FG-ASUU impasse: Can Senate break the deadlock? ...Read More

AFTER what seems like an endless waiting for an official pronouncement on the ongoing strike by members of the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities [ASUU], the Senate, Wednesday last week, became alive to its responsibility. It gave a damning verdict by declaring that the Federal Government negotiating team, in 2009, ignorantly signed the pact that has now become the bone of contention between the government and the union, which is now hell bent on a total commitment to the terms of the controversial agreement.

However, it will be right to point out that the upper legislative body had not been sleeping on the impasse all this while as its Committee on Education, headed by Senator Uche Chukwumerije, has been holding series of meetings with ASUU, right from the commencement of the strike in June.

But the Senate, at its plenary last week, made it known, for the first time that the nature of the 2009 agreement showed that those who represented the government at the negotiation table were people who apparently could not distinguish their right hand from the left. This followed a motion moved by Senate Leader, Victor Ndoma-Egba, and supported by his 106 other colleagues. Noting that the ongoing strike had become a national embarrassment, the senators appealed to both the leadership of ASUU and the executive arm of government to shift grounds on the strike because most of what ASUU was demanding, based on the 2009 agreement, were defective, unrealistic and un-implementable.

Senator Chukwumerije gave a vivid insight into the agreement during the plenary. He explained that ASUU, based on the agreement, was demanding N1.5trillion, comprising, among others, varsity funding and Earned Allowance for lecturers. According to him, the striking lecturers are also demanding that government spreads the implementation of the pact for a period of three years, at N500 billion per year.

Admitting that some clauses in the agreement were ambiguous, Chukwumerije said ASUU had been frustrating efforts by the government to raise funds to meet the demands. He cited an instance that the ASUU rejected the N130 billion offered by the government, comprising of N100 billion for funding and N30 billion as Earned Academic Allowances.

The Senate committee chairman recalled that ASUU commenced an industrial action which led to the suspension of academic activities in public universities over what it alleged as the non-implementation of some aspects of some the 2009 Agreement. He also recollected that the union, in December 2011, went on strike due to the alleged failure of government to commence the implementation of the university funding, Earned Academic Allowances, university autonomy and other matters.

According to the document upon which Chukwumerije predicated his submissions during the plenary and a copy of which was obtained by The Friday Edition, the government and ASUU, in October 2009, entered into an agreement which covered: salary structure for academic staff of Nigerian universities; Earned Academic Allowances, including post-graduate supervision, teaching practice/industrial supervision/field trip allowances, honoraria for external/internal examiner (post-graduate thesis), honoraria for external moderation of undergraduate and post-graduate examinations, post-graduate study grant, external assessment of Readers or Professors, call duty/clinical hazard, responsibility allowance and excess workload allowance. Others are: non-salary condition of service vehicle loan/car refurbishing loan, housing loan, research leave, sabbatical leave, sick leave, maternity leave, injury pension, staff schools, provision of office accommodation and facilities; Pension for university academic staff and compulsory retirement age; formation of the Nigerian University Pension Fund Administrator and National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

As part of the demands under the funding of the universities, all regular federal universities, ASUU said, shall require N1, 518,331,545,304 for the period covering 2009-2011, with a breakdown as follows: 2009 [N472,031,575,919]; 2010 N497,331,778,701] and 2011 [N548,768,190,681]. For the same period, each state university shall be funded to the tune of N3, 680,018 per student, as follows: 2009 [1,144,075]; 2010 [N1,205,880] and 2011 [N1,330,063].

The union also demanded: a minimum of 26 per cent of the annual budget of the state and Federal Government be set aside for the education sector; that education should be put on a ‘First Charge’; Federal Government assistance to states for higher education; that Education Tax Fund Act to be amended to its original conception as Higher Education Fund; that the Governing Council of universities shall access and effectively utilise funds from PTDF for research, training and development of academic staff;

It also demanded the transfer of landed property; patronage of university services; funds from alumni association; private sector contribution; cost saving measures; duty-free importation of education materials by universities; setting up Research Development Units by companies operating in Nigeria; setting up of budget monitoring committee by each university; university post-doctoral fellowship-that each university governing council should introduce post-doctoral fellowship with pay outside Nigeria; provision for teaching and research development; National Research Fund.

