The bottom-line of the strike action of Nigerian lecturers is money. Government says it is broke and that it cannot meet ASUU’s entire basket of demands. Is Nigeria actually broke? Or is it that government only has money to feed fat-cat politicians and their colonies of notorious rats?
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is not going on strike for the first time in the history of Nigeria. ASUU’s recurrent strike action has not solved the problems that its members highlighted to the government and to the general Nigerian public.
ASUU says government habitually reneges on promises and Agreements reached with its members. Government insists that it is doing its best possible.
Education is critical to national development. It is part of the economic jugular, a fact that successive administrations have blatantly sneezed and slumbered on in their locomotive management of stupendously endowed Nigeria.
Truth be told, Nigeria’s University system is a sinkhole that gulps money and produces nothing propelling or empowering to the Nigerian economy.
The Nigerian economy relies almost entirely on the productivity of the West’s intellectual and creative industries to sustain itself. Nigerian Universities merely churn-out graduates who, at best, end-up in offices to push the pen.
For over twenty years, Nigeria’s University system has been known for producing ramshackle graduates. Nigeria’s bloated unemployment market is a most embarrassing exhibition of substandard products of Nigerian Universities!
Productivity is the soul of economic prosperity. Productive economies have their University systems integrated into their overall production architecture.
On one hand, such designs literally plug Universities into the production-sockets of business institutions (i.e. of the private sector), by which they facilitate business growth and success within the vital context of Research and Development (R&D). This way, Universities earn income to cater for themselves, while relying on the financial obligations of their owners to also take care of their operations.
On the other hand, the design in question connects Universities to government’s nationalistic worldview and agenda, by which they (Universities) supply government with information and knowledge produced from their R&D sub-systems to keep government sound at formulating policies, law and programs that keep the country pro-active to citizens’ needs and competitive in the international community.
The decision of Nigeria’s Ministry of Education to create new Unions of lecturers to try to weaken or neutralize ASUU is nothing short of a war-strategy!
It is absolutely wrong for any government to be at war against its own citizens. It takes a pathologically irresponsible father to flog his hungry and crying child. A father should be fatherly – loving, not ruthless to his children. Whoever advised Chris Ngige, Nigeria’s Minister of Education, to create new Unions to counter ASUU advised the Minister wrongly.
Are the new Unions made-up of imported (non-Nigerian) lecturers? If yes, how does a government that says it is broke intend to pay the foreign lecturers? If no, how does the creation of new Unions avail government funds to address the challenges of Nigeria’s University system as repeatedly highlighted by Nigerian lecturers under the auspices of ASUU? Will the creation of the new Unions make the challenges afflicting our Universities disappear?
I recommend the immediate sack of Minister of Education and the Committee that he has been using to run round ASUU like a rascally boy. Ngige is a medical doctor. He should be talking to patients, cotton-wool and syringes in our hospitals, not lecturers!
New hands should be hired to decently, thoroughly and totally address the issues raised by ASUU and to also re-design our country’s University system in-line with the extant and future economic needs of the Nigerian economy.
We need high-grade human capital to drive the Nigerian economy to the lush plains of prosperity. In this wise, we need a University system that supports the creative needs of Nigerian businesses and that of foreign investors with reliable R&D and other necessaries that Universities are meant to provide to the process of national development.
