On Wednesday night, September 6, 2017, the Channels Television, in its programme, CORE, discussed the ongoing Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) STRIKE with a panel of well-educated Nigerian citizens including the national president of ASUU, Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili and others. The ASUU president said that their present strike action was an inevitable reaction to Federal Government’s refusal to honour and implement the 2009 agreement with ASUU, which included providing the sum of 1.3 trillion naira spread over six years to stay university education from imminent death, figuratively captured by this verse from Virgil Enid’s Caesar Gallic Wars And The Funeral Games—Caesar, salve te muraturi, which is, Caesar, we who are about to die, salute you. Dr. Ezekwesili who in a newspaper report had previously condemned the strike, was prominent in supporting Federal Government neglect of the agreement. She said that the Federal Government was always confronted with many competing demands in the face of limited financial resources. As a result, the 2009 agreement duly signed and sealed was deliberately allowed to disappear from Federal Government priority list. She was a former minister of education and whatever was her field of study in the university, she has a doctorate degree. This shows that she had a long stay in the university which should have enabled her to appreciate the pride of place, education in general and university education in particular, must enjoy in the general scheme of things. Government priority is generally a bizarre list. For example, in the face of the so called competing demands, former President Goodluck Jonathan established many new universities when the existing ones were and are still in very dire states! Jonathan cannot justify this action; even though there is the need to create more university spaces for the teeming youths seeking admission. Very ordinary common sense, dictates that it is more important to fund already existing universities to function optimally than to establish new ones. In Nigeria, we twist and mismanage many things. This has led a group to arrogate to itself the term LEARNED, when it is known that to be regarded as learned, one has to have a very versatile knowledge of philosophy, natural science and mathematics. The preponderant majority of the members of the said group are not that knowledgeable. If she belongs to this group, that may explain but cannot justify her stand.
Jonathan as a former university lecturer failed to attend to the basic needs of his constituency, the university. In the university, the Professor should be the most highly paid. The case where the registrar, bursar, librarian, director of works and others earn the same salary with professors and are called PRINCIPAL OFFICERS of the university is a misnomer. At best, they could be called PRINCIPAL ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS. If they are equal to professors, why don’t they act in the absence of the Vice Chancellor or apply to be Vice Chancellor when the post becomes vacant? We know how many stormy weathers a lecturer has to overcome to become a professor! What is more, less than 5% of the lecturers in a department or faculty are professors, the rest vegetate as lecturers till death. I know that until his death, Dr. Fred Onwodi was the only lecturer with a Ph.D in Physical Chemistry proper, in the Department of Chemistry, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Similarly, many if not all Mathematics lecturers in Nigeria, specialize in Pure Mathematics rather than in Applied Mathematics. This shows that university teaching staff materials do not litter the labour market like those of university Registrars and other administrative staff. Many a time advertisements for some academic posts are not responded to because of lack of candidates with the requisite qualifications. With administrative posts, there is always a flood of responses. A Professor has to profess for ten years in order to retire on his full salary while a permanent secretary promoted the previous day, not only retires with his full salary, but has added to his farewell package, a brand new car! I therefore suggest that Senior Lecturers should move up to the present salary of Professors, two new higher grade levels be created for Associate Professors and Professors to give the professor cadre, the cognate recognition of its worth, and prevent it from unnecessary mix up, while the salaries of Lecturer 1 and others below will be upwardly adjusted to close the vacuum created by the movement of Senior Lecturers. Also, whenever Professors retire, they should go with their full salary, be given brand new cars and the practice of giving new cars to permanent secretaries on retirement stopped, they are not a scarce or perishable commodity.
Permanent Secretaries have always appropriated all the goodies in the public service to their administrative group because they interpret and execute government policies. They have therefore, always acted out what Winston Churchill only intoned as a joke when he told his fellow leaders of the Allied Powers during the Second World War in their meeting at Potsdam where they decided to use the ATOMIC BOMB to compel the surrender of Japan. He said “History will be kind to us because we will write it.” When lecturers have not protested that Professors retire at the age of 70 while they retire at 65, there is no reason at all for the Non Academic Staff Union of Universities to demand that they should retire at 65. In civilized countries, university lecturers have no retiring age. They continue to teach and carry out research work as long as they are physically and mentally fit. Nearer home, Government established SCIENCE TEACHERS ALLOWANCE for secondary school graduate science and mathematics teachers. Other graduate teachers have not protested because the need is clear.