The Friday Edition discovered that the agreement included university autonomy and academic freedom-membership of governing councils; review of laws that impeded university autonomy, academic freedom, internal accountability and transparency; no sole administrators for Nigerian universities; pre-degree/remedial programmes to be limited; Pyramidal structure of academic staff of establishment in universities and Expenditure on academic affairs;

As stated in the agreement, issues that require legislation included: Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) Act 2004 to provide for better collaboration between JAMB and the universities, consistent with the autonomy of universities; Amendment of the National Universities Commission (NUC) Act 2004 to make its provision more consistent with university autonomy and powers of the Senate on academic matters; Amendment of the Education (National Minimum Standards and Establishment of Institutions) Act 2004 to better articulate the co-coordinating functions of the NUC in the accreditation exercise and the establishment of minimum standards.

Others included setting up of an Implementation Monitoring Committee to monitor the implementation of the agreement, with the following membership: two members representing the Committee of Pro-Chancellors; Chairman, Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Federal Universities; one member representing NUC as secretary; one member representing the Federal Ministry of Education, five members representing ASUU; and a recommendation that the following should be members of the committee- one representative of the Senate Committee on Education, one representative of the House Committee on Education, chairman, Committee of Pro-Chancellorsbof stage universities and chairman, Committee of Vice-Chancellors of state universities.

While the lawmakers mandated the Senate Committee on Education to continue to liaise with the Federal Ministry of Education, the National Universities Commission (NUC), ASUU and other relevant stakeholders to stem further strikes in the education sector, the President of the Senate, Senator David Mark, was also mandated to engage President Goodluck Jonathan, and the leadership of ASUU in a meaningful dialogue with a view to bringing the strike to an end.

Mark had said the development had really exposed the ignorance of those who the executive sent to negotiate with ASUU on its behalf. Among others, the Senate President also said, “Listening to the agreement that was signed by the Federal Government as Comrade Uche Chukwumerije read out, I was really wondering whether this was signed or it was just a proposal. But when he concluded, he said it was signed. It only shows the level of people the executive sent to go and negotiate on their behalf because, ab initio, people must be told the truth, what can be accomplished and what cannot be accomplished. This is where the Federal Government ought to call those who were party to this agreement.

“On the other hand, I think ASUU simply took advantage of the ignorance of those who were sent and simply just allowed this agreement to go on because it is obvious that this is going to be very difficult piece of paper to implement. They found that those who were sent there simply didn’t know their right from their left and they just went ahead. I think that also is not fair because ASUU is an organisation in Nigeria and we are not going to go to another country to implement this piece of paper. It was obvious to me as soon as Uche concluded that this was a difficult thing for them to implement.”

Vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Education, Senator Olusola Adeyeye, was more blunt as he said there was no where in the world where such agreement could be implementable. He specifically said that most of the demands of ASUU, including injury allowances, excess workload, examination allowance and supervision of project allowances, maternity allowance, injury allowance and sick allowance, among others, were outrageous.

“I asked ASUU during one of our meetings: is there any nation where any of such allowances are paid, according to international standard? A typical teacher teaches two courses in a semester for three hours a week. You are paid salaries, why should you be paid again for these other things? Where in the world are lecturers paid examination allowances? Where is a professor paid allowances for supervising post-graduate students? Why is he a professor in the first place?

“What you cannot ask for in other spheres ought not to be asked for here. The standard practice in the United States is that if you go on sabbatical, you’ll be paid for six months; if you spend more than that, you have to fund it yourself. Where in the world do you say the Federal Government should be involved in the funding of state universities?,” Adeyeye queried.

The comments made by Mark and Adeyeye however touched a raw nerve in ASUU and the union has not been sparing in its condemnation of the two lawmakers. Chairman of ASUu, the University of Ibadan chapter, Dr Segun Ajiboye, was reported to have castigated the Senate President, saying his position on the ASUU demands was not unexpected, being a pro-establishment senator. In the same vein, Ajiboye described Senator Adeyeye as a beneficiary of the benefits available in the university system abroad  and who, having the privilege of taken his children abroad for their university education, is insensitive to the plight of the suffering students in the pitiable Nigerian universities.

