The
negative reaction of the General Olusegun Obasanjo administration to
the university students’ nationwide protests in April 1978 against the
sudden hike in tuition by his administration marked a turning point in
the decline in university education in Nigeria. University campuses were
quickly occupied by the riot police as students kept chanting Alli Must
Go, demanding the resignation of Colonel Ahmadu Alli, then the
Education Minister.
The fallout of the strike was
monumental. Students were killed. Some lecturers were retrenched. Some
vice-chancellors lost their jobs. University Governing Councils and the
appointment of vice-chancellors became more and more politicised. The
erosion of university autonomy, begun in 1971/72, when similar student
protests also led to student deaths, continued unabated. NUNS was later
banned, only to metamorphous into the present National Association of
Nigerian Students in 1983.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities
was formed later in 1978, as an offshoot of the Nigerian Association of
University Teachers, established in 1965. It was realised that the
excesses of the military government, the erosion of university autonomy,
and the devaluation of higher education were far beyond what students
could handle. It became necessary to bring together pockets of
Marxist-oriented resistance within various campuses.
ASUU immediately took on two parallel
tasks. One was to oppose continued military rule and obnoxious
government policies, such as the Structural Adjustment Programme and
World Bank loans intended to impose Western practices and ideologies on
the Nigerian university system. The other was to fight for university
autonomy, adequate funding, improved conditions of service, and adequate
attention to education. The rise of ASUU led to a corresponding
decrease in nation-wide student protests and the concomitant loss of
lives.
Throughout the military era, ASUU met
with one of three major responses: (a) Commissions or Visitation Panels
were set up, only to have their recommendations either sidelined or used
to victimise the striking lecturers and their institutional leaders;
(b) indefinite closure of universities and the mass sack of lecturers;
or (c) outright proscription of ASUU, as happened in 1988 and 1992. Only
partially and sporadically were ASUU’s demands ever met.
The advent of democracy in 1999 was
expected to bring about the desired change. Instead, the travails of
university education multiplied. As more and more money was made from
oil resources, identity politics and self-interest sidelined public
interest, while endemic corruption put national development on hold.
Infrastructure deteriorated, hitting the universities and prospective
employers of labour harder than ever before. Astronomical increases in
secondary school graduates created a glut in university admissions. High
tuition fees in private schools drove millions of students to the
public universities. As a result, more and more students were admitted
without complementary increases in funding; staff recruitment; classroom
space; library, lab and computer facilities; teaching aids; Internet
connectivity; and e-learning resources.
As a result, Nigerian universities lost
the competitive edge in the emerging knowledge economy because they
could not keep pace with cutting edge research, effective teaching, and
efficient graduate supervision. The government’s indigenisation policy
prevented the recruitment of expatriate staff, while poor infrastructure
and worsening national security severely disrupted exchange programmes
with foreign institutions. Ultimately, half-baked graduates and doctoral
students are being produced, and Nigerian universities lost their
standing in the world rankings of universities.
These are the trends that ASUU has been
seeking to reverse since 1978. Unfortunately, the democratic
administrations have responded more or less like the military
administrations before them. True, agreements and Memoranda of
Understanding were signed, but they were hardly implemented. It has been
a policy of give-or-promise-them-something so they may go back to work.
Yet, billions of naira are reportedly
embezzled or otherwise mismanaged every month; billions are spent on
presidential jets and their maintenance; legislators reportedly
appropriated over N1trillion in jumbo pay within the last eight years
alone; and trillions of Naira have been lost to pipeline vandalism and
leakages within the NNPC. This past July alone, government revenues from
oil fell by a whopping 42 per cent to N498 billion from N863 billion in
June. The government blames the thieves and their foreign customers;
but who will blame the government for negligence or for paying over
N1trillion in misappropriated subsidy funds? The cumulative effects of
this wastage and the concomitant neglect of higher education led the
Nigerian elite to spend about $500 million annually to educate their
children in European and American universities. This amount, according
to the Committee of Vice-Chancellors, represents about 70 per cent of
the total allocation to all federal universities in a given year.
Those who have blamed ASUU for the
ongoing strike are either unaware of the history and wastage outlined
above or chose to ignore them. It also appears that they are unaware of
the nature of the 2009 agreement (a consolidation of previous
unfulfilled agreements) and the 2012 Memorandum of Understanding that
the Federal Government willingly signed with ASUU. Of the nine terms of
the 2009 agreement, which included the injection of over N1trillion over
four years to revitalise the university system, only two have been
implemented to date, namely, the reinstatement of University Governing
Councils in the Federal universities and the extension of retirement age
for Professors to 70 years.
The sad irony about the Federal
Government’s failure to implement the agreement came in 2012 when the
report of its Committee on Needs Assessment of Nigerian Public
Universities revealed gross infrastructural and manpower deficits as the
bane of university education in the country.
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