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.

New levels of low

“We ought never do wrong when people are looking.” Mark Twain.

There is certainly a case to be made for a national dialogue over major issues which represent threats to national security and major inhibitors to real development, but not the ones which are being advanced by President Jonathan. The nation is responding to a programmed diversion, but there cannot be an end to the argument over the nature and efficacy of our federal system; the manner we generate and distribute national wealth; the manner we allocate resources around governance institutions and leaders; and the manner we prioritize the goals of the Nigerian state. We will always argue over the manner our leaders emerge; the source and damage of impunity and corruption; and the failures or weaknesses of vital institutions of state. We will always argue over faith and secular values in governance; over ethnicity and citizenship; and over what our nation means to us.

While these questions will not find lasting answers, or answers that enjoy such consensus that only fringe interests will question them, the fact is they will continue to challenge the task of building a nation whose basic characters are essentially settled. The solutions lie in a cumulative and conscious attempt to add value to the positives which improve cohesion, trust and confidence, and in reducing negative signals, tendencies or trends which deepen the doubts over our abilities and capacities to put together a nation out of millions of doubts and hopes. Although no leadership starts on a clean slate, this does not provide it with excuses that it cannot resolve problems.

In the specific case of the administration of President Jonathan, it is a case of inheriting a flawed nation, and then running it aground. The controversy over the religious faith of new cadets being admitted into the Nigeria Defence Academy (NDA) represents a clear and present danger that the rot in the nation’s most hallowed institutions is so deep that we should worry whether the nation can fix its most basic problems. True, this is a problem which grew over the years – long before President Jonathan came anywhere near power. It was initially whispered around in religious circles, as people who saw themselves as custodians of our ethno-religious fortunes poured over published lists of admitted cadets into military and police academies, and counted off Muslims and Christians. Protests over inequity and deliberate distortions to bestow advantages to one faith over the other have been made for more than a decade now.

Voices were louder among Muslims who felt that selections particularly into NDA were being made deliberately to marginalize them. If the authorities paid any heed to these complaints, successive admission patters did not show it. With every new admission, voices were raised higher in protest over the admission of few Muslims against many Christians in States where populations have large percentages of both. Some raised voices against assignments of non-indigenes to certain states; or made claims of cadets changing names to find spaces in states other than their own; and from those who policed the recruitment process all the way to final selection there were allegations of corruption and efforts to discourage intakes of Muslims using all sorts of tactics.

This year’s admission into the NDA has raised more passion than any other time. From the release of the list, the nature of reactions to it ought to have attracted attention of the President. It was not the type of issue you simply note and shake your head at, and then dismiss as a typical Nigerian problem. In the last few years, our armed forces have been exposed and extended beyond the call of duty. Their extensive deployments in internal security operations in the North and Niger Delta, and the unavoidable manner in which their relationship with the civil population will be critically scrutinized should have alerted the Presidency to the fact that this controversy over the ethno-religious character of the armed forces was going to be another major problem.

That was a point at which the President needed to get directly involved. As Commander-In-Chief, it is his direct responsibility to inquire into ways in which some damage control measures can be taken. If indeed, admission patterns offended the basic requirements of merit and equity, he should have ordered a review and other measures that should prevent recurrence. If they were fair and justifiable, he should have used his extensive bureaucracy and avenues for engaging the public to assure the nation that there is no cause for alarm. If a review highlights reasons which account for existing patterns of admission that need to be addressed, he could order steps to be taken in that direction.

Military institutions and academies represent starting points in careers which are covered by federal character requirements. As President, he has a duty to ensure that the armed forces are not exposed to accusations that they violate provisions of federal character. As President of a complex nation in which religion and ethnicity are playing increasingly influential roles in the allocation of power and economic resources, the President should know that compliance with state of origin in admission patterns alone is insufficient. He ought to have demanded answers to all the queries being raised around the list, even if they came from what appear to be his traditional opposition.

