ASUU-FG Face-off: The Important Lessons Many Stand To Miss -By Saliu Momodu

Imagine a national strike action by a hypothetical trade organization like “Union of Metrological Workers of Nigeria” or say another, “Staff Union of Nigerian Scientific Researchers”. Then compare with a parallel Union like “Union of Nigerian Bread Baker’s” or an actual one like Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG). Then ask yourself a question, which of these two categories of striking groups would, on the short or immediate term, advise itself to quietly and unilaterally return to it’s duty post? In the same vein you might ask, which group would be able to quickly and decisively force government to the negotiating table and have it’s concerns assuaged?

I believe that the answers to the above questions are very clear even without mention. Even, I suspect that a “National Union of Garri Processing Workers” would get better attention and courtesy from government than a “Union of Data Scientists or Accountants of Nigeria” if both were to proceed on a strike action.

Now the comparisons above are not exclusively about value or relevance, but about economics, politics, sociology and then perceptions. The lesson is that before you enter into a punching match with an opponent, be sure not to punch above your weight lest you get a beating of your life. So instead, like in a trade dispute situation, weigh your relevance and options using the four parameters above and determine when, how and where to launch a punch if at all your punches would even count in the boxing ring.

It is now anyone’s guess that from this point forward, ASUU will never remain the same again. The reasons are simple, on the above four indexes, the Union has been bleeding out considerable punching power over the decades. To the discerning, it was already obvious, just a matter of time as the Union was on a slippery slope downwards but there was evidently no foresight. So in sheer “opportunism” the present administration gave what in the coming weeks, months and years may prove to be a technical knockout to ASUU.

But how did we get here? How is it that an ASUU strike for almost a year at a stretch would not exert any political cost on a sitting government, a government which by the way is frantically busy with election campaigns for a return to power? How is that the humongous economic implication of closing down our highest institutions of learning seems to be lost on everyone? How did we reach the point where parents, artisans, elites, peasants, and the students affected choose instead to be indifferent or even side with a government that would unabashedly not keep to it’s own side of a bargain it had unambiguously accented to? How is it that many stood aloof in indifference?

Well ASUU is partly to blame, and I shall dwell on just one of the 5 different ways the Union could have averted or change the imminent fate it must now have to face inadvertently. For decades now, ASUU has superintended over a university system that literarily “disenfranchises” the teaming population of secondary school leavers in Nigeria- a very delicate and sensitive demography. Every year, more than two million candidates sit for a higher institution admission pre-qualification examination called JAMB. Two million, whereas all our nation’s tertiary institutions of learning: universities, polytechnics and colleges of educations combined can afford to only admit a mere 600,000 of these applicants. In response, the universities, under the active connivance of ASUU instituted a false, unrealistic and unsustainable threshold of merit they ostensibly call “cut-off point.”

This cut-off thing which in reality is a vote of no confidence on the dignity and humanity of many vibrant, ambitious, intelligent, willing and impressionable young Nigerian boys and girls goes even further. It is the first major disaster that Nigerian citizens in such a large number get to encounter and the trauma continues to stealthily resonate in different areas of our national life. That this happens every year with cumulative figures make an already disastrous case a calamitous one, albeit silently.

But the government, the universities and university stakeholders like ASUU can’t be more grateful, for they had found the perfect get-away mechanism, or so they thought, for a most callous and exclusionary policy of inequality. A policy that on the one hand hides government’s inability to educate her teaming and willing population, and on the other hand deflects from stakeholders’/ASUU’s failure to appropriately advise and even protest the undesirable cumulative seismic repercussions that government, together with the extant educational system was setting society up for.

Notice that the very problem here highlighted is not nearly as much a challenge of funding as it is a challenge of sincerity, priority and tact. If everyone is struggling, lobbying, bribing and dying to get into campus to exit after 4 or so years with a paper qualification to show, that must be something to swell the heads of university stakeholders and make them feel overly important- ASUU not the least amongst them. But the Academics should have known better, they should have read the signs.

TO BE CONTINUED.

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