Fwd: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winner Of The 2010 ATWS Toyin FalolaAfrica Book Award

Forwarded from Ikhide with his permission

"If you want to critique ASUU,the Academic Staff Union of  [Nigerian] Universities,please make a serious job of it.Your dismissal of ASUU as a "bunch of degreeed thugs" makes me wonder what you are referring to. I desist  from  using  stronger terms in referring to what I am convinced is an uninformed perspective from you because I am yet to see your argument against ASUU. You might have something more meaningful to state which you are holding in reserve.ASUU is on a three day strike to to protest the working conditions of universities in the South East."

Toyin Adepoju

Toyin,

Just to be clear, I am tired of academic exercises and I am not going to "critique" ASUU, whatever that means. Just to be clear ASUU is a bunch of thugs sporting PhDs. I am sure that there are a handful of good folks in it, but that in itself is a shame. They should separate themselves from that vessel of toxicity and iniquity asap. And we should disband ASUU immediately.

There is no Nigerian "student" of a Nigerian "university" that I know of who has anything nice to say about ASUU. And for good reason. Why is ASUU embarking on a 3-day strike? She should simply continue on the perpetual strike that has rendered generations of youths semi-illiterate, and brought our nation to her knees. This is the problem with us; we will not accept any responsibility for anything.

Listen to you, Toyin, the last time we talked about this, your response was way more thoughtful AND honest. It was actually refreshing. Now you are crafting hagiographies to whitewash ASUU's evil. I say it is time for the world to stop accepting "degrees" from those hovels of iniquity and squalor masquerading as Nigerian "universities." Let us face the truth, these are hardly institutions of learning by any stretch of the imagination. The real injustice is that it is overwhelmingly the children of the poor that are trapped in those "institutions" where they are screwed relentlessly (no pun intended) by amoral and unprincipled ASUU stalwarts.

I mean, the Minister for (Mis)Education says proudly that his children have to study abroad because the schools are not good enough! Where is the outrage. This is a great time to start over. First of all ban and disband ASUU, ban and disband ASUU. Shut down ALL the universities and start over. This is an outrage. Toyin, when the universities get their allocation, who is held accountable for its (mis)use? Is there any "university" in Nigeria that you know of would meet the minimum standard of accreditation anywhere else in the world? Have you seen their "hostels" lately? I have been paying hundreds of thousands of naira for my relatives' (mis)education by ASUU touts and I can tell you that there are days I wish I could sue somebody...

Toyin, I ask you to show compassion. Have you seen UNIBEN lately? Would you allow your child to step into that space? That would be child abuse! Instead of us bringing down these temples of doom we are worried about yeye terms like "Third World." And each day we slide into the "Fifth World." Na wa O! Toyin the matter is now more than an academic exercise. The political and intellectual elite have declared war on our children. I hope that our children are sufficiently incensed to fight back. To hell with ASUU.

- Ikhide

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

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From: toyin adepoju <toyin.adepoju@googlemail.com>

Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 10:19:09 +0100

To: Ikhide<xokigbo@yahoo.com>

Cc: <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>; Gloria Emeagwali<emeagwali@mail.ccsu.edu>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winner Of The 2010 ATWS Toyin Falola Africa Book Award

Ikhide,

If you want to critique ASUU,the Academic Staff Union of  [Nigerian] Universities,please make a serious job of it.

Your dismissal of ASUU as a "bunch of degreeed thugs" makes me wonder what you are referring to.I desist  from  using  stronger terms in referring to what I am convinced is an uninformed perspective from you because I am yet to see your argument against ASUU.You might have something more meaningful to state which you are holding in reserve.

ASUU is on a three day strike to to protest the working conditions of universities in the South East.Are you critiquing the rationale of the  strike? Are you critiquing the method used? I am placing at the bottom of this post a newspaper report on the conditions in those universities.

I taught in the Nigerian university system and was a member of a  branch ASUU executive in the 90s.Whatever dignity Nigerian lecturers have today was gained largely through the dogged fighting of ASUU.Through ASUU's struggles we moved from being people who struggled to feed their families to being people who could afford second hand cars with some effort,from people who were often compelled to look wistfully at second hand books without being able to afford them to people who could now buy them without too much difficulty.We moved from people dependent on paying people to type our work,often using manual and electronic typewriters, to people who could now afford computers,even if they had to be paid for by hire purchase over one year.We became people who could attend conferences within Nigeria from time to time if the income was carefully managed.