Perhaps the President did all that, and merely ignored to inform a nation polarised by a list which is at the heart of his capacity to be equitable or just. For this and other reasons, the House of Representatives, that institution with a very sensitive political antenna and a highly developed skill for exposing the President’s weaknesses, has now decided to inquire into the quarrels over the admissions list. Tragically, while this may be a good thing in terms of the exercise of oversight responsibilities of the legislature, it will only compound an already messy situation. The inquiry by the federal legislature will further politicise a very sensitive institution which ought to have shielded itself from politicization in the first instance. There is no conclusion which the Representatives will arrive at that will satisfy even a limited spectrum of opinion. If it concludes that religion and ethnicity have been major factors in this and earlier years’ admission into NDA, it will cast serious doubts over the integrity of a premier institution in our security system which should give every Nigerian the same level of comfort and confidence. If it dismisses the complaints of gross and deliberate marginalization of Muslims, it will provide one more platform for sustaining the allegation that virtually all critical federal institutions are now being manipulated to reduce the presence of Muslims in them. The House of Representatives can also quite conceivably fall victim of the same divisions, and become itself, dangerously divided over the issues. Whatever happens, it now has to say something to a nation waiting for difficult answers.

The controversy over admissions into military, police and security training institutions underlie a basic and persistent distrust over the capacity of leaders to lead a nation in which all citizens should expect to be treated as equals. There is of course the additional, important consideration that careers in armed forces, police and security agencies represent rare elite recruitment opportunities in a nation where opportunities shrink literally on a daily basis. But the most worrying sentiment behind these quarrels is that many critical stakeholders in the political process feel unsafe and insecure without people of their faith in important positions in the national security system. There many be a hard core among those stakeholders who will not be assured no matter how the system responds to their causes. But there are also many who are genuinely concerned that our armed forces are being swallowed by narrow and divisive tendencies which have crippled our political systems. The announced plans of the armed forces to recruit another 9000 personnel will now be subjected to even closer scrutiny, using faith and ethnic identity. People recruited on the basis of their faith or ethnicity alone are hardly ever going to defend national interests or security.

The danger of politicizing our armed forces beyond their current levels is very serious. Recruitment and career progression will be determined by faith. Operational issues will have major ethno-religious imprints. The nation will be deprived of the service of a professional, disciplined and cohesive armed forces which should operate substantially above much of the muck that attaches to much of our politics. Perhaps we have crossed that threshold already. But in the desperate hope that we have not, it will be a supreme act of statesmanship if President Jonathan can personally and directly look into the current list of admission into the NDA, and address the nation over it.

The quarrel without a name

“Foolproof systems do not take into account the ingenuity of fools” Gene Brown 

Members of the planning committee of the National Dialogue must be scratching their heads over rising voices and tempers even before they fully engage Nigerians. An almighty quarrel is breaking out over every element of the dialogue gambit being flown by President Jonathan. Ordinarily, this should be sweet music to ears of advisers who thought the best thing for Jonathan in his present circumstances is to set everyone fighting everyone else, and have leaders erecting solid defences around divisive issues, which will give him the respite and room he needs to balance his posture, at least. What is going on, however, is far more damaging than what you would expect to see in opening skirmishes. The quarrels over what the initiative involves in the first place can torpedo the entire enterprise. It is becoming increasingly evident that most critical opinion will punch massive holes in the idea, and the President could end up being advised to handpick a few willing Nigerians to engage in polite conversations in Abuja under the guise of a national conference.

Even in circles which applauded the October 1^st announcement of plans to organize some form of forum to discuss the nation, there is rising anger and resentment that the President’s plans will not meet even the most minimal standards of a serious inquiry into the nature and functioning of our nation. Those who had canvassed for years for a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) now see the President selling the nation a dummy. What, they are asking, is the value of a dialogue, or conversation, or conference that will end up as a document in the archives? Professor Sagay, who needs no introduction in the SNC circuit believes that either of two things are happening. “Either the President doesn’t understand what he is doing by convoking a conference”, he told a paper, “or he is deliberately putting poison into the process to kill it from the beginning”.

The outrage which followed the President’s confirmation that the National Assembly will have the final say on the output of the process should be worrying the President. National Assembly? The same one set up by the same constitution which should be re-written by a conference with sovereign powers? How do you create legitimacy through an illegitimate institution?

In a part of the nation where President Jonathan expected a standing ovation, Tinubu landed and promptly rained on his parade. If you expected the legion of Yoruba intelligentsia and a whole army of SNC followers from the southwest to stone him to death, you were disappointed. The whimper of protest at Tinubu’s emphatic denunciation of the dialogue initiative reveal either of two things. One is that Tinubu is indisputably the voice of Yoruba people. The second is that Tinubu is a master at reading opinions and reactions particularly as they relate to President Jonathan’s policies, and he had correctly predicted that the President was way off the mark on the dialogue offer, and it was safe to shoot it down.

