Re: How to Neutralize a Powerful Union

Prof. Ibrahim Bello-Kano 

For lack of space, let me go straight into the main points of my comment on Prof. Brainy’s piece last week in which he offered suggestions on how a government can neutralize powerful unions and create alternative to such unions. Prof. Brainy also paid tribute to trade union-destroyer leaders such as Margaret Thatcher (the former Prime Minister of the UK, 1925-2013), Lee Kuan Yew (the former Prime Minister of Singapore, 1923-2015), and Yahya Jemus Junkung Jammeh (the ousted President of The Gambia, 1965-). 

The problem is not just with the word “neutralize” which, in its semantic range, means “make ineffective”, “liquidate”, “remove from prominence”, or even “destroy”. However, Prof. Brainy does also advise the Nigerian Government to remove ASUU’s monopoly by “providing a viable alternative in the case of ASUU”. In logical terms, one cannot ask a (liquidator) government to “neutralize” (make ineffective or useless or, worse, weaken or destroy) a union, which was duly registered by the government, and which, in the case of ASUU, is a democratic organization, which, again, is not the traditional worker union (of manual labourers and civil servants or businessmen and women), and which, in other words, looks after the university system, fights for its members and does not sell them down the river, and which, to be sure, inspired the idea of Tertiary Education Fund (TETFUND) and wholesale transformative policies for the country’s large and still growing university sector. An alternative to ASUU would be welcome since it is the subscribers that create and join a union and not the government. Let a hundred flowers bloom. There is a reason why a viable alternative to ASUU does not exist, apart from the so called Congress of Nigerian University Academics, based at, and entirely confined to, the Obafemi Owolowo University, Ile-Ife. 

• ‘One in every three children in Nigeria is out of school’
• ‘One in every three children in Nigeria is out of school’

Prof. Brainy thus speaks from both sides of the mouth: liquidate and, perhaps in the process, provide an alternative to a union that has been the most democratic and the most effective in defending the principles of the International Labour Organization, a key institution that exists to deepen the democratic process across the world. I suspect that Prof. Brainy instinctively despises a strong union movement that can sustain a long strike in the face of an insensitive or unsympathetic government or administration. But if the writer of this column, Ibrahim Dooba, can find the title “Professor” worthy of added on to the “name” of his column ((perhaps he is a Professor with a university affiliation), he should worry very much. I know of no Professor anywhere in Nigeria that has not benefitted, at least professionally and institutionally, from the struggles of ASUU. This very Union got the government to establish the TETFUND which has been building infrastructure and spending billions on academic staff development for more than a decade now. Without ASUU, the government could drastically abridge academic freedom, as happened in ABU Zaria in the mid-1980s, when some government officials asked that lecturers should be sacked for teaching what they were not meant to teach, namely something called “Critical Thinking”.

Between 1998 and 2004, ASUU won large salary increases from unwilling federal officials. Now there are more people joining the profession than when I joined it was a Graduate Assistant in the mid-1980s. I was the only one willing to join the profession, and when all my classmates and a huge number of graduates from the other faculties preferred employment in the commercial banks and other more lucrative institutions. 

The role of ASUU in advancing the university sector and the expansion of the democratic rights of its members cannot be disputed. But why would someone from a liberal background admire Margaret Thatcher, a bellicose, rightwing, union hater, who savagely attacked the National Union of Miners, who called out its members for a strike over her harsh monetarist policies? Thatcher pushed through extensive trade union reforms that sought to weaken the unions. The NUM’s year-long strike of 1984-85 almost toppled the Thatcher government. Although she succeeded in weakening the Union, albeit with the lukewarm support of the Labour Party, Thatcher was eventually ousted by her colleagues in the Conservative Party. 

The political historian Ben Pimlott (“Queen Elizabeth and The Monarchy”, 2012) has cited the Secretary to the Queen in 1986 as saying that “Thatcher’s policies were uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive”. He also argued that the political atmosphere created by Thatcher’s bellicose attacks on the NUM eventually claimed her, too. Arthur Scargill (1938-), the leader of the NUM, famously said, on her departure, that “she’s gone, and we’re here”. Thus Thatcher’s was a pyrrhic victory over the NUM. The NUM still exists as a union, while Thatcher was ousted, denied an honorary degree by the University of Oxford, and died in political ignominy. 

As for Lee Kuan Yew, the mythical figure and “cold war warrior” behind Singapore’s alleged modern development, he was well known as a vicious dictator under the guise of a statesman. He, like Thatcher, saw trade unions as harmful to society, and generally drove through harsh and draconian policies against workers and the poor, all in the name of an authoritarian development model. He hated dissent of any kind, suppressed press freedoms, silenced political opponents, and, in the name of “Asian Values” (he dismissed Africans as semi-barbaric) rammed through enacting laws against protests, banned strike actions, suppressed wage increases for workers, and presided over high levels of wealth and income inequalities, and tellingly enough, supported the USA invasion of Vietnam in 1967. According to Carlton Tan in the “The Guardian” newspaper (March 23, 2015), Lee Kuan Yew came very close to the notoriously racist practice of Eugenics, which seeks to alter the racial features of people in order to “improve them” according to some racial or ethnic model.

The other figure, Yahya Jammeh is one of the most despicable leaders ever, if you remove Hitler and Mussolini from the list.  There is no space to document his horrible legacy— suppression of journalists, murder of prominent critics of his government, rape of young women, arrest of oppositional TV stations and confiscating their equipment, the crudest methods of handling pandemics such as the HIV/AIDS (he claimed to cure the disease by spitting in a bowl of water), documented corruption, and wholesale human rights violations. Jammeh, to say the least, had no formal education, and imposed medieval cultural and health policies on his country until his ouster through a democratic election in 2016.

Both Thatcher and Yew may have successfully crushed unions for a time but they were survived by the very trade unions they sought to crush. Arthur Scargill is still alive and leading yet another worker-union-friendly organization. The people that Yew hounded are still alive and entrenched in the Singaporean parliament, men like J. B. Jeyaretnam, the leader of the Workers’ Party and the former President of the Republic of Singapore, Mr. Devan Nair. As for Jammeh, who is still alive and in exile and in disgrace, is survived by Adama Barrow, the very man he hounded into exile, and who was nearly killed by Jammeh’s murderous secret police.

There is a famous German saying, attributed to Bertolt Brecht, that “one can triumph into (their) destruction”. Thatcher, Yew, and Jammeh all triumphed into their political or physical demise: Thatcher and Yew died despite their political success at suppressing their opponents and both are survived by the latter. Jammeh’s repression and wholesale liquidation of unions, opponents, and the critical press did not stop his political death. 

Indeed, in the case of Prof. Brainy, there is a huge irony in choosing to tell the story of those three anti-union fanatics. None provided a viable alternative to the very unions they suppressed. All have been survived by the very people and unions they sought to liquidate. The final irony relates to what may be called “performative contradiction” on Prof. Brainy: one cannot hope for a liquidation that leaves room for a viable alternative because it is in the logic of governments and statesmen to leave nothing standing after liquidating a very good union that irritated them. There would be no alternative for such people but only a space of emptiness. In the case of ASUU, it would be a calamity for higher education, liberals, the professoriate, and even the academic who holds a column in a liberal democratic newspaper, a paper that cherishes free speech, free assembly, and the democratic right to belong to a union or an organization of professional people— all those being symbols of Modernity, the Rule of Law, and the Bill of Rights.