This did not imply that we could easily afford new books,most of which were published in the West and were therefore prohibitively costly on account of the exchange rates.Being able to attend conferences in Africa,let alone anywhere else, was a significant economic  achievement because not only was one not likely to get funding from the university,if it came,it could be part funding and making up the rest could be quite demanding.Being connected to the Internet could also be prohibitive on account of cost,and even then,it would be for a  few hours in the day.It required a phone line,and having a phone line was like having  a holy grail,along with the rigour of keeping it functioning in the face of technical problems from old equipment.

This was the situation as I understood it when I  Ieft there in 2003 January.

This level of  improvement was accomplished in the fact of ASUU struggles from the early 1990s when ASUU executives and their families were evicted from their homes, threatened by the government and its agents,ASUU staff  losing their jobs and going to court to get them back,threatened with imprisonment  etc. This struggle was necessary beceause almost every time whenever ASUU wanted to negotiate an improvement in conditions of universities and of academic staff,the government would dally until ASUU issued an ultimatum.After this ASUU would conduct a national debate among branches and vote on how to handle  the government's refusal to negotiate.

When I began to teach,I wondered how my teachers coped in that system.Prof.Igbafe,who had taught my parents  as a teacher training school teacher and a university lecturer,warned me of what to expect.Dr.Ogo Ofuani,my own teacher during my BA,tried hard to dissuade me from being an academic,as he was,citing  the challenges involved,but the more he tried,the more ardent I became,beceause the flames of his own disappointed love for the profession reached out to me from within those  words meant to discourage me. It was Ofuani,who,as University of Benin ASUU Secretary, who eventually got me into ASUU Uniben as Assistant Secretary,in the spirit of, "if one must be a part of a noble but challenged ideal,then one might as well be active in trying to meet those challenges".

I would like to make a better effort to  express appreciation to all those teachers at the University of Benin who gave their all to teach us in such difficult  conditions.I was able to get a very good BA with their dedicated teaching and they will forever remain in my mind.They might not have had the latest books or teaching resources but they gave of their knowledge with exemplary commitment.

With time,I appreciate that their influence is forever  imprinted   on me. Examples of this are Virginia Ola's cry that day  at a first year class on poetry,as she read to the class  Dennis Brutus's lines on his way to prison "Cold...the clammy cement sucked our naked feet...The still frosty glitter of the stars..The Southern Cross,flowering low....",leading her to declare that the poet thus refused to be submerged by his circumstances,lifting his mind to the celestial world of  the stars beyond the slough created by apartheid as represented by his imprisonment;Olu Longe's beautiful exposition of Roman Jakobson's stylistic study of language in a third year class on varieties of English, where Longe  used an expression I always repeat with delight:  "foregrounding and cohesion of foregrounding"; Mr Opene on essay composition to our second year class,where he declared "You are the artist!",complementing Steve Ogude's description of the origin of the essay as  "to assay",to experiment,to try,to explore,underscoring the exploratory and adventurous character of essay writing and suggesting the  striking example of Michel de Montaigne's use of the essay as exploratory  philosophical instrument.

Thanks

Toyin

SAVING S/EAST UNIVERSITIES FROM POSSIBLE EXTINCTION

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JOEL NWOKEOMA 01/10/2010 00:19:00

The lingering stand-off between the South-East governors and lecturers of the five state-owned universities in the region over the blatant refusal of the former to implement the agreement which was duly signed by the ASUU/FG negotiating team in October 2009 came to a head last Monday, September 6, when a peaceful protest of the aggrieved lecturers in Enugu was smashed by the police with dogs. That incident alone indicates, somewhat metaphorically, how the various state governments in the South-East perceive the protesting lecturers in particular, and university education in the region as a whole. The affected institutions include Abia State University, Uturu; Anambra State University, Uli; Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki; Enugu State University and Imo State University, Owerri.

A similar protest march by weary students union leaders drawn from the five institutions some weeks earlier in Awka, capital of Anambra State, ended up in a skirmish with anti-riot policemen and stern-looking security operatives.

The lecturers under the auspices of Academic Staff Union of Universities in the South East had embarked on an indefinite strike on Thursday, August 19, and vowed never to return to the classrooms unless the state governments commence full implementation of the signed ASUU/FG Agreement.

The Agreement outlined a negotiated minimum benchmark and standards for the university system in Nigeria which, ASUU said, must be met in order to keep the system internationally competitive. These standards, which are not just about emoluments, are in the funding of facilities for teaching and research, funding of post-graduate studies, upgrading of programmes and remediation of deficiencies. Others include collaborating with industries in the areas of research and development of technology and staff development. State governments that cannot fund their universities to meet the benchmark set up in the Agreement will find that they cannot survive in the system, ASUU stressed.

A communiqué issued by the lecturers, signed on their behalf by the ASUU chairmen in the five universities, lamented that, "It is most shameful that while other geopolitical zones are striving to make their universities excellent, state universities in the South-East are being debased, bastardized and further relegated by narrow ethnic and clannish sentiments."

