When Moses Ochonu or Farooq Kperogi or Toyin Falola or Olayinka Agbetuyi write on ASUU, they will approach the discourse from different perspectives and end up reaching slightly different conclusions regarding potential solutions going forward. Their presentations could be harsh or mild based on personal style and they would each make valuable points but NONE of them would be entirely correct in their opinion. Yet, what unites them is that they are all passionate about improving the state of higher education (universities) in Nigeria. None of them would be doing it from the perspective of seeking to bring down ASUU or its members. This is where I have a serious problem with many ASUU members. For most uncritical ASUU members, you are either entirely in (for them) or entirely out (against them), as they are mostly completely intolerant of dissenting views. This groupthink has become idiosyncratic of discourse in ASUU matters.
One recurring problem with unrepentantly pro ASUU academics is that they often refuse to engage in any self-reflection. They often refuse to consider alternative views. They often gloat in self-righteousness. The only time the majority of them are at peace with you is when you are condemning the government or you find no fault in their approach. It is why many hard core ASUU champions are generally pleased with Moses in any opinion piece where he is calling out the government. But I digress, the point really is we mostly agreed that the government is inept and unreliable in how they deal with issues of national importance. That did not start in 2005 or even 1999, it has been with us. We are, therefore, not dealing with the government in these ASUU discussions.
The way some ASUU members generally refuse to examine any opposing view, any alternative position and any suggestion that is different from the core ASUU directives I do personally find appalling. This idea that you cannot speak on ASUU and university education issues (even if you are a Nigerian) just because you are in the diaspora or because you did not have your education in Nigeria or that you live in comfort is reductionist and red herring.
I have always wanted to know ASUU's position on the following:
· Sexual harassment (why is it wrong to call out ASUU on this?)
· Plagiarism
· Publishing in predatory journals
· Corrupt staff recruitment and promotion
· Violations of students rights and unethical treatment of students
Why do colleagues turn on a writer who asks these important questions? We have discussed ASUU far too many times on this platform and we would again and again. We do it for the love of ASUU and for love of country.
I do have more questions, just so I can regain my clarity and become better informed.
· Why should ASUU members receive full salaries for 9 months for work they did not do? Within the current Nigerian laws it is explicit no one should be paid if they did not work. Now it is 9 months not 9 days. Is the government right or wrong violating its own laws by paying ASUU? There were some ASUU members boasting on social media and posting different activities they have been engaging in for money during those nine months. I have been on strike about 11 times in the last 16 years and I did not receive a dime.
· Why does ASUU coerce (not picketing) non members during strike? What is the view of members to democratise the union(s)? Why should we not allow members to opt-in rather than opt-out of ASUU, for instance, so we can see genuine commitment of "members".
Finally, I am convinced nobody hates ASUU or its members, I believe everyone just loves to see the university system better functional. That universities have shut down for a total of 4 years and 3 months in since 1999 is beyond embarrassing. That is more than the tenure of one elected government. The method that ASUU has used for a while has worked up to a point and has been helpful for universities development in Nigeria. But, it no longer works and far too many people who should know have called out ASUU on this. The continuous refusal of ASUU to even consider changing strategy and propensity of ASUU warriors labelling their peers elsewhere as a result of such calls is what I personally find frustrating.
I recently argued this elsewhere, posted on this forum last Christmas – see https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2020/12/24/asuu-as-abiku-ogbanje-the-need-to-democratise-and-reposition-our-unions-by-gbolahan-gbadamosi/
Gbolahan Gbadamosi
--
I think one fact in this rejoinder that I agree with is the role of a centralised ASUU in a 21 century deregulated university system in Nigeria. I know Marxist conscious scholars like Prof Olorode might disagree with this position but it is a fact of our life now: this capitalist oriented way of running a national university system.
It means conditions of service in stratas and sectors of university systems can no longer be the same.
