tremendous pressure to find new ways of fighting an ancient and seemingly invincible enemy, the government has changed gear, shifted the goalpost, and deflected the battle in a different and unanticipated direction and terrain that disfavour the union. Now the frontlines are poorly defined, and the battlefield is greatly muddled up.
Last year, almost out of the blue, the federal government directed ASUU to be enrolled in the new payroll system. Instead of a better defined and more expansive autonomy, ASUU is to be sucked in deeper into the civil service system. The union, of course, immediately kicked against this new insolence through an orchestrated campaign definitely not lacking in suavity. But it is a campaign for which it has received very scant support from the media and the public. Go and enrol, they, and indeed the entire country, chorused to ASUU. It has not helped ASUU that this new battle is coming not too long after a splinter union, Congress of University Academics (CONUA), arose in the universities threatening the general cohesion that had stood them in good stead for decades, making them one of the most lethal unions in the country. In fact, given the total annihilation of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS, as amended by its decades of metamorphosis), and the ingenious disembowelling of the fractured labour unions of the country, ASUU was the nearest thing to a credible unionised monolith.
Not anymore. Nigerians, unable to grasp the dynamics of IPPIS or the atmospherics of what ASUU represents and embodies, are wary of queuing behind the union. But they really should queue behind them, for the universities have become a caricature, with the government projecting no viable or sensible idea on how to reinvigorate it. The government is more preoccupied with controlling the universities than empowering them. Nigerians have not really interrogated why the government is dragging the universities into IPPIS while exempting other government agencies such as that unaccountable behemoth, the petroleum corporation NNPC, the equally humongous Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the scarecrow tax collectors, the FIRS, and the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC), among others. Officials of the IPPIS insist that eventually these other agencies will be enrolled, but for now, because they are revenue-generating agencies, they will be exempted. The devil is, of course, in the detail.
Here is the argument of IPPIS: “The government knows that all agencies cannot be brought on board at the same time. But for those who draw their salaries and personnel costs from the consolidate revenue account of the Federal Government, they must come on board. For the CBN, FIRS and NNPC, they are revenue agencies and they live on the cost of collection. They are revenue-generating agencies and they don’t draw from the consolidated revenue fund. So, it is left to the government on what to do next, but it is a journey that just started.”
But here is the argument of ASUU: “There is massive corruption in IPPIS. Did government care to investigate IPPIS itself? We are saying why is CBN not in IPPIS? Why is NDIC not in IPPIS? Why is Federal Inland Revenue not in IPPIS? But the lecturers who are just collecting stipends are to be pulled into IPPIS so that our legal entitlement will not be paid.
“We are not going to allow it. We are not going to be part of the staff that are going to be enrolled in IPPIS. We took a resolution and we are reaffirming … that we are not going to get enrolled into IPPIS and you know what our union is actually against is that the university has an autonomy and if you look at it clearly, this autonomy we are saying is enshrined in Section 2AA of the University Miscellaneous Provision Amendment Act of 2003 which clearly explained the role of the Governing Council.
“Even the Miscellaneous Act we are saying clearly stated that the power of the council shall be exercised as in the law and that status of each university. So it is clear we have autonomy. Again, university is the peculiar nature of the appointment of university as academics. Our 2009 agreement which was negotiated by the federal government and our union is also there. So many issues are there and that is why our union is saying we should be allowed to produce a template which will have all these series of issues but not to have a centre point of payment.”
Put differently, the government gives the indication that enrolling in IPPIS will curb the following anomalies and atrocities, to wit, ghost workers, salary padding, multiple salary payments, illegal recruitment, and corrupt employment, among other evils. But do these evils not exist even in greater dimensions in the exempted agencies? Of course they do. So why the exemption? So far, the government has made arguments in favour of the exemptions, but the arguments do not hold water. Not only have funding of universities been grossly inadequate, the government has shown neither commitment to university education nor produced an inspiring vision of what tertiary education should be. Nigerian universities rank very low globally. Instead of declaring a genuine state of emergency in the sector to rectify the problems militating against university education, and lessening or altogether extirpating overcrowding, the government is pursuing a red herring. Like all levels of education in the country, the university system has virtually collapsed. ASUU has made valiant efforts to reverse the decline, but its efforts have become enfeebled by lack of public support and government’s unwillingness to envision something great, befitting and ennobling. The situation is much more dire than the government is admitting; yet that situation will not be ameliorated by IPPIS.
Now, ASUU’s dilemma and troubles are set to multiply, regardless of the persistence and fortitude of their national president, Prof Ogunyemi. Sexual harassment is eating up the innards of the universities. Unfortunately, it is a vice neither ASUU nor the universities have shown brilliance or sagacity in tackling. Consequently, a few rather embarrassing public cases of harassment of female students have gripped the imagination of the country and ended up in the courts. The cases have also unfortunately tended to portray university teachers as rapacious and predatory, and the university authorities more intent on protecting their image than giving succour to mistreated students. Even more unfortunately, the problem has now drawn the attention of the country’s parliament in the form of a bill on sexual harassment designed to protect, most especially, female students. The bill recommends very stiff punishment for offenders.
The ASUU president came under fire last Monday during a parliamentary public hearing when he attempted to draw the attention of the country to extant provisions of the law regarding sexual harassment, while at the same time arguing that the universities, in consonance with the law, can tackle the problem of sexual harassment. Unimpressed, stakeholders jeered at his presentation, and insisted that the bill was timely because the universities had proved woefully incompetent to rein in the problem. But argued Prof Ogunyemi: “Every university has structures through which disciplinary procedures are handled. If we follow the procedure that we have in place at the universities and we link with our existing laws, we can address the same problem without necessarily coming up with a law.”
Given the mood of the country, and in the face of highly publicised sexual harassment cases in the universities, it required enormous courage for Prof Ogunyemi to publicly argue against the parliamentary bill. But he did, a tribute to his character and his intellect. Not only that, he is right. All that the problem of sexual harassment requires is to find ways of ensuring that university authorities live up to their responsibilities. Sadly, neither Prof Ogunyemi nor ASUU is likely to sway the public which has tasted blood. The public will most likely get their bill passed, and the universities will be further weakened and dispirited. Both the public and the ASUU, not to say the universities themselves, cannot be absolved of guilt. And the government which should champion the cause of reviving the university system is too caught up in the morass and too bereft of great ideas that it will continue to fail the country and the universities until everything reaches a dead end.
Leave a Reply