While the Senate President is yet to respond to the statement credited to Dr Ajiboye, Senator Adeyeye, on Monday, addressed a press conference in his office where he took time to explain his stand on the ongoing strike, vis-a-vis the position and of the contending bodies namely, the Federal Government and ASUU on the contentious 2009 Agreement. Not only did he condemn the ‘outrageous’ of the union as contained in the agreement but also articulately pointed out the alleged ignorance of most of its members, especially Ajiboye, of what obtained in most of the universities abroad which they are trying to use as a model for attaining excellence in the Nigerian universities.

The senator reprinting Osun Senatorial District, declared that most of the striking lecturers’ demands bothers on retention of some factors hampering the development of university education in the country. Using the United States of America (USA) as an example,  he also averred that they are apparently not aware of what operates in the western world, where he said most of the institutions were flexible in terms of salaries and allowances of university lecturers.

“I was quite bemused by the reference by ASUU spokesman, Dr Ajiboye,  to my enjoyment of Duquesne University’s reputed Flex benefits for its members of academic and nonacademic staff while denying similar benefits to ASUU members.  First, in most instances, as its very name suggests, the Flex Benefits Program at Duquesne was flexible. It was also contributory.  The university simply matched, up to a predetermined ratio, whatever amount had been contributed by the staff. For example, each faculty or staff made individual decision about how much he or she would contribute towards retirement, pension, life insurance etc.

“In my case, I contributed 12 per cent of my salary towards retirement and pension but the university was obligated to contribute not more than six per cent of my wages towards my retirement portfolios which had been divided by me into different mutual funds like Vanguard, Lincoln, Travelers and TIAA-CREF. At the same time, there were colleagues who contributed only 3, 4 or five per cent of their wages towards retirement and thus enjoyed less than the maximum of six per cent which the university was obligated to match. In accordance with the flexibility of the program, at no time did I contribute towards or enjoy the benefits of Duquesne University Health program.

“Likewise, whereas some colleagues at Duquesne paid over $1,000 per annum to park on campus, I neither paid for nor enjoyed the campus car park facility.  After losing my protest to the university President that the parking charges were excessive, I simply bought a monthly bus pass; I rode public transportation to work. Doing this drastically reduced expenditure on car maintenance while still enabling me to get to and from work at a cost of less than half of what I would have been paying just to park.

“The flexibility in Duquesne University benefits program paled into insignificance when compared to the flexibility in salary structure. At the risk of sounding immodest, the truth is that I joined Duquesne University employment with superlative credentials that aided my bargaining power in matters of salary. Indeed, I was the highest paid Assistant Professor in Duquesne University’s College of Liberal Arts which at the time included all Science as well as Arts Departments. God enabled me to enjoy such exceptional successes in grantsmanship that I was offered an assurance of at least a 10 per cent annual salary increase for three years at a time when annual salary increase in the university averaged 3.5 per cent and some faculty were given no increase at all! The university knew that I would take my service elsewhere if it failed to make attractive offers to retain me.
“The consequence of this was that by the time I became an Associate Professor, my salary had already outstripped those of my colleagues in the same department. Even so, whatever I earned was far less than what an Assistant Professor was earning in the College of Pharmacy where a beginning Assistant Professor’s salary exceeded those of some full Professors in the College of Liberal Arts! It is noteworthy that when the stock market bubble got burst in the USA, with the concomitant reduction of university revenues, Duquesne University like many universities across the USA, froze salary increase for a few years! My wife is a Professor and Chairperson at Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois, where salary and wages have been frozen for the last three years”, he said.

Challenging ASUU and its members to a public debate on how modern and developed universities are being administered and run in more saner climes, Senator Adeyeye advised Ajiboye to canvass that ASUU adopt the flexible Duquesne University Flex benefits program rather than adhering strictly to “the current system where a Professor of Engineering at the University of Lagos enjoys similar salary structure as a Professor Religious Study at Ibadan and a Professor of History at Ile-Ife.”