But are there common problems that require joint and centralised response? Yes there are. Has ASUU as trade union group the right to fight for common problems of its members? Yes it does. Should all ASUU issues be centrally handled or are there scopes for localised chapters? Yes there are.
I still maintain that neither can we blame only one side in a 3 sided game ( government as ASUU does, or ASUU as Moses does) for problems on the rule of engagement without rigorous research to justify our position.
ASUU may have won salary and funding concessions in the past 3 decades that are now meaningless in todays cost of education and inflationary trend to consider them no longer effectual and needing re-negotiation which government may no longer be willing to undertake for obvious reasons.
This is why I stated earlier that we are putting the cart before the horse. A blue print for managing the university system in the 1940s and 50s must be jettisoned for a new one drawn up for universities in the 21st century mid- wifed and umpired by a University Ombudsman to make sure that each side keeps to the bargain ( including academic standards verified by accreditation panels) or penalties be imposed on negligent sides before and to forestall strikes.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>Date: 18/01/2021 16:53 (GMT+00:00)To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Problem of ASUU and the Way Forward
Tunde,
Thanks for your points. I don't agree with many of them because they merely rehash the familiar alibis of funding and poor salaries, which have since been discredited as major causative factors in the depressing deterioration in standards, pedagogy, research, mentorship, and other indicators.
Are you serious when you wrote that the last strike was not so successful because the government misinformed the public and turned Nigerians against ASUU? First of all, is that not a spectacular confession of failure on the part of ASUU? You are basically saying that a government as incompetent in political and policy communication (among other things) as the Buhari regime beat ASUU, a body of smart professors and PhDs, in the messaging game and scuttled your strike with a rhetorical counter effort. If this is true then ASUU is a more clueless and dysfunctional union than I thought, and the crisis is deeper than I assumed.
Secondly, if you could have the self-reflexivity to step outside your ASUU bubble for a moment, you'd see clearly that it wasn't government propaganda that did the strike in. Rather, it was a combination of two factors, both of them ASUU's fault. ASUU miscalculated in declaring a strike during the COVID lockdown when Nigerians (including students and their parents) were dealing with the existential anxieties of a global pandemic and its economic fallouts. In the history of bad timing, the ASUU strike has got to be one of the worst.
The second factor is that the ASUU message simply failed to resonate with a jaded Nigerian public. It failed to resonate because it is past its sell-by date. Nigerians no longer buy the perennially recycled rhetoric of "the problems in the university sector will be solved by increased funding and better salaries and allowances for lecturers." Ironically, it is the success of ASUU in the last thirty years in winning significant increases in funding, salary, and allowances that has made the point that there is a negative correlation between improved funding and salaries/allowances on one hand and the quality of research and pedagogical output on the other.
Falola sent me a rejoinder he received to my ASUU piece this morning. Let me share my response to him here:
On funding, the tone-deafness is even more outrageous. Over the last three decades, ASUU has won significant increases in funding, salaries, and allowances. The question is, in that period, has ASUU members taught better, designed better courses, attended class more often, researched better, published better works, supervised their students' research and theses better, produced better graduates, stronger, more competitive PhDs, raised the overall academic standards in universities, reduced sexual predation of students, read students' chapters and provided feedback quicker, and stopped exploiting their students and turning them into errand boys and girls? These are rhetorical questions of course because we all know that the answer is no.
So if increases in funding and allowances and salaries over thirty years, thanks to ASUU activism, have not resulted in improved teaching, research, and mentorship, does that not say clearly that funding and salary increases have not and will not halt the calamitous decline in academic and ethical standards? Does it not tell us that we should shift the narrative to other glaring causative factors in which lecturers are directly inculpated? But lecturers would not accept blame or responsibility for anything. They are blaming everyone but themselves. They blame the government, NUC, students, parents, society, politicians, etc. Everyone but themselves. They are now even blaming Nigerian scholars in diaspora for their failings. Imagine!!!
