Nigeria’s umbrella union for university lecturers, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) was formed in 1978 to replace its forerunner – the Nigeria Association of University Teachers, which was established in 1965. Ever since its inception, the Academic Staff Union of Universities has fought many battles aimed at bettering the lives of her members and for the installation of qualitative education in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions.
Since its first strike action in 1988 during the regime of Military President, General Ibrahim Babangida, it has embarked on countless strike actions, which often stretch into months and endless negotiations with the federal government that many a time leads to nowhere.
In a 2015 study by Adamu Ibrahim of the Ahmadu Bello University Faculty of Education and published in the Online Journal of Quality in Higher Education on the impact of ASUU strikes on the quality of university education in Nigeria revealed that from 1988 to 2013, the national body of the union had embarked on 16 strike actions. Beside these, local chapters periodically organise their branch strike actions.
Interestingly, between 2013 and now, ASUU has embarked on many more strike actions, and the recent one is on the federal government’s new payment mode for university lecturers.
The question is, how has ASUU-organised strikes impacted on university education and on the quality of graduates from Nigerian universities?
The study already cited says incessant strikes by ASUU does have negative impacts on the students and on the educational system itself. Some of these negative impacts include: poor implementation of university curricula, destabilised calendar of universities education in Nigeria, affected the quality of teaching and the learning habits of students.
These are serious impacts, which cannot be delinked from the current views held across professional quarters and industries that Nigerian graduates are unemployable because of the obvious gaps in their formation process.
This probably explains why many organisations and multi-national companies now prefer employing foreign trained graduates to Nigerian graduates, and why most parents now prefer sending their children to privately-run or owned universities to government-owned universities because they are insulated from ASUU strikes and the negative consequences.
What then is the way forward?
As a nation, if we must get it right on all fronts, the government at all levels and those who run our education sector must act in the interest of the people. It is scandalous that at this stage of our development, university lecturers and the government are perpetually daggers-drawn over how much salaries/allowances lecturers should earn, the state of facilities in our tertiary institutions. No nation serious about belonging and retaining its membership of the comity of nations does that particularly that nations are on a fast-paced mode.
In the light of this, we insist that ASUU and the government must see education as a joint venture whereby governments at all levels must as a matter of urgency adequately fund education, while ASUU settles down to the real business of teaching and producing quality manpower for the labour market.
Again, one of the major sour points between ASUU and government is government’s penchant for reneging on agreements with ASUU. For God’s sake, it smacks off irresponsibility and ungentle manly behaviour on the part of government.
We are aware that many a time, ASUU had to resort to strike because government wouldn’t keep its own side of the bargain or deal.
A government that takes education seriously must do the needful, and lecturers who have the interest of their students at heart must know that too much of strikes except as a last resort does more harm than good.
At Community Bell, we believe that the education a nation provides for her citizens serves as a major determinant for its growth rate in all fields of human endeavour. An example is the Singapore experience. In the 1960’s before it gained independence from Malaysia, Singapore was a decrepit and backward country, but it took the foresightedness of their first Prime Minister, Lee Kwan Yew who placed huge premium on quality education to move Singapore from a back wood third world country to a first world country.
In the continent of Africa, Rwanda provides a veritable example of a country that came from calamity to world acclaim because its President, Paul Kagame raised the bar on education as means of jump-starting development for Rwanda and the Rwandese.
In the words of writer and author, Norbert Juma, “education is at the centre of everything that’s good in our world today. Without education, we would not have advances in education, computers, mathematics, psychology, engineering and any other fields, education is one of the most important things we can do today to secure our futures”.
