Between 1999 and the end of 2021, the Academic Staff Union of Universities went on strike for 60 months and seven days. As for 2022, it’s more than five months and still counting, unfortunately.
ASUU affiliates namely Senior Staff Association of Nigeria Universities (SSANU), Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU), and National Association of Academic Technologies (NAAT) have also joined the strike; thereby turning Nigeria’s public universities into ghost towns.
The belated N2 million monthly salary and other allowances recommended for professors by the renegotiating committee led by Prof Nimi Briggs do not seem to impress ASUU and its affiliates.
Yesterday, The Nigeria Labour Congress commenced a two-day sympathy strike with ASUU “to bring our children back to school and support our unions fighting for quality education in Nigeria’s public universities.” The Council of Student Union Presidents is threatening to join the strike.
When the ASUU Chairman of the Federal University of Technology, Minna, Dr Gbolahan Bolarin, announced that the National Executive Council of ASUU would be meeting on August 1, 2022, he gave no assurances that the strike would be called off.
The earliest that anyone can remember of Nigerian university lecturers going on strike was in the early 1970s when military Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, ordered the dons to vacate their official residences if they wouldn’t go back to work.
The beef between the Federal Government and ASUU has been a seesaw of sorts, with series of Memoranda of Agreement and Understanding usually ending up being observed in the breach.
A Memorandum of Agreement was signed so that between 2009 and 2011 each federal university would get N1.5trn annually, while state-owned universities will receive N3.6m annually per student.
A Memorandum of Understanding agreed in 2013 dwelled on pretty much the same issues of condition of service, funding, university autonomy, academic freedom and administrative matters.
The details were a separate salary structure, called Consolidation University Academic Salary Structure II, a reiteration of the N1.5trn payable to federal universities and the N3.6m payable to state universities for each student they admit.
Others are autonomy of universities academic freedom and stringent criteria for would-be members of university councils, to include having a regular, and not an honorary, university degree, proven integrity, and being knowledgeable and familiar with affairs and traditions of the university system.
The other agreed issues were an Implementation Monitoring Committee for the Agreement to enable the government to meet its obligations to ensure swift amendment to relevant enabling laws and the release of the funds.
The Memorandum of Understanding of 2017 was on the funding of government universities, payment of Earned Academic Allowances of lecturers, government accepting responsibility for staff schools, payment of the pension of professors and salary shortfalls.
The 2019 Memorandum of Agreement was on the full implementation of the 2013 Agreement, payment of salary shortfalls of the University of Agriculture, Makurdi, part-payment of arrears of EAA up to 2018, and mainstreaming of EAA into annual budgets, beginning from 2019.
Other agreements were the strengthening of the Consultative Committee on state-owned universities, government approval for Nigeria Universities Pension Management Company, appointment of visitation committees to universities, documentation of guidelines on procedures and roles of partners in the process of renegotiating FGN-ASUU Agreement of 2009.
The Federal Government, which serially fails to fulfil its part of the agreements soon after ASUU agrees to return to the classroom, appears to lack the wherewithal to consummate the agreements, or is just playing games with the union.
One sore area of disagreement is the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System introduced by the Federal Government to pay the salaries of all government officials, and the alternative University Transparency and Accountability Solution offered by ASUU.
IPPIS enrolls government workers for the payment of salaries from the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federation. Its justification is that it ensures high integrity and can prevent the enlistment of ghost workers.
UTAS is ASUU’s argument that university lecturers’ jobs are peculiar and unlike other government employment. It captures employment, retirement, sabbatical leave, adjunct and part-time engagements and other issues unique to the university system.
But the Federal Government, through the Director General of National Information Technology Development Agency, Kashifu Inuwa, claimed that UTAS failed its integrity test and couldn’t be adopted to pay salaries.
But the teacher in the ASUU President, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke, countered that because NITDA confirmed that UTAS at least scored 85 per cent on the User Acceptance Test conducted by NITDA, it has, therefore, passed the integrity test.
The other day, the nonagenarian friend of yours truly, shared his thoughts on the crisis that doesn’t appear to have a solution, but is gradually looking like a trade dispute that is getting cancerous by the day.
First he enumerated elements of the ‘grundnorm’ for engagement between labour and management of a corporate organisation, as prescribed by the International Labour Organisation.
It is that an organisation has the right to provide whatever goods or services it likes and can also establish its works wherever it chooses, without union interference. No employer or management staff can be a union member. So he thinks a professor is too senior to be a union member, or be its leader.
He thinks there must be sanctity of agreements between employer and union; a principle that the government seems to enjoy flouting. He argues that force majeure or an act of God may legally void agreements, and insists that both the management and the union must commit to finding solutions to disputes between them, and can neither enforce nor extract agreements under duress.
He insists that there must be full disclosure of the consequences of all actions by both parties, the way Miranda rights are read to a suspect that he has a right to keep silent and refrain from making possible self-incriminating statements until he gets a lawyer.
He wonders why the government ends up paying lecturers who have been absent from work due to strike, whereas Section 43 of Nigeria’s Trade Dispute Act provides that a worker shall not be entitled to any wage or any remuneration for the period that he is absent from work on strike.
But if the Federal Government would like to invoke that law, it must be sure that it could not be held culpable for causing the strike. It’s a case of he who must come to equity must come with clean hands.
ASUU’s grouse is that the Federal Government serially reneges on agreements it freely entered into to increase funding to the universities whose student population keeps ballooning as Nigeria’s population increases.
The government needs to come clean and tell the dons what it can, or cannot, do, and get ASUU and other educational unions on a 10-year moratorium promising that there will be no strikes, while the government declares a Marshall Plan to rehabilitate the tertiary educational system.
The state governments should negotiate with the unions and not be compelled to adopt agreements that they did not participate in making. Kudos to the Oyo State Governor, Seyi Makinde, for engaging stakeholders on the participation of the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology’s Chapter of ASUU in the ongoing strike.
Maybe the Federal Government should just humour the University of Ibadan ASUU Chairman, Prof Ayo Akinwole, who suggested that the implementation of the renegotiated ASUU-FG Agreement should end the strike.
Meanwhile, it looks too much as if the government is anti-intellectual.