 He also spoke on what obtains in most of the universities in the US, in terms of salary, wages and benefits which he said were unique. “There are five universities within a four mile radius of Duquesne University. One of these is Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) where I taught before moving to Duquesne. Each of these universities had salary, wages and benefits structure that were unique to its own institution. For example, CMU contributed a fixed percentage of a staff’s salary towards retirement regardless of whether or not the staff contributed. By contrast, Duquesne University contributed nothing towards the retirement funds of a staff or faculty who chose not to contribute. In any case, only in Nigeria would an academician demand overtime allowances under the euphemism of Excessive Work Load Allowances. Such a demand would seem incongruous across the world”, he said.

Adeyeye the assertion that he had his own children educated in the USA, while not caring for the children of ordinary Nigerians who are being made to bear the pains of the rots in the nation’s tertiary education sector. “Dr Ajiboye erroneously (and perhaps deliberately mischievously) sneered that as senator, I sent my own children to be educated in the USA while not caring for the children of ordinary Nigerians.

“It would have been easy for me to also sneer at any ASUU member whose child, sibling or ward might be studying aboard where academic staff unions  would never contemplates declaring a strike so that an academic staff could be paid allowances to supervise a thesis or dissertation! Do these staff not benefit from such researches which are crucial towards the scholarly publications necessary for academic promotion? If someone has been paid of doing or supervising research, should he again be rewarded with promotion and its concomitant salary increase on the basis of a service for which he had already been rewarded?”, he asked.

With pride and a sense of fulfillment, he said all his children had either graduated or had been admitted into a university between September, 1980, when he left Nigeria and 2002, when he finally returned to the country. Touting the academic and professional achievements of his children, he said, “Suffice to say that all of my children were already oscillating in the orbits of success long before my entry into Nigerian elective politics.”

Speaking on what he had done so far to effect a positive change in the nation’s education system, Adeyeye said it was quite convenient for the ASUU spokesman to forget that he had always, during his contributions at Senate plenary, being castigating successive governments for the neglect and underfunding of education. “I drew attention to visionary Obafemi Awolowo’s expenditure of 32 per cent of the revenues of Western Nigeria on education alone.  Awolowo had exceeded the benchmark of 26 per cent long before UNESCO had the wisdom to set it. Indeed, during his campaign in 1978 and 1979, Awolowo repeatedly stated that if necessary, he would spend 50 per cent of Nigeria’s revenues on education.  I also castigated government for entering agreements it seemed to have known it would not implement”, said.

He also said it was wrong for ASUU to be insisting on a total implementation of the 2009 Agreement, noting that the document is not binding.

“Though I am not a lawyer but what I read was it was agreed to recommend. I don’t know whether you saw the document; the agreement was that there would be a recommendation pertaining to this. But, as I said, if government was foolish enough to agree to it, I don’t know whether it was agreed to be paid forever or for a season but sooner or later we got to confront this; we must not let this circle of endless strike become our destiny in Nigeria”, he said.

Disagreeing with ASUU on its insistence on full autonomy for the universities, he advocated for semi-autonomy instead. He argued that, “In the US, people don’t realize this but there are only five federal universities as large as the US is. You know what they are? The military academies-Air Force, navy, army and another one and then Howard University in Washington because 60 per cent of its budget comes from the Federal Government. No other university in the US has money from the Federal Government; if you want to get money, you go and get grants. Universities in the US at either family-owned or are owned mostly by state governments. For example, this is what breaks my heart.

“This year, our budget for education in Nigeria is less than the budget of Ohio State University in Columbus. I am talking of the budget for al the universities in Nigeria, all the polytechnics, all the Colleges of Education, all the unity schools, all the Federal Government Colleges, all the parastatals. All of these, all together their budget is less than the budget of Ohio State University which this year has a budget of $5.2 billion.

Multiply that by N160 and you have a budget of over N800 billion naira. Look at your budget and see how much we give education in Nigeria this year. But it is also a question of the limitations of our resources and mark you, this university that I am talking about in Columbus is only one of 13 universities owned by that state but it is the largest university in Columbus”, he said.