Mainstream opinion in the North is still scrutinizing the “Greek gift” with much suspicion and characteristic disharmony. In the last few days, however, a document allegedly written by the former chairman of the dialogue advisory committee, Professor Ben Nwabueze titled “North and South Divide” appears to be rallying the region to a more cohesive response. The story is that the lengthy document, which can only be described as a tragic epitaph of distinguished scholarship and activism by the aging Professor made the case for a National Conference on the back of the need to dismantle northern cohesion and unity because they represent the reasons for southern disunity and threats to national security. This document, the story goes, was the main impetus behind establishing the committee to advise on the organization of the dialogue.

Reading that document, one can only hope that even with the alarming fall in quality of intellectual and political assets around the President, it cannot be the case that it informed in any measure a raison d’être for the dialogue. The material represents a caricature of the nation’s entire history, and shows a very poor understanding of the complex socio-cultural nature and political character of the north. Consequently, it made some profoundly-questionable assumptions and conclusions on the current state of the North, and a potentially-damaging misreading of how it relates to and with the rest of Nigeria. The document now serves the North as a tonic for the healing of a largely self-induced damage, when it presents “true” and “minority” northerners as targets of a plan to weaken them further under a contrived need for “southern” hegemony.

The North is unlikely to dismiss the dialogue option as emphatically as Tinubu did, although it will see through it as a ploy to split it and place it on the defensive in a Nigeria where it is already very much on the margins. It is more likely to welcome a more genuine engagement with the rest of Nigeria, at which it will lay down its own long list of grievances, and quite possibly demands for far-reaching changes in the manner the nation is structured, and functions. To that extent, it will be reluctant to engage in a talkshop which will only divert attention from the fact Jonathan has many issues to settle with the North, and other poor Nigerians.

There are many angry voices that have not been raised yet. The East, another bastion of the National Conference champions is looking critically at Jonathan’s idea of a conference, and debating whether it is a rat or an elephant. M.E.N.D, or some of its variants say it means nothing to them. Chief E. Clark says it is Jonathan’s masterstroke, and it should, among other things, create a federation in which the North does not continue to get more of the revenue from the south-south’s resources through its underserved numbers of states and local governments. Hundreds of communities, pressure groups and state-seekers will chase the dialogue idea around to see if it represents one more avenue to pitch their tents. They will look to see if it will do more than receive and file a memo, or it will advance their causes further. If it is the former, they will join the queue of Nigerians who will denounce another expensive deception.

President Jonathan’s dialogue is likely to end up looking like a national quarrel. At this stage, the quarrel involves him and that select circle which thought they had finally broken through to a leadership which will hand them Nigeria to unravel and put together as they wish. It is finally sinking in: the dialogue offer is anything but what they wanted. They are already denouncing it as fraud. Politicians will quarrel with the meek effort to divert attention, and they will distance governments and communities from conferring any semblance of integrity on it. NBA, ASUU, NLC and leading professional associations and CSOs are likely to ask Jonathan to define what he wants. If he dithers, or responds in a manner which suggests that he plans to convene an expensive choreographed jamboree, they would abandon him without a dialogue. And to think this quarrel does not even have a name yet!

Getting what you wished for

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.” Winston Churchill

The outcome of the public engagements by the Advisory Committee on National Dialogue may offend one of the basic assumptions which informed the need to subject the nation to critical scrutiny and review. This is the assumption that we Nigerians have no consensus over the legitimacy of our nation and the laws that give it substance; we disagree over whether we want to continue to live in such a nation; we disagree over why it has failed to live up to our expectations; we disagree over how its resources are appropriated and shared; and we disagree over just about everything of value which should create peace, security and unity.

Colonialism is blamed as the genesis of all these ills, but since we are not the only nation which was cobbled out of imperialist designs, the search for sources of our profound dissatisfaction with our nation went beyond the foundations. The post-independence democratic government let us down for taking off from where the British left. Long periods of military rule complicated the problems of emergence of a nation out of basic and endemic structural crises. Reversals to democratic governance merely confirmed that it is not the type of rulers we have that is the problem; it is our nation which is fatally structured, rooted in false values and assumptions, and working towards deepening our problems rather than solving them.

