It is clear at this time that two Honourable Ministers are, to use a contemporary term, trending in the news. Their situation is such that I thought I must put Dangote and the Nigerian energy situation on the back burner this week in order to join the ministerial train or if you like, the ministerial band wagon.
In early September, I turned my attention in this column to what I described as a gathering storm. The storm was in the process of gathering steam as a prelude to causing a great deal of havoc to the nation’s university system. ASUU, the union representing Nigerian university lecturers had begun to make some decidedly ominous noises over the refusal of government to implement the provisions of the 2009 agreement which was signed by both government and ASUU representatives as far back as the year of that agreement. The agreement was signed after it had been carefully worked out by representatives of the government and a high powered union delegation. The issues discussed covered staff welfare, resuscitation of the moribund university system through adequate funding as well as issues surrounding university autonomy. For more than twenty years before then, these issues had plagued our university system within which strikes had become endemic and decay on the verge of being taken for granted. It appeared that both parties on either side of the divide were ready to stop bickering in the interest of presenting a viable university system to the nation. A system that was going to guarantee the quality of the products of that system. After that agreement was signed, we all heaved a collective sigh of relief and were prepared to get on with doing the work required to make the system work.
The agreement was signed with great fanfare but, sixteen years later we are yet to see the results of that agreement. For a start, we were sure that the agreement was going to put an end to the perennial strikes of the last twenty years but we have since found out that the lice crawling through our collective hair were still alive and active. As a result, our finger nails are still bright red with blood. All our hopes have been dashed time after time.
Having spent forty-seven of the most productive years of my life within the Nigerian university system, I cannot turn my back on it six years after retirement. As a university lecturer, I just did not go through the motions of being a university employee. My having spent thirty-one years as a professor within the system shows that I was never a passenger within it. My commitment was total and I was always aware that my achievements within it were to be my professional legacy. The inconsistencies with which I had to battle for the best part of my career however did not allow me to fulfill my potential and limited my scope as a lecturer and researcher. This is why I feel personally insulted by the totally unreflective response of the Honourable Minister of Education to the ongoing two week warning strike embarked upon by ASUU, embarked upon to remind the government of her responsibility to the Nigerian university system.
It was no secret that an ASUU strike was in the offing but the nonchalance with which the notice was treated can only be described as shameful and disrespectful. After all, a union of university lecturers should not be dismissed out of hand in the way the minister has done. According to him, his government had done everything in response to the demands of ASUU and there was no earthly reason why they should go on strike. In the first place what is going on at thís time is a two week strike. It is time limited and designed only to sensitise the government and remind her of her responsibility to a critical sector. Rather than be sensitised, the minister has responded with fury. Previous governments for all their irresponsibility in this matter did not confront the lecturers with venom and did not threaten them with the withholding of salaries first of. And in any case, the no work, no pay threat has never been able to send striking lecturers back to work. True, university lecturers have been steadily impoverished by government policies over more than three decades, the threat of stopping their meager salaries can no longer be regarded as a fail safe deterrent. After all, he who is down fears no fall. On several occasions in the past, Vice Chancellors have been instructed to open registers so as to identify those of their staff who were on strike. That measure did not force lecturers back to work. Lecturers have faced down the threat of eviction from government quarters before and maybe it is to the minister’s credit that he has not yet issued the threat of eviction as a means of forcing striking lecturers back to work. In an attempt to break the ranks of ASUU, the last government threw their support behind a renegade splinter group of opportunistic lecturers who had chosen to curry her favour by rejecting the strike option within the university system. This has not broken the ranks of the lecturers. Those government recognised stooges, registered as a competing unit by the last government, even now, claim to be hard at work but the universities remain closed for business. So much for their effectiveness as strike breakers. One cannot but wonder why successive Nigerian governments have chosen to respond, first with indifference and then fury to the legitimate demands of university lecturers.
And yet the situation within Nigerian universities was radically different from what it is now. Back in 1972 when I graduated from the University of Ife, graduates did not choose to become lecturers. They were chosen. Such was the cynosure of lecturership positions that those chosen to undergo training to become lecturers were regarded as having been made for life. Not only did professors earn the highest salaries within the public service, their allowances and other perquisites of office put them in a class by themselves. In my generation, those of us that had the privilege of overseas study eagerly returned home to serve their respective universities. Those that were given the same opportunity a little over a decade ago have simply absconded and are now happily contributing to the development of universities abroad. They are never coming back home and why should they, when all they can expect is a tongue lashing from an entitled minister from time to time. Everything considered, the glory has departed from our universities and the likelihood of a return is slim.
The other minister recently in the crosshairs of public attention is the Minister of Works, the hard working, self styled Professor of Engineering. So many Nigerians are desirous of being recognised as professors even as real professors are skulking away in their battered ivory towers. The minister was engaged in a heated argument with a journalist who obviously thinks that if the minister was a professor of engineering, he was a professor of interrogative journalism. The sparks created in the course of their public interaction engulfed them both. My interest in this matter concerns why in this country, the Minister of Works has to be an engineer, any kind of engineer and the Minister of Health must be medically qualified. Well, this does not have to be so and is not the case in other parts of the world. Those of us who are sufficiently long in the tooth remember that the Minister of Works in Gowon’s cabinet was a lawyer and the Minister of Health was a History professor. Those gentlemen performed their jobs admirably. The Ministries of Works and Healthare full of engineers and doctors respectively. The minister is a political appointee, put there to supervise the political leanings of the ministry, to see that the workers are ideologically committed to the manifesto of the ruling party. When we see the Minister of Works parading in a hard hat, we just know that he is doing so for the cameras. The serious work on site should be left to the engineers who were employed to carry out engineering works by the ministry. If that was the case, the Minister of Works would have been spared that ordeal of trying to deal with the verbal pyrotechnics which raised his ministerial hackles to an intolerable level.
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