The announcement of industrial
action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) no longer shocks
Nigerian, owing to the fact that it has become a recurring incident.
The present edition of the strike
action began on November 14 and according to Biodun Ogunyemi, ASUU president,
it is “indefinite and comprehensive”.
According to data made available
by the National University Commission (NUC), Nigeria has 43 federal
universities, 47 state universities and 75 private universities.
The 2017 Universities’
Statistical Digest confirms that there are 1.9 million students in Nigerian
universities.
Checks showed that the union has gone on strike not less than 15 times since 1999 when
Nigeria moved to democratic rule and in total, the strike actions have lasted
for 37 months, a little over three years.
Here is a timeline of the strikes
since 1999:
1999 – 150 days
2001 – 90 days
2002 – 14 days.
2003 – 180 days (ended in 2004)
2005 -3 days
2006- 7 days
2007 – 90 days
2008 -7 days
2009- 120 days
2010- 157 days
2011—90 days, started in December
and ended in 2012
2013- 150 days and seventeen days
2014- None
2015-None
2016- 7 days
2017- 35 days
2018- 19 days and counting
What is the bone of contention?
To improve the state of education
in the country, the federal government signed a memorandum of understanding
with the union in 2009 and signed another in 2013.
The 2013 MoU stipulated that
public varsities would need the sum of N1.3 trillion for a modest
revitalisation.
The fund was to be paid in
tranches of N20 billion in 2013 and N220 billion between 2014 and 2018. The
five-year arrangement has not been implemented to date.
Some of the demands been made by
ASUU are funding for revitalisation of public universities, the release of the
forensic audit report on earned academic allowances (EAA), payments of all
arrears of shortfall in salaries to all universities that have met the
verification requirements of the presidential initiative on continuum audit
(PICA) , release of university pension fund operational.
ASUU: If not for strikes,
Nigerian educational sector would have collapsed
In an interview with TheCable
CamPulse, Biodun Ogunyemi, ASUU chairman, said the strike action has helped the
educational sector.
He said: “You need to look so far
over years what the strike has achieved for the Nigerian education sector and
compare it to what is happening in other sub-sectors of the educational system.
If not for ASUU, the public universities, in fact, public tertiary education
would have collapsed totally beyond recovery.
“So you can best appreciate that
when you compare and contrast what is happening as a result of ASUU struggle
and what is not happening as a result of lack of struggle at the level of
primary and secondary education of the country.”
According to Ogunyemi, Nigerians
should be grateful for the strike actions because politicians have shown little
concern for public education.
“They are not concerned with the
plight of the poor. All you see now is how to fit their children into positions
of advantage to the disadvantage of the children of the poor,” he said.
“The best way to do it is to
ensure that their children receive the best of education while the children of
the poor are subjected to substandard and low-quality education.
“NUT cannot do what ASUU is doing
now because the government will seize their salary, they have underpaid them,
they have not given them the right to ventilate their anger. And because of
that, they have become disillusioned in places where they are working.
“You will even see primary school
teachers who cannot see take their own children to the school they are
teaching. I’m saying these just to illustrate the fact that public primary and
public secondary education system have been collapsed. If not for ASUU the same
would have happened.
“So Nigerians should actually be
thanking ASUU, for the wake-up calls we always give the Nigerian government.
“And let me tell you as far back
as 1992, each time we went for an action, we refer government to inject funds
so that public universities will not go on the same place with primary and
secondary schools. In 1992, it’s as a result of ASUU struggle that government
introduced TETFUND.
“TETFUND today is the only source
of providing infrastructural amenities in Nigerian Universities. So people who
are ignorant are the ones saying we are destroying calendar.”
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