PROF. FESTUS IYAYI is a former National President of the
Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). In this interview, he
explains why university teachers nationwide are on strike; saying the
action is to compel the Federal Government to implement the agreement it
reached with ASUU on funding of universities. Iyayi, currently Head of
Dept, Business Administration, University of Benin, insists that the
union members are prepared to stay at home for the next three to five
years until the right thing is done. Excerpts:
ASUU has gone back to the trenches with the Federal Government. Why are you on strike?
The short answer is this: Government believes that Nigeria should
continue to be not just a second rate country but a third rate country
because the quality of development, the kind of society you have depend
on the kind of education that the people have and the quality of
education that exists in the country. In 2009, ASUU reached an agreement
with government on how to rehabilitate and revitalize the universities.
That agreement was a product of three years of negotiation, from 2006
to 2009, and government agreed that it will provide funding for
universities to bring them to a level that we can begin to produce
graduates that will be recognized worldwide, and our universities can
also be classified and rated among the best in the world. People keep
talking about universities rating, but no Nigerian university features
among the first 1,000 in the world because of the issue of lack of
facilities. So, from 2009 to 2012, ASUU waited for the Federal
Government to implement that agreement and what government did was to
believe and present the argument that what ASUU was looking for was
money, and so, they implemented part of the salary component; they did
not implement the agreement on funding. As academics, if you pay us
N10million a month and we do not have the tools to work with, that money
is worthless because we want to be able to conduct research, teach
students the latest that is available in the world of knowledge. Those
tools were not available and are still not available. So, in 2011,
precisely in December, ASUU went on strike to force government to
implement the funding part of that agreement. What did the government
do? They apprehended the strike in January 2012 and the Secretary to the
Federal Government invited the leadership of ASUU for a meeting in his
office. We went there, discussed with them on the basis of which on 24
January, 2012, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the
government under the title, “MEETING OF THE SECRETARY OF THE GOVERNEMNT
OF THE FEDERATION WITH THE ACADEMIC STAFF UNION OF UNIVERSITIES “and
signed by Prof. Nicholas A. Damachi, Permanent Secretary, Federal
Ministry of Education on behalf of the Federal Government. The most
important of the items signed was 3.0, that is, “FUNDING REQUIREMENTS
FOR UNIVERSITIES”. And this is what the Federal Government said it would
do: “Government reaffirms its commitment to the revitalization of
Nigerian universities through budgetary and non- budgetary sources of
funds; government will immediately stimulate the process with the sum of
N100billion and will beef it up to a yearly sum of N400billion in the
next three years”. As we speak now, not a Kobo, not an iota of
intervention has taken place in the universities. Yet, government
itself, in the various studies it has done, said it recognizes the
pathetic state of the universities. In order to implement this
agreement, government first gave a reason saying, ‘oh, for us to apply
the funds, let us first of all identify the areas of priorities to which
the funds will be applied’. Government also said, ‘we are not going to
give the money to the universities, what we are going to do is to
identify the projects, we will them call on government agencies such as
the CBN, PTDF, ETF to deliver the projects to the universities that
would then be estimated’. So the money is not coming to the
universities, government will do the costing and get people to come and
do all those things such as the rehabilitation of the laboratories,
classrooms and a variety of other things.
Needs assessment committee
Now what should be
those things: Government set up a committee called the NEEDS ASSESSMENT
COMMITTEE and it went round the universities and what it found was
shocking. First, it found that the students – teachers ratio was 1-400
on the average instead of being 1-40. It found out that the classrooms
were grossly inadequate and could accommodate only about 30 percent of
the number of students that needed to enter those classrooms; they went
round and found students standing in their lecture theatres with other
students writing on their backs; they found lectures going on under
trees in some of the universities; they went to laboratories where they
found people using kerosene stoves instead of Bunsen burners to conduct
experiments; they found specimens being kept in pure water bottles
instead of the appropriate places where such specimens should be kept.
They found chemistry labs without water; they found people doing
examinations called theory of practicals and not the practicals and you
will imagine what the practical ought to be. And when the report was
eventually presented to President Goodluck Jonathan at the Federal
Executive Council, we understand that Jonathan said that he was
embarrassed and did not know that things were all that bad.
