I was one of the few voices of dissent on the perennial industrial action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) before I left the system over a decade ago. I have no problem with employees declaring an industrial dispute with their employers. But when lecturers of state universities leave their employers in their various state capitals and go to Abuja to negotiate with the Federal Government salary enhancement under different guises including the recent “Earned Academic Allowances”, and thereafter return to make their campuses ungovernable on account of such agreement, then this calls for sober reflection.
Another gripe I have always raised with my colleagues has to do with the deliberate conflation of issues during any industrial crisis. I have read on the pages of newspapers well-informed commentaries accusing ASUU of deceiving the public during their regular strikes. One of the grounds of the accusation that is branded on my memory is that for every strike declared by ASUU, the union usually pushes to the front burner “poor funding, infrastructural decay, empty laboratories and libraries”, (the exact words used by my protesting colleagues at OOU) in order to court cheap popularity among the generality of Nigerians, but lurking in the dark among the union’s demands is salary increase, which is usually cloaked as allowances, and that once that pay component is fulfilled by the government, the lecturers return to the classrooms, until one or two years later when they will declare another industrial crisis with the same reasons and the issue of remuneration coming under different headings or titles.
When I saw the various headlines in the papers a few days ago accusing Ogun State government of owing Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU) teachers 16 months of salaries, I roared into laughter: “My colleagues are at it again!” Sixteen months without salaries! Can any ASUU chapter in Nigeria live without salary for 16 months? Certainly, this cannot be true. Members of ASUU won’t work without pay for three consecutive months without a strike in Nigeria. Even those national strikes that lasted for many months, in which we were not paid, we all knew from the very outset of the industrial crisis, that we would receive our pay once the strikes were over!
The accusations of the union, directed against the Ogun State Governor, Senator Ibikunle Amosun, would seem to be against the grain. If it is true, and indeed, it is true, that OOU, which we all knew was not much reckoned with in Nigeria some years ago, recently emerged the best state university in Nigeria according to the ranking conducted in conjunction with the regulatory body, the National Universities Commissions (NUC), then I think the governor should have been praised for his efforts while the union makes more demands.
I knew I read about the degree of the decay at OOU, which the Amosun government inherited. A couple of searches are quite revealing. There was a publication credited to Alex Onanbanjo, Pro-chancellor and chairman of the governing council of the institution in 2009. He was quoted in The Punch of June 10, 2009 as saying that, “It is in OOU that one finds a situation where examination scripts were not marked and graded for three years. It is there that you find graduates of four years without transcripts not to talk of certificates. Mark boosting is the order of the day. In a particular department, marks of more than 300 out of 500 students that sat for the examination of a particular course were discovered to have been boosted beyond the original marks legitimately earned. In another department, a lecturer gave the whole score sheets of his course to a female student who served as go-between in the ‘business’ transaction of mark boosting. So bad was the situation that it is trite knowledge that the eventual marks of many students of OOU are functions of the financial and sexual power of those concerned. It was also discovered that very many lecturers were involved in the extortion of students through the sales of hand-outs. Discretionary admission (that is, admissions not based on merit but on ‘connections’) became the order of the day, sometimes adding up to 50% of total admissions. The university management could not even keep a tab on the number of its students at any given time. Very many of the revenue-generating centres of the university (such as the Centre for Sandwich Programmes) were taken out of the purview of the Bursar. With that arrangement, financial malpractices became the order of the day. The University continues to pay drivers even when senior staff members entitled to them do receive allowance for drivers as part of their salaries in line with the monetisation policy. Perhaps the most embarrassing of this pattern of irresponsible employment is the case of the University Guest House which has only four rooms but with 32 workers! Quite a number of academic staff also benefited from promotions either without requisite number of publications or following due process…”
We understand that when the current governor was sworn in, there were petitions urging him to carry out a surgical operation at OOU, which would have resulted in mass sack in order to sanitize the system. What we read later was that a visitation panel was set up, the report of which resulted in the change of the management and operations of the institution. This much was indirectly reflected in the protest march by ASUU-OOU last Monday when they recognised the contributions of the new management, but castigated the government that brought in the new hands! What an upended logic! From news available, the government of Amosun offset about N2.5 billion of salaries and allowances of the lecturers and other staff, which it inherited from the previous government in 2011 and graduated about 40,000 students in one ceremony in 2012, graduation ceremony having not been conducted for eight previous academic sessions, underscoring the magnitude of the rot inherited!
Of course, everyone is aware that the Amosun government is one of the fewest in Nigeria that consistently devotes the highest percentage of its yearly budget to education. It even won a Babs Fafunwa Award recently, coming first among the 36 states on budget to education.
The commendation of OOU by the National Assembly is still green in our memories. The national legislature took cognisance of the fact that graduating students of OOU now get their certificates on the day of convocation. What a transformation! What a turn-around in such a short space of time! A lot of innovations, especially against academic corruption, have taken place at OOU under the current management, which should be emulated by other higher institutions of learning in Nigeria. I do not know how OOU-ASUU will divorce the outstanding successes recorded by the new management of the institution from the government that owns the school.
And lest we are accused of being pro-establishment, a tool often used to blackmail into silence views outside the blinkered position of majority of my colleagues in ASUU, let me say that OOU still has a long way to go. But as we say, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a step. In spite of my reservations as regards OOU-ASUU leaving its employer in Abeokuta and going to Abuja to negotiate remuneration for its members, government needs to negotiate the issue in the interest of all stakeholders, especially the students. Hardworking lecturers and non academic staff deserve very good package.
My colleagues have to be reasonable as well considering the financial challenges facing the nation at present. What is in dispute is not salary, let no one be deceived, but a contraption called “Earned Academic Allowances”, negotiated in Abuja under the cloud of strikes.
As someone suggested in an online reaction to the protest, the state government could take the court option because it is not bound by any agreement reached with the Federal Government by its own workers. This may take years to resolve judging by the delay in our justice system. There is need to allow common sense to dictate the choices of OOU-ASUU at this juncture and on this issue of “Earned Academic Allowances.”
- Dr Odion, a management consultant, sent in this piece from Lagos.
