South-East ASUU Strike: The Government Died.

By Msonter Anzaa

It’s over four months since the Academic Staff Union of Universities went on strike in the South-East over improved pay. The strike has lasted so long that media attention has shifted away from it and the governments of the South-Eastern States have carried on with business as usual. The consequences of the strike include uncompleted semesters, disrupted examinations, unending sessions and most important of all, a heavily burdened and virtually collapsed educational system.

Agitations for improved pay have recently become very popular in the academic world in Nigeria. Last year, three Unions in the University system went on strike demanding upward review of their pay and more committed funding of the system. Three Months of protests, negotiations, accusations and counter accusations passed before universities were reopened. The argument at that time was that in line with the principle of federalism, the Federal Government could not impose a salary on the states as what they must pay their workers. Soon, the states bought into the argument and complicated matters by insisting some of them were not able to pay what the Federal Government had agreed to pay its workers. I thought the argument about federalism was diversionary. It was just about the Federal Government of Nigeria deciding to set the standard for Universities in the country. Just like the National Universities Commission ensures that all universities in Nigeria meet certain infrastructural and manpower standards, the Federal Government could decide that all professors in Nigerian Universities must be paid at least, a certain minimum amount. All proprietors, whether they are states, local governments or individuals, who want to establish universities would then have to meet these standards. But the federalism argument dragged on and is partly responsible for the disaster in the South-East.

South-East governments have since then refused to be referred to what the Federal Government is paying its workers. Their popular argument is that they are not able to pay as much as what other governments can pay. Everyone in Nigeria knows that government has no funds. It never does anyway. But somehow, it manages to send the totality of State Assemblies for overseas seminars on legislation. Government is obviously the poorest organization in Nigeria. It is rather ironical that there are officials of governments who may be wealthier than their respective governments. The tragedy in the South-East may not be seen as a national catastrophe, but it is. It is the tragedy of young Nigerian men and women who have been kept out of school for over eight months in two years. One-third of the last two years has been wasted on strikes alone in that region. Soon, when, as we pray, the strike ends, universities would just turn their final-year students to the labour market as graduates who may not be employable. Then it will become clear to all that while governments have refused to develop education for some stubborn reasons, they have actually helped under developed - not develop their people.

The other time, somebody was complaining of fake militants in the Federal Government’s amnesty program. Those guys may be fake militants but are they also fake Nigerians? Probably not. The fact that more and more young men saw the amnesty as an opportunity to benefit from the government’s largesse, should normally open our eyes into the mass of idle minds in the country. Even in Northern Nigeria, if you open a militant camp today, you may find supposed Niger Delta militants. Some of the people some South East States chased off the road by banning commercial motorcyclists called Okada, may have been university graduates. They are victims of a university system that is neglected and mutilated by poor governance. When you have a university system that has become a battle ground for agitations, deceive no one. You are grooming an army of political thugs, kidnappers armed robbers and even hungry politicians who pilfer the state treasury with abandon. This is what the government in the South East States has done.

My grandfather told me one day that the government had disappeared. “The government has disappeared”, the old man said. “We went looking for it. We traced its foot marks till we got to a huge rock. When we couldn’t trace further because there were no foot traces on the rock, we knew that the government had disappeared”, he said. The evidence of government’s disappearance, the old man said, was the increased criminal activity with decreased accountability for the crimes; communal and political crises lasting decades without any meaningful intervention by the authorities to stop them; decayed and decaying infrastructure etc. When the government was still here, you could not kill and go, nor could you take away people’s rights. When the government was here, it cared for the future of its young ones. Government provided golden educational opportunities for them. It did not close their universities while it played politics. When government was alive, it actively invested in the development of its constituency. Its officials did not develop stubborn ideas about taking holidays in Dubai, building hotels in South-Africa etc.

I have always argued here and elsewhere, that what we need in this country is sincerity and commitment. We need to have a little human feeling on the part of our leaders. That kind of feeling that makes you put yourself in the position of your young ones whose future you have compromised through negligence; a human feeling that makes you see the situation through the eyes of poor families who cannot support two children in the university and who therefore are desperate to have one graduate before the other comes in. It is about living on the ground with your people. We need governments who know us and whom we know; who trust us and whom we trust; who feel our pain and whose pain we also feel. I mean governments who live where we live and who also eat what we eat. You don’t motivate people to make sacrifices for the state by hypocritically neglecting their basics needs while attending lavishly to your luxurious wants. If the South East States truly do not have the funds to assent to the wishes of ASUU, the must open their hands and ensure fairness in the wage system. And letting local councilors with SSCE certificates earn more than professors just for being in government is not one way of doing this.

Finally, when it closed universities for months; when it looked the other way as the future of its lovely young ones was being jeopardized, that is when the government in the South East died.

Read also ASUU Strike: The Boko Haram in the Federal Government