JUST IN: ASUU In The News Again

ASUU In The News Again

According to a report by The Nation, ASUU is in the news again.

WHENEVER ASUU appears in the news, you can be sure that it is because the union representing Nigerian University lecturers is announcing an impending warning strike, declaring an indefinite strike action or announcing the suspension of a strike action following some agreement with government after interminable rounds of negotiations. Unfortunately, ASUU has appeared far too many times in news headlines in the last thirty years, to the detriment of the Nigerian university system. Before going on with this article, it is only fair for me to disclose that I spent a total of forty-seven years as a member of staff of a Nigerian university and for thirty- five of those years, I was an active, some would say hyperactive member of the union. This being the case, I have not occupied a ring side seat but have been in the ring with all the combatants thrashing out the issues which have affected our universities over these many years. I must confess that I was initially a nominal member of the union in which case, my active involvement in the union was brought about by a conversion and a realization that the Nigerian university system was worth fighting for if it is not to collapse under the weight of government neglect verging on a state of abandonment.

The first real confrontation between university lecturers and government over the state of our universities took place in 1981. There were only a handful of universities at the time and all of them were under the supervision of the almighty Federal government which at that time was under the presidency of Shehu Shagari and his National Party of Nigeria, the first civilian government after the military seized power in 1966. That strike started during the customary long vacation period in the hope that all issues would be resolved before the students reported back to campus to start a new session. Fortunately, that hope was fulfilled and the strike did not eat into the new session so that disruption of the academic calendar was minimal. I must confess that I was busy with other things during that strike and when it was resolved and the universities had wrung some far reaching concessions from government, I felt so guilty about my lack of participation in the strike that I was resolved to be part of any future struggle as I enjoyed the fruits of that strike in the same way as those other lecturers who had gone to war with the government on my behalf had done. To be fair, the university system, in terms of conditions of service became so attractive after that strike that I did not think that another such strike would be necessary for as long as I was a member of staff of the university. Unfortunately, events were to prove me wrong in the uncomfortably near future as whatever gains that were conceded by government were eroded within a few years and our condition became worse than it was before the strike.

Less than three years after the end of that strike, the government which signed the agreement with ASUU was tufted out by the military and another round of struggle began as the agreement which led to the end of the strike became more important in the breach than in its observance and the universities took on the tatty garb of a department in the Ministry of Education. It soon became apparent that university lecturers had been relegated to the status of poor cousins to their civil service counterparts, even though they had started out on a higher rung of the career ladder than those of their class who had gone into the civil service upon their graduation. In the meantime, both Federal and State governments began to set up new universities with joyous abandon and in no time at all, the number of universities ballooned out to twenty-eight, fifty and way beyond, even as the resources allocated to each university dwindled perceptively and the number of students admitted swelled beyond what was reasonable without any corresponding increase in the number of those employed to teach them and the physical facilities with which to teach them became grotesquely inadequate. We began to operate facilities which in all honesty were universities only in name.

I was admitted into the Nigerian university system through the University of Ife at a time when there were only four functional universities in the country, the fifth, the University of Nsukka having been closed over the period of the civil war. The University of Ife matriculated no more than six hundred and thirty students that year and if a similar figure was returned for the other three universities, it is unlikely that more than three thousand undergraduates entered the Nigerian university system that year. I was admitted with ‘A’ level qualifications and I duly graduated with a degree in Pharmacy at the end of May in 1972 having spent a little under three years as an undergraduate. That timeline is worthy of note because it means that I did not have to spend a day longer than my expected date of graduation, a feat which has now become impossible to achieve fifty years after I left the university. It has to be said that many of my colleagues did not meet this three year cut-off point because they failed to convince their examiners to release them on time because in those days if you failed the almighty June examinations, you simply repeated the class without the option of carrying over the courses in which you had failed. This was a stern examination of student competence as any mistake in the examination could lead to tragic consequences; but the students could not claim that they had not been given adequate warning of the consequences of failing any of the eight or nine papers set before them. As with impending execution and indeed those examinations were a bloodless form of execution, taking the almighty June examination had the propensity to concentrate the mind powerfully. This compelled the students to voluntarily put their noses against the roughest grinding stone in the period leading to the examinations. In all my years as an undergraduate, the June exams, which actually started in May, started and finished on set days as nothing was allowed to violate the sacredness of those dates. In my days as an undergraduate, nothing, not even power-cuts happened to derail lectures and practical sessions and tutorials took place as advertised at the beginning of the session. Even when students took on the authorities of their respective universities, they had it at the back of their minds that almighty June was waiting for them in barely concealed ambush and they went back to their studies before any damage was done to the prospects of facing their examiners and prevailing. That was the system into which I gladly immersed myself as a Graduate Assistant a few months after graduation thinking that my temperament was well suited to the orderliness of an academic career, to the envy of those of my colleagues who could not surmount the hurdles put in the way of aspiring academics. In other words, academia was attractive to all but only a few were chosen and chosen severely on merit. Unfortunately, this idyllic state was not going to last for much longer as within ten years after my graduation, the situation within academia had begun to unravel and was soon in free fall to the level where the system has lost both shape and form and become incapable of maintaining the standards which were set all those many years ago before I was admitted into it.

There are now close to or more than two hundred universities in the country. It is not possible to put a definite figure to the number of universities operating in Nigeria because new ones are coming on stream by the day. All towns are clamouring hideously for a university to be located within their precincts as if the presence of a university had become a yardstick for urban legitimacy. Well-heeled Nigerians and religious organizations cannot rest easy until they acquire the status of university ownership and the craze to land this status is not showing any sign of abatement any time soon. And yet the spaces created by these universities, some of them only so called, are not enough to satisfy the yearning of young Nigerians for university education. This should come as no surprise seeing that the entry qualifications set for university admission are so low that virtually anyone who has taken the trouble of going through a halfway decent secondary school should find a place in some university. That far too many of our secondary school graduates cannot win a space in the university testifies not to the high standards set by our universities but to the abysmal quality of our vastly degraded secondary school system and its failure to educate our children in any meaningful way at that level.

At the heart of our predicament with education, especially at the tertiary level is that there are no alternative means of making a decent living or defining a worthwhile career without landing a meal ticket disguised as a university degree. The quality of that degree is of no consideration in the developed economies of the world where there is space for ‘making it’ in life without going through the university. In Nigeria however, even those who have squeezed through the considerable inconvenience of going through the university do not have a guarantee of somehow forging a career at some satisfying job. All they know is that without a university degree in Nigeria, you are doomed to roam the streets forever looking for an unlikely career salvation. And so, the struggle continues ad infinitum.

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Eyo Nse is a creative writer, blogger and a software engineer.He is a simple individual who loves to see others succeed in life.Mr Wisdytech as he is popularly known - started blogging in the early 2000's.