Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: State of the Nigerian Universities in PHOTOS and Our National Legislators earns N15,000,000,.00K a month!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Go to Abuja and you see Legislators buying mansions with huge monies WHILE THE UNIVERSITIE

Moses,

These pictures have gone viral thanks to Linda Ikeji's blogs (here). If you really want to be depressed and lose yourself in unending despair go past the pictures and read the comments. If you find one commentator there that can write in passable English, please share the good news with me. Nigeria is becoming a rogue state where mediocrity is at best an asymptote - people are operating at levels of unthinking that would have been inconceivable two decades ago.

As for those pictures, they sure look familiar to me. I graduated from the University of Benin in 1979 (Biochemistry). When I got there in 1976, I was awed by a beautiful place of learning. By 1979, the place was bursting at the seams, the authorities could not keep up with the enrollment. Squatting was the order of the day, and soon, decay started to set in. The Junior Staff Quarters became a slum of sorts where we all repaired to for food, and anything else that kept a student together. Again, Moses, many of those pictures, believe it or not are familiar to me. There are structural reasons why we don't seem to invest in a maintenance culture. Na today?

Thanks to social media and ASUU's critics (they are legion) people are now awake to the unspeakable damage ASUU and our rogue "government" have done to tertiary education. I have even worse news. We do not have the capacity to do what must be done to stem and then reverse the damage. Government will end up releasing money to our "reformers" and the money will be most likely looted like the funds before were looted.

The first thing to do is to cut out the bullshit. We need to get to work. We need demographers who can accurately predict enrollment trends - in each university.Every institution will need a planning unit, a maintenance unit, a facilities planning unit and a construction unit, as well as a functioning unit that handles the operating and capital budget. And a real procurement unit. Again, I ask, what makes up the N1.3 trillion number? Where are the spreadsheets per institution, per building? 

ASUU and our "government" are still operating Soviet era management techniques, top heavy, overly centralized and horribly inefficient. It is choking Nigeria's tertiary educational system. You should all be panicking. That country needs a bloody revolution. It will not happen of course. More than likely, real progress will start when the rich are through eating the poor. Nonsense.

Good night. 

 

- Ikhide

 

Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com

Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide

Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide

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From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 6, 2013 9:28 PM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: State of the Nigerian Universities in PHOTOS and Our National Legislators earns N15,000,000,.00K a month!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Go to Abuja and you see Legislators buying mansions with huge monies WHILE THE UNIVERSITIE

Tunji,

Please go back and look at the so-called agreements and MOU. Bolaji has done this discussion a great deal of good by posting them earlier. They are broad, fantastical documents of general principles based on assessed needs. They are NOT (repeat, NOT) specific in any sense. They do not address any specific infrastructural needs that affect students and learning. Did you see the section regarding the 1.3 Trillion naira? That section and others demonstrate clearly that the ASUU negotiators did not really care about the funding issue. Why should they, when they don't think students deserve a fair shake as the primary consumers of the products of our higher institutions? The so-called agreement and MOU on funding read like afterthoughts that were haphazardly cobbled together after ASUU got the specific promises and concessions regarding allowances and perks that it wanted. When it comes to the allowances, there is remarkable specificity but when it comes to the funding that ASUU claims as the centerpiece of its struggle, there is shockingly little specificity and plenty of unbelievably bureaucratic nonsense about "agreeing to recommend," agreeing " to take up with the relevant authorities," etc.

I believe in trade unions and I believe that unions have a right to negotiate better terms for their members. But I believe that unions also have a duty to make concessions and sacrifices for the continuity and improvement of the sector in which they operate, in which members earn their living. More importantly, I believe that a union should not lose sight of the human subjects (and consumers/victims) of its members' work, especially when the union wants to be seen not simply as a trade union but as a catalyst for reform.

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