The aggrieved lecturers were unequivocal that they had no issues with their respective university managements but that their grievances were premised on the unwillingness of the state governments of the affected institutions to implement a binding mutual agreement.

Interestingly, the governors who are in the eye of the raging storm seemed unperturbed by the position of the unyielding lecturers whom they accused of having "failed to consider the peculiar circumstances of individual states", whatever that means.

In a communiqué released after a meeting of the Governors' Forum in Enugu on August 22, the governors exhibited uncommon bellicosity by declaring the zonal union of ASUU as "illegal", as if its own umbrella body, the South-East Governors' Forum, is even known and recognised by any law in the country. Worst still, they maintained, and wrongly too, that the agreement between ASUU and the Federal Government "was not binding on state and private universities."

There is, however, nothing that can be as further from the truth as this claim given that the same governors complied with a subsisting agreement signed in 2008 between the Nigerian Union of Teachers and the FG on a 27.5 per cent salary increase for teachers in the country. Why, one may ask, did they not object to its implementation on the grounds that it was not "binding" on them? Or, when did they suddenly wake up to discriminating against agreements signed between national professional groups and the federal government?

Besides, this flies in the face of ASUU's position that "there would be no multiplicity of academic standards in the country" because, as ASUU President, Prof Ukachukwu Awuzie, noted, "Nigerian universities cannot be divided into low and higher institutions in the same structure. There should be just one system with one set of minimum standard." The question that naturally flows from this is: Do the South-East governors want a different system and standard for universities in their states?

The consequences of this needless altercation, obviously sustained by the intransigence of the governors, are both dire and dreadful. Sadly, while it lasts, the students are at the receiving end of what has become another manifestation of poor governance in the region. At the last count, 10 unfortunate students of Anambra State University have been reported dead while traversing from their homes to the campus to ascertain the state of the industrial dispute. This is not even mentioning the anguish of guardians and parents who watch helplessly as the academic careers of their wards and children are being jeopardised.

Another effect of the closure of the universities is that the final year students as well as the law students among them who should have been mobilised for the compulsory National Youth Service Corps scheme and law school respectively will inevitably miss out. This is not saying anything about the dire security implications of having idle and disillusioned students alongside a huge unemployed youth population loitering about in a kidnapping-ridden region especially in the run-up to the forthcoming general elections.

What appears difficult to understand is how it is only the South-East governors, a region which tends to regard education as its main industry, that are constrained in the implementation of the 2009 agreement at a time other state governors, even in regions regarded as educationally disadvantaged, do not see any qualms in doing so. Besides, how come the governors are ever willing to plead with the striking lecturers to "consider the peculiar conditions" of the zone when they themselves have shown little or no considerations at all in their abrasive show of affluence and flamboyance in power?

Suffice it to say that the South-East governors have no reason whatsoever to justify their refusal to implement the agreement if they get their priorities right. What is the sense in attempting to build a model state, as many of them claim, in an environment of palpable ignorance? Which country or state successfully developed while sidelining qualitative university education as the governors are doing? And, for a region that blazed the trail in setting up the first regional university in Nsukka in 1960, this is most unfortunate.

What makes their posture the more tragic is that they have similarly failed to confront anything of note in their respective states for the improvement of the lives of their citizens. You may recall that they had to run to Abuja seeking for federal assistance to deal with the security challenges that bedevilled the region recently claiming they were ill prepared to do so. Now, if they cannot provide security, by confronting criminals and kidnappers that have turned their states into their haven, as they themselves admitted, cannot provide jobs for their teeming unemployed population, and have also failed to improve the state of infrastructure as well as perform such routine tasks as payment of staff salaries, what do these governors do with the huge resources at their disposal?

Apparently, the crisis of development that has engulfed the South-Eastern part of Nigeria in the last decade is hinged on the poor governance evident in the region. This is exacerbated by an anti-intellectual posture by the leadership that sees education as an expendable commodity, and not as a vehicle for development and social transformation. This is the case because the wrong people are thrown up for leadership positions owing to an atrocious electoral process that does not express the wishes of the electorate.

The governors obviously owe their people the duty of saving university education in their states from imminent collapse by discarding their unhelpful hardline posture in the implementation of the agreement for better funding of their universities. It is shameful that while a State like Gombe is building a brand new ultra-modern university, Igbo governors can't even fund those established for them. Their bogus security votes, for one, can be utilised to fund these universities. They should as well explore cutting down the high cost of governance, plug the leakages and waste in their governments to free money for education. Education cannot wait while politicians are having a field day politicking and frolicking at will.

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