It appears that there is an intellectual and mental poison which afflicts many highly placed government officials. If for any reason, government foresees that it could not fulfill an agreement, it should notify the other party/parties early enough and call for a renegotiation. Government never does this. It will deliberately dishonor the agreement and aggressively turn round to accuse the victim of impatience and confrontation! As the custodians of government records, permanent secretaries ought to remind government of the fall date of agreements. If I were the head of government, I will immediately sack any minister and his permanent secretary who allow strike to take place under their portfolio. Reason, being that workers usually go on strike as a last resort after negotiations have failed and always give procedural notice.
Education, food and medical health care should be top priority in the budget and its implementation. As it is being argued that there is not enough money to care for education, government should cut its cloth according to its size by shutting off the luxuries in the budget. For example, the salary and allowances of members of the National and State Houses of Assembly, are a criminal and prodigal waste of public funds. To fix any salary, it is necessary to weigh the work content of the job. The work done by the members of the national and state houses of assembly does not justify their outrageous monthly salaries and allowances which I hear is about N3bn annually per senator according to Prof. Itse Sagay. The Federal and all the State Governments pay this offending salaries to the members of National and State houses of assembly regularly and without fail while shedding crocodile tears to explain their inability to pay the minimum wage of N18,000.00. If a revolutionary government with which I may be connected, surfaces in Nigeria, I will ensure that the members of the Wages and Income board from the time of Obasanjo’s first tenure as President and all the members of the National and State Houses of Assembly ever since, will be arrested and sent to Soviet type Siberian Labour Camp so that their hands and feet will be acquainted with the dignity of labour. To fix salaries for those paid from the public purse, the starting point is the lowliest paid. In fixing their wages, sufficient consideration should be given to provide a LIVING WAGE to enable these workers maintain a family of four children, feed them, send them to school, pay medical bills and save at least 5% of their salary for the proverbial rainy day even though, if I remember properly, Mr. Scrooge in the novel, The Christmas Carol did not see why we should save for a day we are not free to move about. It appears that always, attention is usually placed on the flamboyant prestige rather than the work content of some jobs. The most highly paid worker, the Head of State should not earn more than five/ten times the minimum wage, to bring sanity to the life style of many people paid outrageous salaries and allowances from the public purse. The budget of the Ministry of Defense should be drastically cut as we are not expecting any war, the Boko Haram insurgency notwithstanding. The stupendous budget given to the military by military regimes should stop. In this regard, the National Assembly can effectively check President Buhari, if he insists otherwise. Let me remind us that Chief Obafemi Awolowo said that money saved from inflation of contracts alone, would guarantee free education in Nigeria! We know that this is not an idle statement because Chief Awolowo’s pronouncements were always based on extensive research.
Dr. Oby Ezekwesili’s negative and antagonistic disposition to the ASUU strike may have been influenced by the mentality behind the Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) campaign which arguably, is an unnecessary and irritating propaganda. The campaign gives the impression that the government kept the Chibok girls somewhere, and if pressurized sufficiently would bring them out. Next, government should avoid sending people with superfluous aristocratic penchant to parley with labour leaders. Dr. Chris Ngige was always talking down on labour leaders even to the ASUU National President who is a Professor. Dr. Ngige spent at least six years in the university, sufficient time for him to appreciate the worth of a Professor. Even though he has the right to were rings all over his body, in Igboland where he comes from, most respectable and self-respecting males do not wear more than one ring with playboys like Charles Oputa-Charlie Boy and other playboys, being the exceptions to the rule.
