The Academic Staff Union of Polytechnic (ASUP) has been on strike for the past eight months; there has been allegations and counter allegation from both federal government and the union on the reasons for the protracted impasse. The union’s president, Dr Chibuzo Asomugha spoke to GIFT EMMANUEL on why the strike has lingered among other issues… Excerpts…
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The struggle as the ASUP President:
In one word I would say the challenges could be described as intriguing from several angles, it has been an experience in learning, it has also been an experience in understanding how the structures of bureaucracy work in Nigeria, and on the whole it has also been a mixture of frustrations and certainly suspense and failed expectations.
Polytechnics have been on strike for almost 8months now and it is clear ASUP as a union is agitating for certain things to be done, what really are the issues?
Yea, principally, the issues can be summarised in three areas generally. One, the issues goes to address the strengthening of the legal and the institutional framework of the Nigeria’s Polytechnic system, it also goes to address the issue of deepening the capacity of academic personnel in Nigerian polytechnics to equip and position them properly so as to be able to meet the objectives of the agenda of training the polytechnic graduates, thirdly also, is been to really restore integrity and dignity to the products from polytechnics. But if you look at them as individual items, we can mention some of them very clearly, for instance, in 2009 we entered an agreement we Nigerian government and that agreement provided in its self that by 2012 it would re-negotiated and since 2012 we have been asking the government to re-negotiate the agreement it agreed to re-negotiate and up till now they just been a mirage, government has frustrated the process. Also, we are looking at the discrimination against polytechnic graduates in public service and generally in the Nigerian labour market and we are saying that, this system has become anachronistic really in the global world now that we don’t discriminate against people’s career choices just because of where they went to school. Also, we are asking for proper comprehensive NEEDS assessment of Nigerian polytechnics, this hasn’t been done and we know that it has been done for Nigerian universities and we are asking that government would also do that. We are also asking government to set up a commission to clearly cater for Nigerian polytechnics education just as there is a commission catering for Nigerian university education and another commission catering for colleges of education. We are also asking for a comprehensive funding portfolio period for the polytechnics, we are also asking government, actually we have started the process but it’s very slow, to review the federal polytechnic Acts, we are also asking the government to ensure that there is parity in conditions of service in Nigerian polytechnics irrespective of who the proprietor is, we are also concerned that some of our state polytechnics have deteriorated to the extent that we can’t even guarantee the quality of certificate our people are awarding in those areas.
So principally, these are some of the areas we are looking at and we are also asking government to take care of the peculiarities of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, that is the centralised payment system in such a way that it will take care of the peculiarities of the tertiary sector which government have not done and government is trying to forcefully erode us into the system and we are trying to say no, let’s do these other ones and try to see how it works out and we are also asking government to release the white paper on the visitation that happened in federal polytechnics about one year nine months ago and that white paper is still been withheld for reasons we do not know. So these are the areas we want the government to look at and come to terms with us and we are also talking about migration, the full funding of migration of staff on an elongated salary scale that happened in 2009 and in 2010, a small cash of staff were migrated and the larger majority of the staff in the polytechnics were not migrated, so in effect, what it means is that from 2009, the major cadre of staff in the polytechnics has been under paid by the government and now we are asking the government to pay up and implement the migration properly so that people will not be short changed any more.
Nigerians were made to understand recently that the 13 issues you presented to the federal government have been cut to 4 key areas, and to what extent has the government fulfilled the key areas?
Let’s give this issue a proper perspective; because it has been an issue for government propaganda, when the supervising minister of education, Barr Nyesom Wike said they have done 90% of our demands, it is practically not true. When in 2013 we came to government, we came with portfolio of 13 demands and when we started discussing with government on the 13 issues that we brought, at a point we had several stakeholders intervening and at a point the federal legislators, the joint education committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives intervened in the matter and during the negotiation predicated on their intervention, what happened was that, government now appraised the 13 issues and actually suggested that since it was not possible, because there was some of the issues we have to categorised, issues that you could resolve in the long term and issues that you could resolve in the short term, so because we were on strike, and the agreement was that everybody should do something that will immediately reopen the schools, so the government asked us if they could chose those issues that could be resolved within a short period so that we could go back to classroom while we continue discussion on the other issues. So we asked the government to choose the ones they want and they chose this four by itself. And as at that July 2013, the government said we should give it just two weeks but we said, no, two weeks is not actually realistic let’s give you one month, we gave government one month and it was three months later and government had not done anything about those four issues and that was when we resumed strike in October 1st, 2013. So actually that is the position and those four issues were and still are the ‘constitution of the needs assessment committee for public polytechnics, constitutions of the governing council of six polytechnics that were omitted in the first schedule, the CONTIS 15 migration issue and the funding, the implementation and the arrears and also the release of the white paper on the visitation to federal polytechnics’, these were the four issues and as at today, I can say that the government has addressed the issue of completing the constitution of the governing board of six federal polytechnics, the government has also set up a needs assessment committee that is working now which is supposed to hand in its report this February but up till date, the committee has not even done site visit, so we see that already the committee is behind schedule. The issue of CONTIS 15 migration, practically we can say it hasn’t been done and white paper also is been withheld by the federal government for reasons best known to them.