By the way, the interlocutor in question began his paragraph on sexual harassment thus: "it should be noted also that sexual harassment is not peculiar to universities alone. The ugly menace pervades all strata of society." Why should I take anyone seriously when they begin their comment on sexual predation in Nigerian universities by saying "sexual harassment is not peculiar to universities? This defensive premise turns the reader off because you know what's coming: more justificatory escapism and denialist platitudes. And nothing is said about ASUU's opposition to the sexual harassment bill proposed in the National Assembly.
Finally, you stated that there are no alternatives to crippling and increasingly counterproductive national strikes. There are. What needs to happen as a first order reform is for ASUU to decentralize its most consequential decisions and actions, including strikes. National strikes in academic settings are a relic of a bygone era, as is the idea of setting a single, uniform salary/allowance band for all public universities.
All universities are not the same and do not or should not have the same missions. All states and regions are not the same in financial capacity, developmental aspirations, and religious and philosophical orientations. Not all universities should thus be subjected to conditions and terms they cannot fulfil or that are out of sync with the missions and priorities of the states and regions they're located in or that established them.
These variations should inflect how universities are conceived and run in each state and/or regional clusters. The ASUU struggle needs to move to these local terrains accordingly and deal with the peculiar challenges and demands of each institution, state, region, and conception of what higher education should do in a particular geographical and societal context. When there is a need for industrial action, it should be animated by these local and localized issues.
For goodness sake, why is ASUU embarking on a national strike and closing down all public universities in 2020 and doing so to enforce and demand uniform conditions and perks? Why should all public university academics in the entire country be paid uniform salaries and allowances based on rank? Why is ASUU afraid of merit pay and merit pay raises, even if this is established in addition to agreed-upon salary bands? Is the uniformalization of salaries and other entitlements not one of the primary disincentives to pedagogical and research excellence in Nigerian universities? Does that model not engender mediocrity? How do you justify such an outmoded template of academic unionism in 2021?
I have been writing on ASUU for almost 15 years now and have in my various interventions suggested various alternatives to strikes, but the foundational reform that needs to happen is to first abandon the idea of the one-size-fits-all-universities unionism.
As to your other tired excuses and rationalizations for the rot, and your comparative references to conditions in the Western academy, I leave you with two short sentences posted by my Egbon, Professor Adeleke Adeeko, this morning on the African Doctoral Lounge page on Facebook:
1) Scholarship is hard everywhere2) Location should not be a tenable alibi for not doing the necessary hard work
Cheers
--On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 7:35 AM 'tunde jaiyeoba' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
--Prof Ochonu,
Your problem of ASUU and the way forward is well taken.
I have a few issues to raise.
You summarised that strikes have not been effective but you did not prescribe options to strike. Then if ASUU strikes have not been effective because government never fulfils promises, is that ASUUs sole fault?? Please have you studied what our neighbours- Ghana or even Republic of Benin and other developing countries are doing in their Universities to make them stable. Why do Nigerian academics prefer to move to Ghana, Botswana, Kenya, South Africa, even Republic of Benin and other African countries than work in Nigeria? You know there is no time i wont have to ask this question; have you ever being an academic in Nigeria?
Your proposed solutions centre on how ASUU can have positive evaluation by the public. That is not plausible. The public that is so misinformed and manipulated by our politicians and cannot vote in competent people into governance. Why do you think ASUU strikes have achieved so little according to you. Is it not because government and those that should respond play "deaf and dumb" to the issues of tertiary education? Please mention a few recent things that have come up in the Nigerian University system that was not a fall out of ASUU strike.
