Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Senator Adeyeye responds to ASUU

Ogugua,

At this point I have to wonder if you're up to some mischief, since you chose to completely ignore everything I wrote and and go on a tedious tangent. You can't even take yes for an answer, as though you're simply hungry for a debate. You're are largely debating with yourself now since I began my post by saying I agree with you on everything you said about the government's failings, waste, corruption, etc. The Senantor clearly does too, going by his write-up. I don't waste my intellectual energies on the government. The government has enough critics, and there is no critique of the Nigerian government that is new or breaks new ground. One gets jaded after a while. But I digress.

You are completely wrong when you insinuate that Senator Adeyeye has not criticized the NAtional Assembly's excesses and outrageous compensation culture. Just plain wrong. For goodness sake, even his rejoinder to the ASUU fellow is dripping with radical, courageous criticism of the waste and corruption that plagues the government and the national assembly. To boot, it recommends very radical measures for curbing the compensation of National Assembly members and public office holders. Did you even bother to read his piece, or my piece before putting finger on keyboard? You're making the same mistake as Dr. Ajiboye, the ASUU official who attacked Adeyeye for using public funds and his national assembly jumbo pay to send his children abroad for education without first doing a basic background check, which would have revealed to him that Adeyeye left Nigeria in 1980 with his family, twenty years before he entered politics and that his children would have advanced in their various educational and professional pursuits by the time he entered politics in 1999. 

In your case, you categorically stated that 1) Senator picked on ASUU first or that "he has chosen to start with ASUU"; and 2) that he has not criticized the corruption and profligacy in public governance and among his colleagues in the national assembly. Both claims are categorical falsehoods. The first claim is easy to demolish since Senator Adeyeye has been at the forefront of the struggle for probity in the National Assembly since 1999, proving that ASUU is not his first target. Before now, I don't even remember him ever criticizing the union, at least not publicly. Conversely, he criticized his colleagues on the floor of the House several times for their excessive pay and perks, and for the Ghana-Must-Go culture of corruption that routinely plagued the House between 1999 and 2007. There are press clippings to testify to this if you care to go into the archive. Along with Hon. Uche Onyeagocha and one or two other progressive members of the House whose names I cannot recall, he protested loudly against the House leadership and his colleagues when the first Fourth Republic legislative scandal broke over furniture allowances. They were the so-called "trouble maker" caucus in the House, the spoilers detested by their colleagues for foiling and protesting against malfeasance and corrupt deals in the House. Adeyeye was not only a thorn in the flesh of his colleagues, he constantly railed on the floor of the House and in media interviews about waste, excessive compensation packages, and corruption in public governance. Yes, he and Comrade Uche Onyeagocha were outnumbered by their greedy colleagues and were never able to effect the radical anti-corruption and accountability reforms they envisioned for the House, but they at least never stopped protesting their colleagues excesses. Not only that, I remember that tiny caucus declining to participate in foreign travels, allowances, and perks they deemed questionable and excessive. They didn't just talk the talk, they walked it too. For me that's courage.

When the Third Term bribery scandal broke, most legislators were coy on the details and nature of the bribe loot. Not Adeyeye. He was one of a few who took to television and the airwaves to reveal the details of the bribing and how he turned down the money, all this at a time when OBJ and his folks were denying any bribery related to Third Term. When Nuhu Ribadu, Obasanjo's hatchet anti-corruption man publicly denied that huge bribes had been offered to legislators to induce their acquiescence to the Third Term gambit, it was Professor Adeyeye who publicly debunked Ribadu's claim and challenged the latter to a public televised debate on the subject. Ribadu never took him up on the offer.

Senator Adeyeye may not have been as vocal in the senate as he was in his two terms in the House, but to his credit he has not partaken in the outrageous perks either. Which is precisely why he has the moral and ethical standing and courage to criticize that culture in his write-up and to call for radical cuts to the pay of public officials and legislators, himself included. 

The man has earned his stripes and along with them the right to criticize an increasingly disruptive and misguided body like ASUU. It is easy and cheap to stay on the outside and take pot shots at politicians, bureaucrats, legislators and others inside the system. We all do it because it is easy, comes with no cost, and is no act of courage. What is not easy and denotes courage is to be an insider and be able to muster the gumption to criticize the system and one's colleagues. That's what Senator Adeyeye has CONSISTENTLY done since entering public life. I am pretty sure he has his failings like the rest of us but I know of no other Nigerian politician who is capable of playing this courageous role of an insider critic, a role which comes with costs that are both pecuniary and relational. And I know of no other politician in the Fourth Republic who has rejected excess salaries and perks and/or has donated the excess portion of their jumbo pay to charity and constituent projects as the Senator is doing. In Nigeria we prefer blanket labels that do not isolate cases that buck the narrative. And, of course, we see critics as enemies. That is one of ASUU's many foibles. They won't even take some responsibility for the obviously poor state of teaching in our universities, a reality that continues to doom the future of most of our university-going youths.

