The saying all’s well that ends well has probably never had a ringing significance than it now does for President Muhammadu Buhari and his government. The president leaves office at noon on May 29 next year. This is a constitutional fact that will come to pass. Now, I do not know what the president himself, his government and party are thinking right now about this. But the challenge of the next few months is crystal to me: President Buhari and his government need to exit the stage on a high, and hand over a Nigeria that is at least as stable as was handed to him in 2015.
Achieving that singular but multi-faceted objective would require many things, among them the following three: a successful election, a satisfactory end to the long-running saga of the Abuja-Kaduna train attacks, and a definitive end to the ASUU strike, now in its seventh month. Indeed, I would throw in a few others like flooding the market with enough grains from the reserves to bring down the skyrocketing prices of food items; sustain the recently improved electricity supply; and of course, improve public communication with the citizens between now and May next year.
All of which takes us back to the ASUU issue. Last Tuesday, after meeting with pro-chancellors and vice chancellors of federal universities on the ongoing strike, the Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, had cause to lament the difficulty of industrial engagement with ASUU. He said: “The past two weeks have been a very dark period of personal anguish and internal turmoil. I used to deceive myself that in a climate of frankness, and with mutual goodwill, it will fall to my lot to bring an end to the incessant strikes in the education sector. This has not proved possible – or, at least, not as easy, quickly and straightforward, as I used to think.”
As a columnist not too long ago, Malam Adamu Adamu wrote many articles on ASUU’s strikes, often decidedly taking the side of ASUU, and coming down hard on the government of the day at various times. But as minister of education for the past seven years, his relationship with ASUU and even his performance in the sector more broadly has scarcely been better than those of the previous governments he criticised. Many would say he has in fact done worse than those before him. I will leave the minister with his lamentations, but for me, there is only one reason why there has been no end to ASUU’s “incessant strikes”: the federal government is really not serious about ASUU or about the public education sector in this country. This is the underlying issue and it manifests time and time again in all negotiations between ASUU and the government, but especially in between one strike and the next.
The real issues between ASUU and the federal government come down to just four things: increased capital funding to the universities; demands for higher salaries; arrears of earned allowances; and the implementation or otherwise of the ‘no work, no pay’ position of the government. All other issues, including the contention on IPPIS/UTAS are actually secondary and would not otherwise lead to industrial action by themselves, however trigger-happy ASUU is to launch strikes. It is an absolute disservice to Nigeria for a government to take six months and still be searching for ways to resolve these issues.
Let’s start with the Earned Academic Allowances (EAA). ASUU is demanding the release of N50bn for arrears of EAA, which the government has agreed to include in the 2023 budget. But why wait until the arrears have accumulated to this staggering amount? Why is it difficult for the officials in the ministry of education to include this in the budget each year? After all, almost the entire annual education budget goes for recurrent and overhead expenditures (80 per cent in 2021) alone. More significantly, EAA is payment to lecturers for extra workloads arising from high student enrolment per class. There is absolutely no reason why the students should not bear this cost. An EAA charge of not more than N20,000 per student per year or semester would more than meet this cost easily each year, and would permanently remove one of the sticky reasons for the incessant strikes.
Also, the federal government agreed to include N170bn in the 2023 budget to complete payment of “one tranche of Needs Assessment Revitalisation fund”, as demanded by ASUU. If the government now agrees to include this money in the 2023 budget, why could it not have been included in the 2021 and 2022 budgets? Why not in the previous years? The federal government always waits for ASUU to go on strike before taking action on the things they had previously agreed, because it is not genuinely committed to meeting those agreements. And this is the real problem.
But there is really no need for the government to include revitalisation fund in the 2023 budget or budgets for any other year. In the 2021 budget for example, the federal government allocated a total of N771.4 billion to the education sector (5.68 per cent of that year’s total N13.5 trillion budget), according to data by BudgIT. That same year, TETFUND raised a total N323.2bn. That is 42 per cent of the total education budget, and almost twice the N170bn government is now searching for as revitalization fund. But importantly, TETFUND billions are not usually included in the overall annual education allocation. There must be a way to repurpose some of it as annual revitalisation fund, after all, the revitalisation funds are supposed to be used for the same capital projects that TETFUND provides to the universities.
This leaves us with salary increase and the no work, no pay issues. ASUU wants full payment of salary arrears during the previous six months its members have been on strike. ASUU’s argument for this demand is that their work comprises teaching, research and community service, so even if teaching ceases during strike, research and community service goes on. Even by its own merit, this argument is weak and would not hold in any arbitration system in the world. If your job entails three tasks, and you didn’t do one, you cannot ask for full pay. And to earn the pay for the other two you claim to have done; you must show acceptable evidence for work done. An arbitration panel should be able to work out a formula for what ASUU must give up, and what the government would need to pay from the arrears.
And finally, the stickiest of all issues: salary adjustment for lecturers. The federal government is offering a 35 per cent and 23.5 per cent salary increases to professors and other categories of staff in the universities, respectively. The details of what the Nimi Briggs Committee recommended to the government are not yet public but it is clear that the government offer falls far short of expectations. A 35 per cent increase for a professor is like moving from N400,000 to N520,000. This paltry increase certainly cannot justify six months of closed schools, and even the government knows this cannot be accepted by ASUU.
The government has argued that adopting the recommended increase by its own Nimi Briggs Committee will cause other workers to demand even more salaries too, which is neither here nor there since everyone knows only a few workers would ever become professors or teach at a university. Given that the last major increase to academic salaries was done by the late President Yar’adua nearly 15 years ago, a 100 per cent increase across the board for teaching staff, and say 65 per cent for non-teaching would not be too high, and it should be possible to work out full implementation over two or three years. but then again, I leave the minister to his lamentations.