Also, I notice that when we are discussing about limitations within the Nigerian context and serious problems of being an academic in Nigeria you rarely contribute. Issues that are taken for granted even in African countries and a major part of the developing world like power supply and access to publications are significant problems in Nigeria. Do you discuss with your colleagues at home about these issues?? In what ways have you started a discourse in your former university about making academic materials available to them?? Do you really understand the Nigerian context that your colleagues live and work?? Have you experienced coping in such a situation?? You are not a scientist, but have you heard from colleagues whose complete sample for research they have been working on for years got destroyed by 1 week of power failure?? When ASUU is raising the matter of infrastructure if you cannot relate to matters like this then you cannot understand our situation. Looking good in the perception of the public is just a side attraction to the serious issues that academics have to contend with in Nigeria. In fact, setting the people against ASUU has been one way government tries to break strikes. No one will condole all those other issues like sex-for marks and the likes. Getting the people to understand what is wrong with our Universities and the whole education system is as complex as trying to get the Nigerian people chose proper leaders.
Please this your write up does not appreciate the fact that almost nothing good ever happened in the Nigerian University that was not struggled for. Why do you think there are no more foreigners lecturing in the Nigerian Universities. Is it because Nigerian academics do not want them? Can you come back home to earn our salary and work under the conditions we work in?
Let's keep the conversation on!
Babatunde JAIYEOBA
Prof. E. Babatunde JAIYEOBA PhDHead, Department of ArchitectureFaculty of Environmental Design and ManagementObafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
On Saturday, 16 January 2021, 11:33:44 GMT+1, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:
--Saturday, January 16, 2021
Problem of ASUU and the Way Forward
There's probably no more pressing issue that imperils the collective destinies of Nigeria's aspirational middle-class youth than the naggingly disruptive violence of never-ending ASUU strikes. This week, I've decided to invite Professor Moses Ochonu, my friend of nearly three decades who has invested tremendous emotional energy on this issue, to write a guest column on the just suspended ASUU strike. I hope his dispassionate diagnosis of the issues and his thoughtful counsel to ASUU will ignite a soul-searching conversation about pedagogical accountability in our universities and about productive alternatives to strikes. Enjoy:
By Moses E. Ochonu
ASUU has called off its strike. The strike will predictably be spun as a success, but it was largely a failure. It cost the union an enormous amount of societal symbolic and perceptual capital while yielding few returns.
ASUU won a few modest concessions, but most of them were in the form of government promises. We know how these promises usually turn out. The government reneges on them, leading to another strike, and another poorly implemented "agreement." And on and on it goes in a rinse and repeat cycle that torments and shortchanges students and their parents.
What's more, the latest "resolution" does not break any new ground and is largely premised on the old MOU and the entitlements enshrined therein. The strike essentially reaffirmed the status quo.
What this means is that ASUU has not achieved much from the strike and merely cut its losses when it realized that it had no leverage and was losing the PR battle in the public domain.
Speaking of losing support, ASUU loses a large slice of public opinion with each strike.
It shouldn't be so because, all things considered, ASUU has been a net benefit to the Nigerian university sector.
The problem is that it is a union moored to an outdated method of struggle, rigidly unwilling to acknowledge the limitations and diminished public appeal of its actions and rhetoric. For good or bad, most Nigerians now blame strikes as much as they blame government inaction for the problems in Nigerian universities. They no longer see strikes as a solution but as part of the problem.
More tellingly, most Nigerians consider lecturers to be self-absorbed, tone-deaf, insensitive, and navel-gazing operatives who are incapable of seeing how they have become part of the problem and how they've become the primary culprits for the absence of moral and instructional accountability and the decline of academic quality control in the system.
Unless lecturers look inward, become self-critical, and begin to live up to their familiar claim that they are saviors of a comatose university system, they will continue to lose public support and will eventually become irreverent objects of scorn with no moral sway and only the power to blackmail and take hostages, the hostages being students.
Where is ASUU when Nigerians discuss the problems of poor and non-existent teaching; rampant sexual harassment; poor supervision and mentorship; corruption and ethical violations; plagiarism; a flawed academic staff recruitment process; lax and politicized academic staff promotion requirements; the absence of merit pay for productive and exemplary lecturers; tyranny towards students; and pedagogical poverty?