Sir, on the issue of CONTIS 15, the supervising minister did mention that federal government has approved the payment of the arrears, that it just for the parties to agree on the strategies of payment. How correct is that statement?
No, the minister didn’t say the money has been approved, the minister told us he was taking risk in accepting that that money would be paid and bringing up a proposal that it was going to be paid in instalment, he said he hasn’t even mention the matter to the authorities that are going to release the money, there was a discrepancy between what he said before the press and what transpired in the meeting.
So, as it is now, the money has not been released?
There is no money; he the minister has not even known where the money will come from. As at our latest meeting with government officials, the people who are supposed to determine where the money is going to come from did not even know about what the minister said.
On the issue of needs assessment, one of the augment at your last meeting was, with the on-going strike, the committee will not be able to work, how do you resolve this?
Who said the lectures are not there? Have they gone out of the country?
But the lecturers are not in school, how will the need assessment committee function?
Is it teaching practice? Needs assessment is not teaching practice, the needs assessment is supposed to look at what is on ground in the polytechnics, take an inventory of what is there, their conditions, facilities and the equipment and then, look at it as what supposed to be, that is what needs assessment is about.
The union is fully mobilised for the needs assessment, and if there is any academic staff that is required to be useful during the needs assessment, that person will be present and will provide anything the committee needs and also when we talk about this needs assessment we should realise that when they say strike and the students not being on campus, we will always make this point, ASUP did not close down any school, we did not ask students to leave the campus, management should be responsible for that and of course when needs assessment comes, if it is necessary for the students to play a role, they will play their role, we don’t think that the strike will in any way affect the committee’s job.
With the foregoing, can you say that government is really giving adequate attention to technical and vocation education in the country?
You know these things are clear for Nigerians to see because there are things you don’t just talk, you ask people to see things themselves, it is clear that you can just judge the seriousness of the government towards technical and vocational education by what is on ground, you can even compare what is on ground today with what has been on ground earlier on. When we were growing up in the 70s to 80s, we have technical colleges all over the places but where are they today? The problem is that, we keep focusing on tertiary education that is not where the damage is done, the damage is done at the primary and secondary level, what is the technical content at the primary and secondary level? What has happened to the government technical colleges at the secondary level? They have been converted to liberal secondary school, teaching ethics, history and the rest of them, the practical skills are looked down upon because government have profiled technical education as a ‘second fiddle kind of education’, government should have been able to develop technical education and liberal education side by side as options or alternatives depending on aptitudes as a matter of fact but what government has done is to try to make technical education as artisanship and elitism is liberal education and that is the root of the dichotomy we are facing today against polytechnics and its products. After secondary education, people should be able to choose depending on their aptitude or talent, on their proclivity to study, to say ok I will go to polytechnic and another says ok, I feel better to rising, let me choose university education, now you are producing two people at that tertiary level, you are giving them an equal opportunity, this one is hands on, so he is focused in a particular direction, this one is theoretical and he is focused on another direction but what we do here is to make one so substandard and another very superior and as a result of this, even people whose best potentials can be actualised in the polytechnics will not want to go there, they will go to the university and waste, so that is the problem.
So with the situations on ground, what really can you say will happen for the institutions to reopen?
Honestly, we have bend backwards, look, we have 13 issues, and in July government said it can carry out four out of the 13 issues in two weeks, now look at it from July till now how many months have passed? Government have not been able to complete the four to enable us go back to classroom, the government choose this four of its volition, now if you take four out of that 13, you still have nine of the issues still left, these issues should have been under discussion since July 2013 but they have been kept in abeyance until now. When we met with the minister the last time, we raised these issues and he said nobody was going to discuss them, he was concentrating on this issue of migration as if that was all we are talking about, even when we suggested to him to set up a working committee headed by the permanent secretary if he was too busy so that at the end we bring our proposals, the minister said no until this matter of migration is resolved but that is not the only issue, and that has been the problem, the government don’t want take issues holistically but bit by bit and when you solve one bit, the other bit comes back. We have bent backward enough because you can always make comparison in the system, there is no way you can stop making comparisons, the universities had their strike, and we were on strike before the universities. When the universities issue came on board, the government dropped everything about us and faced that of the universities, gave them everything they wanted and even paid them their allowances of about N40b and we are talking about salaries, a worker’s salary is the responsibility of his employer, allowances are complimentary, they can be negotiated but you cannot negotiate somebody’s salary and you have been short-changing people since 2009 in terms of their emoluments that they take home but you are providing N40b to pay the allowances of universities lecturers and you can’t provide N20.4b to pay for salaries of polytechnic lecturers, it doesn’t make sense to anybody least of all to people who are directly involved. That is why we are saying; let government do what any reasonable government supposed to do to show that what we are saying is not true. Our members are not happy the way we have bent so far, but we say let us give government a benefit of doubt considering the competing demands on government’s attention.