No intervention
It was on that basis that they
said that this money should be spent. As we speak, the money has not
been provided, no intervention has taken place and the academics are
tired. We negotiated for three years, 2006-2009, we went on strike in
December, 2011 and government apprehended that strike; we signed an MoU
in January 2012, between then and now, nothing happened. That is why we
are on strike. We are saying, ‘look, rehabilitate the universities’. As a
reporter, you can go round our classrooms and you will see what our
classrooms are like. In this era, it is the quality of knowledge that
you acquire that will determine the position you occupy in any part of
the world. We did this and government did not do anything. A professor
came from Bayelsa State recently to the University of Benin, looking for
journals. We went to the library because we have an e-library and he
could not do anything there because there was no light for two days in
the library. If you go round here now, lecturers have generators in
their offices to be able to work, every department has two or three
generators to be able to do their work. Is that what a university should
be like? If you go to the students’ hostels, they in a sorry state,
they live 12 in a room; they are like piggery; they now have what they
called short puts, they excrete in polythene bags and throw them through
the windows into the fields because there are no toilets. If you come
into this building (faculty building), there are no toilets and, if walk
round, you will find faeces sometimes in the classrooms because
students have no place to use. And it is like that in all other
universities.
Enough is enough
Academic staff has said enough
is enough, we cannot continue to work under these conditions, especially
when government gave commitment in 2012 that this matter would be
addressed but up till now nothing had happened. We had several meetings
between 2012 and now and they will say ‘next week this one will happen;
in two weeks time that one will happen, give us one month, this one will
happen’, nothing has happened. And when students leave here, they
apply for progammes in the United Kingdom, United States and other
countries for their master degrees, PhD or other postgraduate programmes
and they are told that they cannot be admitted because their degrees
are suspect. Shell here in Nigeria spent millions of dollars re-training
graduates, people who made First Class and, when they test them, they
found out that they have problems. How can you take an engineer who has
not conducted an experiment, all he did is the theory of practical? He
does not know how the equipment works? If you want a properly educated
student population, you have to provide the facilities. That is why ASUU
is on strike. What government has done in the past is to say that we
are on strike because of money, now they don’t have that excuse. It is
true that part of the agreement we have with the government also talked
about academic allowances, but academics are saying that we are not
interested in that; we are saying that government should rehabilitate
facilities and once they are rehabilitated and they are up to standard,
we will come back to work. If you go to our classrooms, we use chalk
boards, the situation of the 1960s but people are using multi-media
facilities, mark boards where you can download information. That is not
available here and government is not interested in that. No country
developed without a sound educational system and the foundation is not
the primary school incidentally, it is at the university level because
it is the university that trains other levels. For instance, if you want
to teach in primary school, you need people who attended the Colleges
of Education; if you want to be teacher at the Colleges of Education,
you must have a degree from the university; so, the university provides
the manpower for other levels of education and that is why you must
concentrate efforts on the university education. If you don’t do that,
other levels of education will suffer and that is what has been
happening in Nigeria.
Against this backdrop, of your complaints more private
universities are being approved by government. Will this help to solve
the problem?
Even the National Universities Commission
(NUC), which is licensing private universities, has now drawn attention
to the crisis of quality in many of these private universities. You
know what government does: We have refineries in Port-Harcourt and
Warri; I was just talking with some people recently and they said, oh,
Port-Harcourt refinery is in a state where it can refine whatever amount
of crude oil sent to it; its plants are all now working,’ but, as at
today, government has not send crude oil to it and they cannot process
anything because they want to import. Nigeria is the only OPEC member
country that sells crude oil to its refineries at the international
price? Does that work? It doesn’t work, but they use international price
to sell crude oil to refineries, to make it impossible for the
refineries to process crude and then they go to Spain and other
countries to import refined products.
So, what is happening is that government wants to kill the public
universities just as it has killed its own enterprises so that it can
invite people to come and buy over the public universities?
