Ikhide:
First, as a Vice-Chancellor and concerned citizen, I continue to be saddened by the prolongation of this strike in the Nigerian University System (NUS) that has now entered its third month - which is a third in length already of the super-long 2002/2003 strike of yore. After the meeting of five representative VCs, ASUU representatives and the Vice-President Sambo on September 16 in which certain reasonable decisions were reached, one thought that cooler heads would prevail. But alas, significant distrust and some missteps between the contending parties leave the situation un-resolved, with no end in sight yet.
Secondly, you have been a fly in ASUU's ointment, and have been joined by Feyi Fawehinmi (FF) in his four-part blog series, [http://aguntasolo.com/] which I have thoroughly read. I commend him - a university brat himself - for his yeoman effort. It is not easy to be a social/public critic - and using data too, because opinions are easy, facts sacred, and you must develop a thick skin when people come after you. When you also get the attention of a Prof. Akin Oyebode (who has been on both sides of the isle on this matter) with a rejoinder (I repeat the rejoinder in the Appendix below), then you know that FF has hit a raw nerve.
However, Ikhide, for the sake of transparency, I made available in
all the ASUU, SSANU, NASU and NAATS 209 agreements with the Federal Government. Notice that it was not ONLY ASUU, but the other three unions. So the total EARNED allowances being demanded is NOT for ASUU alone - and that point must NOT be forgotten, and ASUU should not be held as if it is demanding ALL of this money for itself. That is a point that FF must acknowledge moving forward, and not pour all invectives on ASUU. Non-academics too must also share the blame in the rot in our university system. In fact, if you read the EARNED Allowances portion of the other unions other than ASUU, some eye-popping and hair-raising agreements were made which, to my mind, should not have been made AT ALL, not to talk of setting NAIRA RATES to them.
The third point to be made is that while principles of funding and financial rates were agreed with respect to certain allowances, the total number of staff to be paid (and students to be served) by each university; who between the federal government and the university that would make the payments; and most especially the CAP of the total amount paid were really NOT part of the agreement. This was the MAIN flaw of the agreement, and has really led to the impasse.
In order to correct this flaw, back in September 2011, all the Vice-Chancellors of Federal Universities - we nine new ones included, barely six months old then on our jobs - were asked by the Federal Minister of Education to submit the financial implications of the 2009 agreement on our campuses for ALL employees (academic and non-academic) for the period July 2009 to December 2012. An initial compilation in November 2011 was incomplete (not enough universities responded) because of confusion about what was to be included or not, but by April 2012, a fuller compilation was made by the FGN/University-based Unions Agreements Implementation Monitoring Committee chaired by Dr. Wale Babalakin, and revealed to us: a sum of N106.7 billion, itemized according to the following table.
According to the IMC, a close study of the submissions showed too much inflation, and universities were once again asked to go back to tighten their figures, leading to a revised figure of about N92 billion (I don't have that table with me, but that amounts to about 90% of the above figures).
Where we are now then is that the Federal Government has offered to pay - and has paid - N30 billion, asking the universities and their Councils to source for the rest, to ASUU (and Vice-Chancellors') chagrin.
I suspect that Government suspects that there is still inflation in the figures, but has indicated that the universities should use what has been given NOW, and then return LATER to report what is left to be paid, and that will be considered. (This is an outcome of a meeting with the Vice-President, and what the VCs have recommended previously.) I believe that that is a fair demand - but ASUU is not trusting enough of government's intention, not without reason - but it must trust, for the sake of the nation.
Ikhide, you asked whether I agreed with FF's analysis. I will now stick my neck out and indicate my own official position as Otuoke VC to the IMC when it asked for a revision. This is what I wrote in a paragraph as opinion - and I stick to it even today:
There is a fourth point to be made. If you study the "agreements" closely, some of the agreements were "agreements to recommend", NOT agreements themselves. A recommendation can be agreed to or rejected, but to act as if the agreement to RECOMMEND amounts to the RECOMMENDATION itself causes a perception problem.
For example, take this section of the ASUU agreement:
Does this section REALLY mean that the Federal Government has AGREED to fund universities to the tune of N1.518 trillion? Not at all....it just means that the IMC has AGREED to make that recommendation to the FGN, which in fact it did. It is now UP to the FGN to accept or reject it. We might be very UNHAPPY that the recommendation was not accepted, but it would be disingenuous to state that the FGN has ACCEPTED to provide N1.518 trillion, but is now only offering N400 billion.
Same principle goes to this section of the ASUU agreement:
Ikhide, I have provided this long piece to give you my own knowledge of the history of this impasse, and to provide some insight into my own line of thinking. There is enough blame and misunderstanding on all sides, but what we need right now is statesmanship on both sides to end this strike, after which our whole Nigerian University System should be re-evaluated to grant GREATER AUTONOMY to individual universities; have the federal government (and the NUC) play a less intrusive role in university governance; declare the education sector a national security matter; and have collective bargaining / strike action be more local rather than national. Towards that end:
1. The Federal Government should truly commit to increasing funding to the education sector, starting with the 2014 Budget. It should include ALL monies going NOT only to the Federal Ministry of Education but to ETF, PTDF and any other MDAs that spend money on education in the calculations.
2. ASUU should accept the N30 billion earned allowance paid now as DOWN-PAYMENT, and when the Vice-Chancellors in consultation with the Governing Councils have disbursed same, should be able to return for more as found necessary. IN the time being, the Federal Government should budget N30 billion for it in the 2014 budget, to build trust.
