Prof. Festus Iyayi former National President of the Academic Staff Union of
Universities (ASUU) explains his views and
thoughts regarding the ongoing industrial
action by ASUU.
Excerpts:BENIN 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.
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.
Prof. Iyayi So what is The Way Forward?
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.