One of the discussants said that the best universities in the world are privately owned and that ASUU should find a way of funding the universities. Of course, the ASUU President corrected him by saying that most of the best universities are not privately owned. Let me add by pointing out that OXFORD, CAMBRIDGE, STUTGART, COLOGNE, MIT and HARVARD UNIVERSITIES which are some of the leading universities in the world if not government owned may be independent yet substantially or completely funded by government. I also wish to remind him that the lecturers were employed to teach and do research work and not to fund or be the proprietors of universities. Where government business is handled patriotically and responsibly, education is not witch hunted as is the case in Nigeria. Because of its populist and responsible disposition, CUBA has the highest standard of literacy in the world, near 100%, in spite of the capitalist and imperialist inspired crushing economic antagonism by America.
When the first generation of Igbo traders ventured out of their home land in search of money achieved their ambition, they noticed a big handicap, lack of education. They there and then decided that those coming after them would not suffer the same affliction and established scholarship programs in their Town Unions to sponsor their young ones to obtain education locally and abroad. This resulted in reducing significantly within a short time, the educational gap between the Yorubas and the Igbos which alarmed the Yorubas. This event was graphically described by Emeritus Professor Chinua Achebe in his booklet- The Trouble With Nigeria where he said “Although the Yoruba had a huge historical and geographical head-start, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950 …’ The semi illiterate traders knew the value of education and gave it the necessary attention. The Nigerian Government is not yet convinced that education is an unavoidable necessity. This attitude of semi illiterate Igbo traders is what the core North, that is the Hausa/Fulani needs. Not arresting the development of other parts of the country by declaring their area, educationally disadvantaged while lavishing their money and time on SHARIA, building mosques and pursuing Arabic education!
When government has done the needful, it has to visit the rot in the universities since the Vice Chancellors and their teams appear to be helpless. At the University of Nigeria, EDUCATION started as a department in the faculty of Arts. It has now grown to be the biggest FACULTY in that university. It has many departments, including Mathematics Education, Chemistry Education Physics Education, and others. For example, the Department of Physics and Astronomy does not have enough lecturers, well equipped laboratories and technical staff to power the teaching of PHYSICS. How then can a tangential department like the Department of Physics Education cope as far as the teaching of PHYSICS is concerned. The wild claim by this education people is that they teach you how to teach PHYSICS. This is utter falsehood. You need to know enough PHYSICS to be able to dispense it to any level. It is my considered opinion that the wings of this Faculty of Education need to be clipped and backloaded to the Faculty of Arts as one department. This, as in many other cases of unnecessary academic units, will make a lot of savings to the university.
What an atrocious monstrosity: Presently, people who need to be taught are being engaged as lecturers! Another example is to be found in a university where one of the final year students took a course outside his department. The lecturer who taught this course, returned a grade D pass for that student. When the lecturer packaging the results of the final year students saw this, he accosted the other lecturer, told him that the student in question was one of their first class hopefuls and asked him to remark the paper or he would take the matter to the Vice Chancellor. The lecturer took the paper and finally returned a grade A pass. I raised this matter because if this had happened to a mediocre student, nobody would fight for him even if he deserved an A grade. All these lecturers suffering from many debilities, like unsuitability to be a university lecturer in the first place, sexual harassment of female students, commercialization of marks and others should be sacked promptly.
With all these untoward tendencies rearing their ugly heads, especially the archaic stubborn indifference of the presidency to public opinion on crucial and critical issues such as herdsmen terrorist menace which is yet to be captured by Defense Headquarters’ radar in spite of the photographs of Fulani herdsmen bearing AK 47 riles being awash in the print media, inequity in state allocation to the South East Zone, the non-inclusion of Ndigbo to head any unit in the recent reorganization of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company and many others, education is only waiting to fail in Nigeria. Before the darkness falls, as Peter Pan said in one of his last articles as the editor of Daily Times just before Easterners were compelled to seek safety in flight to Eastern Region in 1966, let me advert the attention of all concerned, particularly the government, that EDUCATION IS NOT ONLY A PRIMARY BUT ALSO A COMPLEX INDEX OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT.
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Mazi Chike Chidolue
B.sc hons. Physics, university of Biafra, 1967
Industrial Physicist
fmr. Officer, 12 Commando Brigade, Biafra Army.
E-mail: cchidolue@gmail.com
