ASUU’s unwinnable battles: The need to change tactics  

By Prof. Tunji Olaopa

ASUU has always been in the news. And the news has always been about ASUU’s grouse with the Federal Government of Nigeria over the deplorable state of the higher education nay university system in Nigeria. It is however left to decide whether ASUU’s public presence or is it struggle, is achieving its desirable objective. There is a reason for this query. This is because it is as if ASUU’s rhetoric and action are more like lots of sounds and fury with little to show for it if the future of Nigerian universities is anything to go by. Almost on every count of its strike, ASUU extracts some sort of financial commitment from government. And this seems to constitute some kind of a win, until the next strike. Unfortunately, these strikes add their own damages to the university system that ASUU is so intent on rescuing. The other side of the national calamity is that government by its own actions has not given anyone the confidence to think that it is ready to achieve anything different with the federal universities. In fact, there is that collective narrative that outside of ASUU’s militant activism on behalf of university education, the Nigerian university system would have been far worse off than it currently is. And to make matters worse, you have the federal government floating more universities that are, to all intents and purposes, dead on arrival.

It is then logical to ask, within the context of the axiom that the government owes its people and its national development plan, a blueprint for educating her citizens; what Nigeria’s masterplan is in this regard? In other words, given the diversification of tertiary education system with the exponential growth of private universities, how is the federal government’s education blueprint a significant platform from which to engage ASUU, other trade unions in the university system, as well as other stakeholders in the education sector? This is a critical question for me. And its sense derives from my experience not only as a former coordinator of the education sector analysis project at the federal ministry of education and head of its policy division, but also as a former permanent secretary at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity. One of the cogent issues I had to engage with is the adversarial industrial relations dynamics that undermine the national productivity profile of the Nigerian state. The tension generated by these actions are rooted first in government’s non-strategic tactics circumscribed by system breakdown that undermine strategic communication founded on a vision of what should be. And second, there is the better organised trade unions deploying their own industrial relations approach designed to exploit government’s tenuous legitimacy and mistrust by the populace that has resigned itself to fate in the face of government’s dysfunctional policy architecture that has scant impact on its well-being.

Unfortunately, strikes are not working. The several concessions that ASUU and the other trade unions have exacted from the government are too marginal to amount to any tangible impacts on the university system. The question for ASUU then is: how long can a good case be fought with a tactic that seems jaded and wearying, and has really not won any of the battles decisively and in any revolutionary sense? Let us face the fact—ASUU has a compelling case to make. The Nigerian university system is in a terribly bad shape. This one statement of fact captures the entirety of ASUU’s activism for as long as the trade union has been established. No one can grudge this fact. And it is because it is founded on the axiom that the greatness of any nation is measured in terms of the crop of its patriotic human capital who are willing to deploy their competences to rebuilding their fatherland. Unfortunately, the debilitated Nigerian university system churns out human capitals that did not get the best they could have gotten, and that lands in the unemployment market where they are not able to give anything to their fatherland. Well, they are not able to give anything except hatred and deep animosity that could become inflamed any time. And as the Minister of Education once wrote before becoming the minister, the struggle by ASUU “is to save the university system so that it becomes what it is supposed to be—a system for producing a culturally literate society, and for generating and harnessing ideas and knowledge, initiating and driving social and economic innovation, and ensuring national competitiveness on the global scene.”

ASUU is genuinely and significantly placed to champion this noble course of repositioning the university system. Indeed, ASUU should not be left alone on the matter. This goes beyond just being a sectoral matter that the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), for instance, will just lend a mere voice and support. It is a national emergency that ASUU cannot fight alone. One begins to really appreciate the depth of the worrying future the university system faces when one takes a long look at the parlous state of Nigeria’s public primary and secondary schools today. Only those without the means dare to send their children to public schools.  And the public universities are not far from that point. They are losing students at an alarming rate. Those with the means either send their wards to private universities, or send them outside of Nigeria. And who can blame them? And when all is said and done, we lose both the students who struggle to go through the university system in Nigeria and those who traveled out to the diaspora. Saudi Arabia recently benefitted from the few doctors we have who had been struggling with livelihood in Nigeria.

This is all so good, so far. The real point to make is that if ASUU ever hopes to win this battle for the revamping of the university system, it must first recalibrate its tactics. I am always alarmed when I hear the best of the intellectuals Nigeria can produce saying strike is the only language the Nigerian leadership understands. And I retort, what has strikes tangibly produced for the university lecturers and for the system itself? For me, one good way to rethink the strike strategy is to historicize its provenance, trajectory and functionality. We have to look at the labour unrest against the uncaring colonial state, all through the years of military rule when any industrial action was met with a balance of terror. By the time ASUU became incorporated as a trade union, it began on the foundation of a Marxist ideological framework. But the times are changing, and even Marxism itself as a significant ideology has undergone several fundamental changes itself! The sad fact however is that ASUU today has been so distanced from any ideological provenance as to be almost bare. Its fixation with strikes speaks to a union bereft of options and fixated on vacuous populism.

To return to an earlier point. ASUU can no longer take up the messiah complex as the only party interested in the salvation of higher education in Nigeria. It will be a significant recognition of the possibility of alternative strategies if ASUU can champion the emergence of an ideology-based model of higher education development that would feed into the national development vision. This is an imperative given the fact that adversarial industrial relations dynamics will never ever yield any tangible results that will do justice to the larger picture in a nation’s development framework. ASUU and the government, together with other relevant stakeholders, including the National Universities Commission, have to get involved in a conversation around two fundamental issues. The first is the matter of university autonomy. This is a significant aspect of the entire trouble of making the university system functional as a source of sound education and human capital development. This is an issue ASUU must lay on the table and force government’s hand in seeing it through to a logical conclusion. Autonomy demands that each federal university will agree on the constitution of a strategic governing council that will then deliberate on strategic change management dynamics around which the university can become administratively self-sustaining and academically excellent.

The second issue, a correlate of the first, concerns the idea of education funding, and the appropriate models that could be considered. It might just be in Nigeria alone that the government fully funds higher education. This is seriously unsustainable. And definitely not with the economic recession caused oil price volatility and accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic. All across the world, education funding models derive from tuition and fees, operating grants, auxiliary enterprises, endowment and other gifts and investments. Each university, apart from the government operating grants and other private-induced contracts and endowments, is then instigated into a creative rethinking of the pathway into internal growth and excellence that will have to rethink some internal frameworks—education bank, student loans, work-and-study schemes, recalibrated distance learning, bursary and scholarships, etc.—that will define its unique identity. Such an identity would have to be defined, most importantly, against the background of the research imperative that ties the university to its location.

In the final analysis, ASUU must re-learn the principle of collective bargaining around first principles that will bring into sharp focus the crucial relationship between the demand for the revitalisation of the university system in Nigeria and the country’s labour laws, national fiscal crisis and the overall development and productivity challenges that Nigeria is facing. Of course, the university system must be saved and be made more innovative and competitive. However, we can no longer allow the fixation with strikes blind us to the possibility for alternatives. After all, we are talking of a union of all the intellectuals and scholars in Nigeria. How impossible could the search for a different strategy be?

Olaopa is Retired Federal Permanent Secretary and can be reached via [email protected]