The Buhari administration has decided to wage a war against the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) over the union’s demand that the government should honour its obligations to the universities. After months of pretending a negotiation was going on, the government finally and magisterially made an insulting take-it-or-leave-it offer. Do Nigerians see anything wrong in that? What they see instead is ASUU’s rejection as constituting unwarranted recalcitrance.
The government, in the face-off, has an upper hand, weaponising propaganda against ASUU as the enemy, and playing upon the intelligence of hapless Nigerians to turn their attention away from its own irresponsibility. Through the regular and social media outlets, Nigerians are daily flagellating the arrogant, wicked, and unyielding lecturers who are expecting to be rewarded for laziness. They accepted the government’s propaganda that it had met all of ASUU’s demands, yet the stubborn union would not call off the strike. Without examining the truth or falsity of this egregious official claim, they are condemning lecturers for being wicked; some even asserted that ASUU is acting as an agent of the opposition party.
An otherwise very intelligent and knowledgeable columnist even claimed lecturers are using the strike to accumulate unearned wealth. Other influential journalists, columnists and opinion molders who are ordinarily expected to conduct a thorough investigation have jumped on the anti-ASUU bandwagon. Some even advised that ASUU “has made its point,” and should move on and call off the strike, forgetting that ASUU did not embark on the strike to make a point but to make the government implement the subsisting agreement for the benefit of the university system. Worse, the government is now inciting students against their lecturers. Isn’t that unfortunate!
Nigerians have yet to correctly perceive that by seeking to wreck public education completely the government has declared a war against them. Unfortunately, the potential casualties of that war are currently on the side of their adversary, the government. This is because it is average Nigerians, poor and under-remunerated public servants, artisans and subsistence farmers that will eventually bear the brunt of the government’s destructive actions.
If lecturers are allowed to be starved into submission and ASUU loses this struggle, Nigerians will be the worse for it. Tertiary education will be totally commercialised and priced out of their reach. As Chief Awolowo famously asserted, only by making education available and affordable to Nigerians will the children of his drivers not also end up driving his own children.
The immortal Nelson Mandela is worth quoting as well: “Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine; that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation.”
Let’s be honest with ourselves, there is only so much that a group of patriotic citizens can do in defence of a public that does not appreciate their struggle. Because they aren’t super humans, lecturers are bound to throw in the towel at some point if the government continues with this war.
Having publicly declared his ill-advised stand on the no-work no-pay policy, the ego of President Buhari is unlikely to make him consider retracing his steps. Lest we forget: this inflexibility and refusal to countenance good advice on critical national matters from his colleagues was used to overthrow him in 1985. Old dogs hardly learn new tricks, so don’t expect the dictator to change his mind. Nigerians are the eventual losers in Buhari’s war against ASUU, even if they don’t yet realise it.
Government’s formidable arsenal of weapons, strategies and tactics are deployed in war against its own citizens: squeezing lecturers by punitively withholding their salaries to obtain surrender; it can proscribe ASUU, arrest and detain lecturers, sack them if they refuse to go back to classes in humiliation, compel Vice-Chancellors to open registers for the defeated academics to sign that they have returned to work in humiliation, and force them to even declare that they have shown remorse.
Déjà vu. Didn’t Generals Babangida, Abacha and even former President Obasanjo do it with remarkable brutality and callousness? Why shouldn’t Buhari? Will Buhari permit his ego to be bruised by ASUU’s (bloody civilians!) principled stand, no matter how patriotic? I doubt very much. Nothing satiates the bloated ego of an army general than victory in battle!
But there is a grave danger in all this, and it won’t be long before Nigerians begin to reap the fruits of their own carelessness and indulgence. A historical analogy is perhaps appropriate for illustration here. Germany was sorely humiliated by the triumphalist allied, especially European, powers at the conclusion of WWI, a war which Germans claimed they did not lose to any allied military superiority on the battlefield but instead surrendered due to the total military blockade to avoid the extermination of the German nation by mass starvation.
The triumphant and triumphalist European powers could not resist forcing the most pernicious Versailles peace treaty down Germany’s throat. But Hitler’s Nazis neither forgot nor forgave this national humiliation, and righting the wrongs of Germany’s surrender and humiliation at the opportune time was one of the major causes of the infinitely more destructive Second World War. The world has never remained the same, and most of Europe has been under US military occupation since.
If Nigerians supinely allow ASUU to be clobbered and crushed because it seems convenient today, it is they, ordinary Nigerians, who will pay the stiff price down the road.
Successive governments since Babangida have strongly desired that ASUU gave up its demands for adequate funding of public universities and fight only for their remuneration. This suits the government very well, and if done, the universities will become like public hospitals. After the government had successfully duelled the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) into exhaustion, similar to the current savaging of ASUU, doctors gave up fighting for the improvement of the hospitals and concentrated on their remunerations alone. Because of this, public hospitals have today become worse than mere consulting clinics; the consultants have migrated en masse to better climes where hospitals are better equipped, and they are paid remunerations that adequately reflect the services they render. Tens of thousands of Nigerian medical specialists trained here at home today populate hospitals in the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Nigeria can no longer retain its medical doctors and nurses because of poor, unsanitary and unhealthy working environments and virtual slave remunerations.
A similar fate awaits public universities. As medical doctors migrate abroad, so will academics to other climes where their skills and competences are sought after. ASUU’s failure will result in the commercialisation of public universities; they will then become undersubscribed because Nigerians will not be able to afford them. And the ruling elites will surely get an exhilarating kick out of humiliating their nation’s best and brightest. But the downside is that the same fate that befell public hospitals awaits public universities.
Nigerian lecturers are also the worst paid in Africa; and teaching facilities and learning conditions in the public universities are simply scandalous even by last century’s standards! Yet our government would rather fight lecturers to death than improve the situation.
- Fawole, fawolew@yahoo.com