Unfortunately, it will not work because universities are not like
enterprises. In the UK, most of the universities there are public owned;
in the US, most of the universities are state owned; the one you hear
about, HARVARD, is a private one, but most of the universities in the
world are owned by government because education is a social service; the
revenue and tax collected by government comes from the people, the
commonwealth, that is the fund that is used in funding education. And
what the government is doing is to under-fund public universities, give
them a bad name and provide an excuse to license private universities
many of which borrow lecturers from public sector universities, many of
which do not have the equipment which public universities ought to have.
And many of the private universities focus on the social sciences, law
and arts; they do not go into engineering, medicine or sciences because
you need a lot of capital outlay, you need to spend a lot of money
building laboratories. I went to Oxford University last year and they
showed me a laboratory that was built last year, a huge building where
people from different parts of the world went there to conduct
experiments. It cost billions of pounds and no private sector person
will like to invest such money because the returns on investment cannot
be recouped. So, private sector universities are gimmicks by government
to say that they are better than the public sector universities, but
then, how many people are there how much fees do they pay and how many
people in Nigeria can pay the sum of N350,000 and above paid in private
universities? Those universities are not meant for the children of
ordinary Nigerians and development has to be about the ordinary people,
it cannot be about the rich. So, there is no way, not in this century,
not the next or in a life time that private universities will become
more important than public universities.
The way forward is that the ruling elite in Nigeria must be sure of what they want. We have an example; many years ago, Ghanaians were here; they flooded our universities; when the Ghanaians rulers saw what was happening, they took a step back and said, lets us change direction’. They closed down the universities for three years or so, rehabilitated all the facilities in the universities and brought the students and the lecturers back. Now, the CBN Governor Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi disclosed that Nigerians spent about N62billion paying school fees for 75,000 Nigerian students in Ghanaian universities. Our people are in South Africa paying fees there, but who are those going there; they are the children of the rich. Ghanaians are in Ghana universities but they are not paying what Nigerians are paying there. So, the way forward is that government makes up its mind that Nigerians must have a place under the sun and that place under the sun can only be guaranteed with a sound university system. It must make up its mind; is it to close down the university system for three years or so, do what should be done and then invite students and lecturers back? For instance, in the University of Benin, you don’t have a foreign student and if you go to other universities in Nigeria, I don’t think there are foreign students. When I came to the University of Benin, I was interviewed by Prof. Smith, a Briton who was the Dean at the time and many people from different parts of the world were here as teachers and students. But, right now, they are not in Nigeria; instead, Nigerians are everywhere. That shows that the system has collapsed. When we went to the National Assembly, Sen. Uche Chukwumerije and his colleagues told us that they were on their knees begging us to recall the students because they are on the streets posing dangers and problems, and we said, it is better for them to be on the streets than on the campus of universities learning ignorance. You cannot teach ignorance to people or half knowledge to the people because they will be more dangerous to the society.
‘Not asking for money for ourselves’
If you have a doctor that is not well trained, and you say ‘go and remove an appendix’, and he goes to remove your heart because he doesn’t know where the appendix is; it is better not to have doctors than the one who will go and remove your heart than the appendix. That is what the Nigerian government wants us to do and the academics in universities are saying no, for once, let us do the right thing; we are prepared to stay at home for between three and five years until these problems are resolved. We are not asking for money, facilities must be provided to make the universities truly what they ought to be.
In terms of how to solve the problems in the universities, when the financial crisis broke out in 2007 and banks declared that they were in trouble, government brought out N3trillion to bail out the banks. First, they gave the banks N239billion, another N620billion and N1.725trillion making a total of N3trillion.
Then the aviation sector said that it was in distress, they gave the sector, N500billion and they gave even NOLLYWOOD billions of Naira. These sectors are important, but they are not as important as the fundamental which is the education sector. If you can give the banks N3trillion and all the universities are asking for is about N1.5trillion, the same way in which they sourced the money which they gave to the banks which they are now saying that they should not pay back, they should be able to do more for education. So, nobody should come to us and say that government has no money.
If they can bail the banks with N3trillion, banks owned by the private sector, they cannot tell us they cannot fund the education sector because the World Bank told them that Africans do not need higher education, that what Africans need is middle-level technical education; that is what the Okonjo-Iwealas and Goodluck Jonathan are for. So, let them do what they did in the case of the banks to education and if they do that, the problems will be solved.
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