Since shifts between military dictatorships and democratic governance have failed to move the country beyond its basic limitations, and constitutional amendments have merely provided a cover for incumbents to prolong their stay in power, the solution was unlikely to be found in tinkering with laws. The constitution and the institutions it has created will not subvert themselves in a manner that will allow an unhindered and popular effort to create genuine alternatives. The case began to be made for a wholesale rejection of the structural foundations of modern Nigeria and the creation of avenues for evaluating its relevance, utility and even continuance. The claim that sovereignty is vested in the people began to be interpreted in its literal sense: let the ethnic groups and nations which pre-dated colonial imposition exercise that sovereignty directly and totally. Allow representatives of the people who were forced into co-existence by imperial interests to question everything about the nation, and what they decide will be final. They could re-create the nation in any number of ways; they could affirm its unity under different values and institutions; or they could end the Nigerian enterprise in everyone’s interests.

This, basically, was the chorus that was heard in the last two decades in some parts of the country, notably the South West which felt hard done-by when Abiola’s election was aborted; as well as in South South minority communities which felt that too much of what they have is being shared with too many fellow Nigerians. It also found resonance in circles in the South East which created their own versions of the build-up and aftermath of the civil war, and concluded that Igbos would have built the greatest nation in Africa but for the liability which they carry called Nigeria. Here and there, pockets of disciples of the idea of the wholesale unravelling of the nation emerged, motivated by a variety of reasons. Some saw it as the best means of freeing small groups from domination by larger groups. Some saw it as a means of keeping more of what should be shared. Other saw it as a solution to the domineering position of the North in national affairs.

In general terms, mainstream Northern political opinion was, at best, suspicious, and at worst, hostile to the very concept and feasibility of the idea. Its core leadership put itself forward as the custodian of the integrity of the nation, its unity and survival. It felt justified in putting a robust defence against any idea that the nation’s unity is questionable, and that its future can be discussed or negotiated away by elites from parts of the country which had narrow political goals to pursue. Northern leaders died in 1966 in the hands of military adventurers who set in motion a disastrous chain of events leading to a civil war. Northern lives and limbs in their hundreds of thousands were sacrificed to free southern minorities from      Igbo domination and to preserve the unity and integrity of the nation.

If the nation shed no blood in the fight for independence, it certainly shed mostly northern blood to preserve the unity of Nigeria. Northerners overthrew or murdered other northerners in 1974, 1976, 1983 and 1985, and made many futile attempts in between in the name of improving the state of the nation. Northerners plucked Obasanjo from extinction and installed him in power in 1999 when it became accepted wisdom that other northerners prevented Abiola from becoming President in 1993. Northerners suffered massive depletions in their stock of political leaders in the hands of fellow northerners and Obasanjo, and have borne this loss as a price to pay for preserving the unity of the country under a democratic system. The North has been forced open, polarized and endangered by the exploitation of its pluralism, all in the name of the democratic process. While the South West found security in a political cocoon; the South South basked in the glory of temporary and problematic wealth; the East continued to walk on any side of the political street which paid it the most, the North shrank under poverty, insecurity and poor governance.

The initial response to the offer of a National Dialogue is revealing some startling postures that had been largely invisible. Virtually every major geo-political cluster of opinion will now make a case for a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) without delay. Tinubu’s repudiation of the idea as a deceptive diversion has effectively set the basic agenda for political South West. The traditional SNC priests will follow with a condemnation of anything short of a SNC. The South South will not see their hope of a radical review of the manner revenues from petroleum resources are allocated in a polite dialogue which will end up as a document before the National Assembly where the North has majority.

The East will likely support a SNC because not to do so will harm its interests. It will make the case for it because it has unresolved issues with Nigeria, particularly one which will not accord due respect for its demands for an additional state, and in which Igbos build the nation and are targeted routinely by other Nigerians virtually as a national pastime. The far North will demand a SNC because it is beginning to question the value and practicability of its continued support for the unity and integrity of the nation in the light of its current positions and experiences in the nation. It will highlight positions that the North will benefit from a critical scrutiny of the entire structure, functions and viability of the nation’s basic institutions. It is likely to support a wholesale revision of every arrangement which currently sustains the nation from the perspective of a disadvantaged and threatened partner. Minority Northern interests will support a SNC because they will see it as an avenue to assert their autonomy from being appendages of the majority in the North, or pawns in the hands of the South.

So the nation is united, after all. It is solidly united behind the idea of a thorough and genuine reassessment of the Nigerian nation. This is not what President Jonathan wanted. He had thought he will tap into a sentiment that will win him applause in some quarters, and send other quarters into panic and disarray over the initiative. Now that he knows what the nation wants, how will he respond to this national consensus against his dialogue?