Not only is ASUU often missing from and uninterested in such discussions, it usually supports and provides refuge for its members accused of failing in these areas. The union is happy to be an incubator for and rewarder of mediocrity and nonchalance among its members.
And yet, to neutrals and independent stakeholders, the aforementioned issues, for which lecturers are culpable, and which are directly within their purview, are as responsible for the decline of university education in Nigeria as the funding and infrastructure issues often privileged in ASUU propaganda.
If you ask the question of why standards are falling, research quality and quantity declining, and graduates getting worse despite ASUU "winning" significant salary and funding increases over the last three decades, ASUU deflects by blaming the poor quality of admitted students; that is when its goons are not attacking you for daring to pose such a "sacrilegious" question. ASUU never takes responsibility or accepts blame.
It is no longer enough for ASUU people to deflect these issues by saying that these are policy and governance issues under the remit of regulators and universities management and that ASUU is a trade union that is only concerned with the pecuniary interests and institutional comforts of its members.
If that claim is true then why does ASUU preface and bookend its statements and rhetorical expressions with the claim that it is fighting to save the university system for the benefits of everyone—students, parents, and society?
Why not stick to the rhetorical script of members-only priorities? Why pivot self-interestedly and strategically to the mantra of bringing salvation to university education for the benefit of all?
ASUU cannot have it both ways. If they're only a trade union then they should stop assaulting us with claims of caring about and trying to save our universities from ruin.
ASUU people cannot insist on being judged as a trade union with a members-focused mandate when matters of ethics, abuses, and dereliction of duties are mentioned but then turn around, when they desire support for their strike, to claim that they are fighting for all stakeholders and trying to save the university.
Clearly, ASUU is plagued by a crisis of identity and rhetorical confusion that it needs to resolve.
If ASUU people are truly concerned about the salvation of our universities, they have to start addressing the failings of their members and commit to helping to hold failing and erring members accountable.
Only then will they win back the support of Nigerians who have become disillusioned with ASUU's rhetorical claims and its increasingly counterproductive and fruitless industrial actions.
Let me sketch out what ASUU needs to do to win back public support and reacquire lost social capital.
ASUU needs to articulate a clear, unequivocal opposition to the problems of sexual harassment in Nigerian universities. For starters, it should drop its opposition to the sexual harassment bill being considered in the National Assembly and work with the bill's sponsors to refine it. ASUU should articulate an equally clear opposition to plagiarism among its members.
In both the plagiarism and sexual harassment domains, ASUU should abandon its odious practice of defending and protecting the accused and in some cases even threatening to go on strike on their behalf when they are punished.
The union should take the lead in stemming the problem of poor class attendance, nonchalant teaching, and poor research supervision, which are common practices among its members.
The union should stop standing in the way of disciplining lecturers who fall short in these areas.
ASUU should protest the irregular and corrupt recruitment of academic staff with as much fervor as it protests the nonpayment of earned allowances, and the union should insist on the implementation of rigorous academic promotion criteria, which would help rid their ranks of ineffectual and uncommitted lecturers.
ASUU should support the implementation of merit pay, a system in which, in addition to base pay set uniformly by rank, lecturers who distinguish themselves through their teaching and research outcomes/output are given salary increases as a reward and as an incentive to catalyze excellence in teaching/supervision and research.
ASUU should support and help develop the modalities for the implementation of student teaching evaluations in all universities.
Finally, ASUU should support and help champion the development of what I call a Students Bill of Rights (SBOR), which would outline the rights and protections students enjoy in their academic relationships with lecturers, and which would protect students against abuses, tyranny, unethical exactions, exploitation, and vindictiveness.
Doing all these would buttress ASUU's claim that it is not only concerned with the welfare of its members but also with saving a collapsing higher education system.
Ochonu is Professor of African History at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, and can be reached at meochonu@gmail.com
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.School of Communication & MediaSocial Science BuildingRoom 5092 MD 2207402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogiNigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
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