So far during this FG-ASUU wahala, ASUU and its members have blamed the following for the poor state of instruction in our universities and for the production of poor graduates: 1) Funding, 2) the NUC giving out fake or undeserved accreditations, 3) students who are distracted by ipads and ipods!!! No soul searching on the part of ASUU and its members, no taking of responsibility, absolutely no self-critique, and no self-critical conversations about improving the standards of instruction that would demand more from ASUU members.

Criticizing the government is the easiest thing a Nigerian can do. Criticizing a union like ASUU takes courage and conviction. I commend Adeyeye for the courage. He is criticizing both sides, apportioning blames and folly on both sides. He has not spared his colleagues or the system in which he operates. That, along with the fact that he is in solidarity with ASUU on the funding issue, should blunt any attempt to portray him as an ASUU-hating politician.

And to close, I am forced to ask what you'd do differently if you were in Adeyeye's position, resign from the senate--or stay away entirely from politics? Would that not amount to abandoning the prison to the prisoners? Is it inherently wrong to go into politics, to be a politician? Is public service a domain that academics should not venture into? I read your post and I can't quite understand what you expect of Senator Adeyeye. If you don't agree with his criticism of ASUU, fine. But you have failed to demonstrate what it is that you think he is doing wrong. 

The FG-ASUU agreement that you speak of has been litigated extensively on this forum and found not to be a cut and dried document that you and a few other folks portray it as. In fact because it started life as an ambiguous set of general principles, it has been the subject of review and renegotiation before--in 2012, a process that resulted in the oft-cited MOU. I lived in Michigan and I now live in Tennessee, states with a strong auto workers union,  and I know that the auto workers union routinely renegotiate signed contracts with the auto companies, with the former often giving concessions to the auto companies in the overall interest of the industry's survival and in the full knowledge that certain demands and aspects of signed contracts are either unimplementable or are too vague to be considered binding. In that spirit, Adeyeye is not saying that the government should repudiate agreements with ASUU; he is saying that in implementing these agreements, which are vague and open to multiple interpretations, each side should give some ground and that ASUU in fact should rethink some of its more unreasonable demands. What is wrong with this? After all, are the two sides not mostly haggling over how, when, and at what pace to implement the general principles already agreed upon?

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 5:12 PM, Anunoby, Ogugua <AnunobyO@lincolnu.edu> wrote:

Has the Senator ceased to be an academic? He calls himself professor does he not? He should start by exemplifying his righteousness with the corrupt elite group that he apparently is part of should he not? When and how often have you heard or read that he preached/preaches to his colleagues and other leeches in government on their profligate practice of public governance and betrayal of trust? Why has he chosen to start with ASUU?  "They" traditionally pick soft targets/victims  do they not? Thank goodness ASUU is not a too-soft one. The Igbo say that true beauty starts from the inside. Righteousness should too.

Who is to say that the National Assembly does not have a higher annual budgetary allocation than Nigeria's tertiary  education sector does, if all the Assembly's members' cryptic financial steals are properly booked and reported? Why does the National Assembly not insist that all in government keep all transactions' books properly and sanction violators? The Senator knows that that government cannot afford to keep an agreement it entered freely with ASUU, signed without duress, and announced to the Nigerian public. He does not seem to know however, that Nigeria cannot afford the cost and nature of government that he has been proudly part of. Is this ignorance of his one of convenient choice? We know of course that awareness and knowledge can be conveniently a'la carte for perfunctory politicians.

 

oa

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 12:44 PM

To: USAAfricaDialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Senator Adeyeye responds to ASUU

 

Yes, yes, and yes, to all that you wrote above. But you seem to have completely missed the overarching point that Adeyeye was making, which is distilled in a single sentence, which I am reproducing here: "our task [as academics] is to curb needless privileges rather than add to them."

 

And that is the point, that academics should not be comparing themselves with politicians, or their pay and benefits to politicians.' In the US, academics never reference politicians' remuneration in discussing their needs or greivances. During the economic meltdown, state legislators were cutting and slashing allocation to state universities. Did they cut their own pay and perks? No. In fact many state legislators increased their perks in the midst of the recession, causing public outrage. Yet in lamenting the cuts to public universities' budgets by states, I never once heard or read academics reference the salaries or perks of those responsible for the cuts--state legislators. That's because they knew that it would be a losing argument, a form of self-indictment when you begin to draw comparisons between your needs and what is recognized all over the world as politicians' penchant for awarding themselves outrageous benefits while denying same to regular citizens. Nigeria may be an egregious instance of this, but it is global phenomenon.

 

Academics and their expectations and tastes are not supposed to mirror those of politicians. If your value system mirrors that of politicians, you should never have entered academia to begin with. Which is precisely the problem in Nigerian higher education: the system is filled with many folks who don't belong there, who don't subscribe to the humanistic values of academia, who are motivated solely by pecuniary impulses, and who, as a result, frame their demands and priorities using baselines established by profligate politicians and their fiscal conducts.

