Striking against ASUU

“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.” George Orwell

It should be worrying to members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) that the ground is strategically shifting away from them. If traditions are a guide, they should be, at this stage, dusting notes and preparing to resume activities after three months of strike. All the rituals have been performed. They walked out and waited for the nation to take note. Government pleaded and re-negotiated; threatened and blackmailed. Ministers displayed figures and statistics. Salaries were threatened. Parents begged both sides. Traditional rulers intervened. Editorials pleaded for resolution. Clerics prayed for an end. Students begged, threatened and became dangerously restive at home and on streets.

Two elements are relatively novel in this fight. One is what appears to be a full and final offer by the federal Government as far as funding element from the 1999 Agreement are concerned. It would appear that it is more a case of the federal government being unable, rather than unwilling, to put more on the table. The offer of N100b which ASUU says is merely paper at this stage, could actually turn out to be all that the cash – strapped administration can make. If ASUU does not believe this, then it must have access to treasures which the federal government is hiding from state governments, contractors and public servants. If the federal government draws the line at the offer of N100b and pleadings by President Jonathan, and ASUU refuses to bite, then we have a new character to this old fight which is defined by its failure to be settled by token payments into accounts of lecturers and a little for renovation contracts.

The second relatively new element is the combination of a new, stronger resolve of the ASUU leadership to stay out, and the increasing loss of critical support from major sources of influence. Just when ASUU digs in with its 1999-or-nothing posture, and the police chase them around, there is the emergence of a worrying strand of public opinion which is further isolating ASUU and its cause. The rather emphatic denunciation by the Senate President of the entire Agreement as the product of poor judgement is startling, coming as it does from a man who is supposed to mediate in the dispute. ASUU also knows better than to believe the pledge of the House of Representatives that it will improve funding of university education in the country. You can effectively rule out the federal legislature out of substantially improving the material basis of a resolution of this fight this time around.

More worrisome is the rising anger that ASUU is being more difficult than usual. Parents and students, vital stakeholders and generally faithful traditional allies of ASUU are beginning to think ASUU is being unreasonable. Major sources of influence are now urging ASUU, and not government, to budge. ASUU’s time-tested strategy is coming back to haunt it: many Nigerians are asking it to fight and run away, as it had done countless times. It risks prolonging a fight with dwindling sympathisers. If it fights to a point where its former friends now join the rank of its enemies; it will find it very difficult to call out the troops for another fight in future.

There is a very important lesson for ASUU at this stage. Perhaps it had wrongly attributed to itself the role of the sole custodian of the fortunes of university education in Nigeria all along. It would have been a wrong attribution because higher education (or even university education) is too important to be the sole responsibility of academics. Education as a whole is a national priority, and while ASUU may have assumed the mantle of responsibility for its upper reaches because no one else cared enough, it handled that responsibility in a manner that isolated other critical stakeholders in the struggle to ensure that it achieved the level of prioritization it deserved. Some of these critical stakeholders include parents and guardians, students and young graduates, labour and employers. In short, voters. The rich and the powerful whom ASUU takes on in its ritual fights do not matter here: public education at all levels had collapsed long ago because their children and wards do not go to school in government schools or in Nigeria.

The faulty assumption of sole custody for the fortunes of university education left ASUU alone at the mercy of a formidable opponent in government. Governments which should ordinarily show sensitivity to public opinion and appropriate respect for the requirements of development such as mass and high quality education ought to have come to office on the back of mandates from the public. Whether they do or not, most governments in Nigeria do not feel any major urge to invest public funds around priorities such as quality education at all elves. For most of them, but particularly for the federal government, ASUU is a nuisance that surfaces every now and then to ask for a little more and make politicians look bad. State governments which establish universities as status symbols have no interest in building a stock of knowledge and producing quality graduates. They cannot, therefore, be bothered over having to spend more and more on university teachers’ salaries.

What ASUU should do is not resume at all, at all cost. If it genuinely believes that its 1999 Agreement with the federal government represents an irreduceable minimum for turning around the fortunes of universities, it should insist on full implementation, and nothing less. Let this fight be taken up by the Nigerian people, and anyone interested in resolving the crisis in our higher education should get involved in insisting that government honours the 1999 Agreement, and not that ASUU abandons it now and resumes to fight for it another time. This should be the point of a final stand. If this administration can resist having to respond to genuine demands that children of the depleting middle class and the poor should go to good universities in Nigeria paid for by public resources, let it deal with public opinion. If public opinion can be manipulated by government to force ASUU to abdicate, it will not hold ASUU hostage longer than ASUU can make the case that resuming for crumbs will not be in anyone’s interests.

Capitulation will be what ASUU will do if it resumes now. It will lose the remnant of credibility it has as a vanguard in the fight to make the state more responsive and responsible to the needs of the Nigerian people. If university teachers resume now, after telling the world that the system had collapsed, they will not ask us to join in the fight for a collapsed system again. A few people may clap. But they will curse ASUU if in the next year or two, it comes out asking for a little more.