Acknowledging the enormous rot in Nigeria’s education sector which he said cries for urgent and immediate attention, he did not spare the union as he said, “But as unpopular as saying so might make me to the membership of ASUU, the truth is that ASUU has been a part of the problem.  I would gladly love to engage Dr Ajiboye in a prime time televised debate on my assertion.”

The academic-turned politician however was not all vituperations as he offered and proffered some engaging solutions to the nagging problem of neglect in the education sector, calling for a holistic approach to the problems.

 “Meanwhile, we must leave the ridiculous for the sublime. Now, even as I did during my contribution on the floor of the senate, let us direct our attention to some practical solutions to this most national pressing crisis. First, the National Assembly of Nigeria should henceforth appropriate at least 26 per cent of Nigeria’s current revenue to education alone.

“Second, Government in Nigeria, especially the Federal Ministry of Education, has been denigrated into a beast of burden. The metastasis of asphyxiating bureaucracy demands the streamlining of the endless parastatals that drain resources while making little or no contribution to national well-being and progress. Third, to raise revenue for funding a national redemption program in education, all imports should attract a mandatory education tax of one percent. Fourth, beginning from January 1, 2014 till December 31, 2018, all workers in Nigeria must contribute five per cent of their income as education taxes. Embezzling any amount of these revenues targeted for education should be taken as an act of treason.  This should attract the most severe penalty such as impeachment, imprisonment and perhaps death penalty. Fifth, the costs for running the offices of all elected and appointed political office holders should immediately be pruned by 50 per cent. Something tells me that the implacable demands by ASUU are fueled by resentment at the cult of obscene privileges which Nigerian politicians have become. But our task is to curb needless privileges rather than add to them”, he said.

 Senator Adeyeye also adopted the populist approach as a way of tackling the perennial problems in the education sector. He said, “If I were to be the government, I will solve the problem today. The reason is that government made an agreement; nobody held a gun to the head of the government officials. So, instead of taking a hard line position, I will make a national broadcast and I will point out the areas where I thought ASUU was making ridiculous demands such as asking to be paid for supervising students; such as asking to be paid for the excess workload allowance. All the other ones, I will immediately be committed to them.

“And where will I find the money? Scrap SURE-P, for example; SURE-P is just one the ways where politicians and bureaucrats are chopping Nigerian money. Take the money and put it into the universities. Like I said, I will immediately take a bill to the National Assembly, asking to raise a bond; that every Nigerian worker, regardless of where you work- whether you work in Mr Biggs or you work in the National Assembly-you must contribute five per cent towards education redemption. That is what we all did to fund the Nigerian Civil War.

“Having said that, I will also point out, as the president, that the issue of the rot in the education sector goes far beyond what is happening in our universities. Every time people complained about how faulty the standards of graduates of our universities used to be, I always say they are as good  as when they came in; it is garbage in, garbage out. If you have matriculating student who do not know when to use who or whom, you can see what trouble such student would have because I was in primary five in a rural primary school when my English teacher taught me that who is for subject and whom is for object. We were taught subject and predicate; so we know what was the subject and what was the object. But sadly there are university graduates today who do not know what I just said I have learnt in primary five. So what we ought to do therefore is to say, ‘okay, this money will not all go to our universities because were you to make your universities in Nigeria the Havard and Yales of the world and to keep our schools the way they are, where will the entrants of those universities come from?’

“Imagine, if as president, you can give each state of Nigeria five billion naira per year for years, towards the total renovation and upgrading of basic education structure, that will come to N180 billion per year if you had another five billion naira for the FCT, it will become N185 billion per year. If you look at a budget of about five trillion naira, the additional expenditure which have just incurred by giving this grant to the states to take off will amount to no more than four per cent of the national budget and could easily be absorb because of the measures which I had earlier indicated, such as one per cent on imports.”

In the face of the belligerent posture of ASUU over the 2009 Agreement which terms the Senate has said are not implementable, will the union come down from its high pedestals and allow for some concessions as a way of proffering lasting solutions to frequent strike actions which has become the hallmark and bane of tertiary education in the country?