 

Senator Adeyeye, to his credit, has been a lone voice in the national assembly, beginning from his days in the House of Rep, calling for a radically downward review of salaries, allowances, and benefits for legislators and office holders. When he won the senatorial election two years ago, he publicly declared in a Saharareporters interview that, given his well known objection to the outrageous salaries and perks of legislators, he would take from his senate salary what he would have been earning as a Professor in the US and donate what is left to his community/constituent in the form of projects and charity. He is the only federal legislator to my knowledge who has made such a public declaration. 

 

He has again declared that advocacy of pay cut for legislators and political officers in the write-up under discussion. Quite courageous if you ask me. He cannot be called a hypocrite on this matter. And he cannot be portrayed as a typical politician, as intolerant ASUU officials are trying to do, because he is not a typical politician. He is a heterodox political figure bucking and upending the trend. If anything, he is being very modest as some of us know the fight that he and people like Hon. Uche Onyegocha fought against corruption in the House of Rep between 1999 and 2003. How many of us will be able to maintain our moral and ethical commitments in the orbit of a corrupt, rotten institution like the Nigerian senate? I particularly like the fact that senator Adeyeye is not behaving in a politically opportunistic manner in regard to the strike, especially as an opposition who could have easily slammed the FG's handling of the crisis and aligned himself opportunistically with ASUU as many opposition figures have already done to score political points. This, to me, shows courage and conviction. 

 

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:13 AM, Anunoby, Ogugua <AnunobyO@lincolnu.edu> wrote:

"He (Senator Adeyeye) is saying what some of us without loyalty to ASUU have been saying---that some of the demands and expectations of ASUU are simply unreasonable, even outrageous when juxtaposed with academic cultures all over the world… Sometimes I wonder what some of these demands and expectations are modeled on.  "

 

Mo

 

It is heartening to know that the Senator has something to say about the " demands and expectations" of a tiny, tiny, select, leechy minority of Nigerians- legislators and other public officials whose demands and expectations are equally "outrageous ( or even worse) when juxtaposed with public service cultures all over the world " and are met without fail?  Many Nigerians and I sometimes wonder what some of those demands and expectations all of which are regularly met out of government budgets, regardless of budgetary constraints and stresses are modeled on.

 

oa

 

oa    

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Monday, October 28, 2013 11:49 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Senator Adeyeye responds to ASUU

 

Okay o, di show don start o. I'm happy that our progressive friend, Senator Sola Adeyeye has waded into this matter with commonsensical, constructive suggestions and reasoned critiques of the ASUU position.

 

I know Professor Adeyeye personally, and he cannot be branded an establishment person or a hater of ASUU. He is calling it as he sees it. He is saying what some of us without loyalty to ASUU have been saying---that some of the demands and expectations of ASUU are simply unreasonable, even outrageous when juxtaposed with academic cultures all over the world. Sometimes I wonder what some of these demands and expectations are modelled on. I know we like to copy things from other climes and cite academic conventions from the West as gold standards of compensation, but most of the remunerative demands and innovations that ASUU has pushed and continues to push are alien to American, British, Canadian, and other Western academic systems.

 

I agree with Senator Adeyeye "that the implacable demands by ASUU are fueled by resentment at the cult of obscene privileges which Nigerian politicians have become." However, this comparison is misleading and misguided, for as Senator Adeyeye stated, "our task [as academics] is to curb needless privileges rather than add to them"

 

 I hope that Dr. Ajiboye will take Senator Adeyeye up on his challenge to debate the ASUU-FG problem on prime time Television. It would go a long way to enlighten the public and cut through the all the sophistry.

 

On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Ikhide <xokigbo@yahoo.com> wrote:

"First, the National Assembly of Nigeria should henceforth appropriate at least 26% of Nigeria's current revenue to education alone. Second, Government in Nigeria, especially the Federal Ministry of Education, has been denigrated into a beast of burden. The metastasis of asphyxiating bureaucracy demands the streamlining of the endless parastatals that drain resources while making little or no contribution to national well-being and progress. Third, to raise revenue for funding a national redemption program in education, all imports should attract a mandatory education tax of one percent. Fourth, beginning from January 1, 2014 till December 31, 2018, all workers in Nigeria must contribute 5% of their income as education taxes. Embezzling any amount of these revenues targeted for education should be taken as an act of treason. This should attract the most severe penalty such as impeachment, imprisonment and perhaps death penalty. Fifth, the costs for running the offices of all elected and appointed political office holders should immediately be pruned by 50%. Something tells me that the implacable demands by ASUU are fueled by resentment at the cult of obscene privileges which Nigerian politicians have become. But our task is to curb needless privileges rather than add to them."

- Senator Sola Adeyeye

 http://xokigbo.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/senator-sola-adeyeye-responds-to-asuu/

 

- Ikhide

 

Stalk my blog at http://www.xokigbo.com/

Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide

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

 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

 

--
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.


---Mohandas Gandhi

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

 

--
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.


---Mohandas Gandhi

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.


---Mohandas Gandhi

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.