"Beyond that, can it do more than make suggestions to those whose responsibility it is to run the university system?"
--Toyin
Fine, if ASUU cannot commit itself to following up on or monitoring its perennial demands for "funding" then it should strip it from its discourse, propaganda, and demand and stick to fighting for its members' welfare like most trade unions do. No need to pretend to care about these other stuff that affect students and use that pretend empathy to bolster your self-interested demands. That's plain deceptive--419 in Nigerian parlance. That's the two-facedness of ASUU, the crisis of identity I outlined earlier. You can't eat your cake and have to too, claiming to be fighting for infrastructure and the rehabilitation of the Nigerian higher education sector while recusing yourself, when challenged, from the need for making specific demands regarding the infrastructural and instructional aspects of the decay you claim to want to solve.
"Secondly, is it realistic to expect ASUU to be able to make detailed suggestions about infrastructural issues that differ across universities?"
It is disingenuous and hypocritical of you to raise this question. This is precisely why several of us (myself, Bolaji, Ikhide, and others) have made the case for ASUU's decentralization and the localization of grievance and amelioration, a suggestion that you criticized as misplaced. You cannot kick against decentralization, suggested on account of "infrastructural issues that differ across universities" and the different infrastructural and intellectual stations of each university, and then turn around to argue the same thing through your poser that a national ASUU cannot make specific suggestions about problems in individual universities or regional university clusters. You're making the argument for decentralization and localization without realizing and acknowledging it. Thank you!
"Finally, university funding has been central to ASUU demands since the 1990s when I began to follow the union's activities."
That, precisely is the point! With all the "funding" demands of ASUU since the 1990s, we still have recently taken pictures depicting student conditions and infrastructures that have have clearly deteriorated rather than improved. Does that not tell you that making ambiguous, ill-defined funding demands is a failed tactic? Does that not open up two possible explanations--that ASUU is not truly committed to the funding issue and is merely using it for PR or that the demands have been made in a haphazard manner that suggest that ASUU's true priorities lay elsewhere?
On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 7:28 AM, <chumadil@yahoo.com> wrote:
--
Toyin,
just to add to what you already said , if government is truly serious that it does not have enough money to pay University lecturers their arrears of earned allowances, then they must rotate or democratise the owing of salaries/allowances now, so that perhaps be the President, the Ministers, Legislators etc. will go without their allowances for a few years while too and ASUU paid for now. This can be repeated until such a time arrears of allowances/salaries can be eliminated completely. Its absurd to ask one group of working citizens to put up with arrears of allowances while some others receive their pay in full plus their thief-thief money.
If government is sincere about the payment of earned allowances as the claim would it take over a few days to come up with the actual figures they said they are waiting for? Or is it a case of the Federal Government plotting trick ASUU into calling off its strike so that the problem continues?
Full payment of arrears of lecturers' earned allowances should be effected immediately, then ASUU should go on to renegotiate downwards its demands on funding universities in view of any verifiable claims regarding inadequacy of funds for investment in public universities in Nigeria.
I don talk my own jare!
ChumaSent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.From: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <tovadepoju@gmail.com>Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 03:36:14 +0100To: cc: USAAfrica Dialogue<usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>ReplyTo: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.comSubject: 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 UNIVERSITIEIt may be argued that ASUU has a duty to be informed about the specifics in allowances for its members.Not only is that the union's job, such specifics can easily be defined in terms of particular parameters.Beyond that, can it do more than make suggestions to those whose responsibility it is to run the university system?Secondly, is it realistic to expect ASUU to be able to make detailed suggestions about infrastructural issues that differ across universities?It is one thing to expect more from ASUU, it is another to make sweeping, condemnatory conclusions from data that is inadequately analysed just because it fits a particular thesis to make those conclusions.Finally, university funding has been central to ASUU demands since the 1990s when I began to follow the union's activities.It is not new.Thankstoyin--On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 2:28 AM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
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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