3. ASUU should accept the N100 billion NEEDS assessment money given to all universities by the Federal Government, after being assured that this will not affect statutory TETFUND money. [By the way, all VCs and Pro-Chancellors are being invited to Abuja next on Tetfund affairs.] Again, the Federal Government should budget N100 billion in the 2014 budget for special ADDITIONAL intervention in the next year, and the following two years, and ensure that all trapped TetFUND monies are released promptly..
4. The Federal Government's No-Work No-Pay rule on this particular strike should be rescinded forthwith; It sours relations, in the opinion of Vice-Chancellors, because there are academic staff who may NOT be teaching, but are doing research and community service, and some are actually doing administrative work (Heads of Departments, Directors, etc.).
And there you have it.
Bolaji Aluko
APPENDIX
QUOTE Rejoinder from Prof. Akin Oyebode to FF's "We have an ASUU Problem"
Dear FF,
I couldn't resist responding to your jibes and vituperation. It is full of generalizations, errors, inexactitude and inanities that could make one want to throw up
Please be informed that the time UNILAG had three Harvard alumni on its Law Faculty was over two decades ago. I should know since I went to the big H and have been on the UNILAG staff list for nearly 40 years and the only member of the troika still on ground.
I agree that some of us love teaching and, or are deeply patriotic but there's a lot more to taking the jump to a greener pasture abroad. Please be informed that most of us still around remain not out of lack of rosy offers and promises of a better life but because of our firm belief in the necessity to ensure that the roof did not cave in on Nigeria's education system.
I'm surprised you failed to recite the line of cynics that those who can, can and those who can't, teach. Having been in the business of teaching lawyers for quite a while, helping, in the process, to produce 50 SANs and 25 law professors, I should be in a position to make averments regarding legal education in Nigeria and matters incidental thereto
.
When one of my children came back to the country after concluding his LLM in a US Ivy League Law School and succeeded in addition to crack the New York Bar (at first attempt, by the way), he was full of praises for the quality of legal education he had obtained here in UNI:LAG. I'm sure you must have come across numerous Nigerians in your country of sojourn making good with Nigeria's university education which you have derided so much.You argue that the quality oft our pedagogy was suspect but the evidence on the ground does not justify your wholesale condemnation. Of course, we can use greater input and modernization of the education process but we are still striving to perform or task in the face of paucity of facilities and inability to attract and retain the best and brightest. I can tell you that Harvard had nearly 100 libraries when we were there some 40 years ago. The main library had nearly five million volumes…
I do not, in the least wish to turn this conversation into a point-counter-point discussion but let me tell you this: the ball lies squarely in the court of the Nigerian State for disparaging the old legal maxim, pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be implemented in good faith). The disdain for Nigerian academics shared by people of your ilk within a general anti-intellectual environment is so suffocating that one has to wonder why our universities and other higher institutions of learning had actually survived thus far.
Way back in the 1990′s, I happened to have acted in the role of legal adviser to the ASUU negotiation team that brought into being the first FG-ASUU Agreement which the government of the day later felt it worthy to thump its nose at. A decade later, I had become a V-C and was a member of the government team that midwifed a revised version of the 1992 FG-ASUU Agreement. Characteristically, the government of the day again went back on its words. Now, we are once again faced with the scenario of discounting an agreement signed, sealed and delivered by the selfsame parties in 2009. It would have been funny if it was not tragic.
I pause to ask, when would the Nigerian State learn to put its money where its mouth is? The real issue is re-furbishing the infrastructure of our universities in the face of a student population bursting at its seams while the rich, famous and powerful dispatch their children and wards to the US, Europe and better organized environments such as South Africa, Ghana and even, Benin Republic next door. It would seem Alphonse Kerr knew what he was saying when he observed, " Plus ca change, plus la meme chose… ( The more things change, the more they remain the same…)
Since ASUU is demanding a mere fraction of what the country expends on running its bureaucracy, importation of fuel by an oil-rich enclave, humongous emoluments for its legislators, sundry acts of corruption and squandermania, the path of reason is to make the necessary adjustment in the country's scale of values and priorities in order to rescue Nigerian universities from ultimate perdition. Anyone who says that ASUU is asking too much or acting unreasonably needs to put on his thinking cap in order to understand clearly what the current struggle is all about.
UNQUOTE
On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 6:39 AM, IKHIDE <xokigbo@yahoo.com> wrote:
--"As I've said several times before – this dispute is all about pay and nothing else. The thing with recommendations is that they are just that; recommendations. You cant take someone to court for not following a recommendation. So it was up to the government to follow those parts of the agreement or not. But ASUU weren't messing about with the parts that concerned them. The numbers were clearly specified which is why today they can say the government is owing them N92bn in earned allowances or whatever the figure is. It is also the same reason why the government feels it can throw N30bn at them and ask them to 'manage' it. Afterall its ASUU's word against the government's.
You hardly come across the word 'student' in the agreement at all. And there is nothing specific about infrastructure in there other than the large sums of money the government was supposed to give the universities. There are many people today making ignorant noises about government 'honouring the agreement' and even coming up with things that are not in said agreement as 'ASUU's demands'. There really isnt anything for anyone in here other than ASUU so personally I'd say, leave them to fight it out with government."
Fascinating, if hilarious analysis of the ASUU-FG agreement. I wonder if Bolaji Aluko agrees with the analysis. He does nail ASUU something awful on the self-serving nature of the agreement. More alarming, he makes the great point that no one truly knows how much every year this agreement will cost. No budgetary numbers, just pay. All the government needs to do is just pay ASUU. Why are we like this? A must read. Read the rest here:
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