About the writer.

Omotoye Olorode, B. Sc. (Ife), M. A., Ph. D. (Kansas/Member, Secretariat Collective, The PeoplesAlternative Poilitical Movement

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In the last two weeks or so, the Federal Government, the state governments, their supporters and other anti-ASUU forces inside and outside the Nigerian University System (NUS) have fully unsheathed their swords charging at the Academic Staff Union of Universities[ASUU].

One of the Federal Government’s [FG’s] spokespersons unleashed the diversion of no-work-no-pay (NWNP) on ASUU while NECA (the Nigerian Employers’ Consultative Association?) and some anonymous and named ‘labour leaders’ (like Mr Issa Aremu, DG of Michael Imuodu Labour Institute), have thrown their weight behind governments’ invocation of the NWNP! We have pointed out that since a modern wage worker is really a modern slave, employers will really prefer not to pay any wages at all. We are, therefore, not surprised about the position of NECA. We argued also that the routine objection of certain categories of employers (banks, police customs service, private hospitals, security companies, some state universities, private universities, and other private educational institutions) to unionization of workers, and their predilection to casualization of employment, are all part of the increasing entrenchment of virtual forced labour and outright criminalization of strikes.

And we are not surprised, either, about the trendy “all-over-the-world” criminalisation of strikes even when it is the irresponsibility of the ruling classes and the rapaciousness of employers that force strikes on workers! Modern employers thus keep equating strikes with slave revolts which, respectively are punished with starvation [to death, if need be—no-work-no-pay], or death sentence! A law firm owner’s “colleagues” or Dangote’s workers don’t even need to go on strike to be discarded! Companies do that every time after making huge accumulation from workers’ sweat and blood by declaring bankruptcy; their directors would still keep smiling to their banks! The rhetorical and tendentious question, by Council Chairman Yusuf Alli, concerning what ASUU does with the check-off collected from its members, should be directed to his collaborator Vice-Chancellor of his university; he was an ASUU official at Obafemi Awolowo University.

As I pointed out above, various responses to the current impasse arising from ASUU’s national strike, have come from academics both inside and outside the universities. There had been out-and-out assaults on ASUU from certain lecturers, professors and Vice-Chancellors (current and former), non-ASUU lecturers; and at least one group of lecturers are grovelling before the Federal Labour Minister to approve a rival union, for them, against ASUU! Needless to say, most anti-ASUU comments on the current crisis are based on falsehood, half-truths, selective rendition of the pertinent issues which are already in public domain, and outright ignorance of issues, chronologies, etc.

In this essay, I wish to react to two contributions on the origins and development of this crisis: one by a professor who finished serving as a Vice-Chancellor recently, the other by a professor who, as an ‘elder’, also claims to know the [Nigerian] University System [NUS] well. 

Professor Idowu Olayinka , [IO], former VC of  University of Ibadan wrote (in, “Musing on the protracted ASUU strike: Echoes of the past in the present”): “I write as an insider in the  Nigerian University System and a patriot”; he did not claim that he is an “elder”. I consider his essay informed and factual regarding events and dates which went as far back as 1964, concerning lecturers’ dissatisfaction with their conditions of service and the humiliation they have been suffering in the hands, especially, of military dictators since April 1973! Everyone who is serious about why lecturers have endured half-a-year without pay, needs to read Professor Idowu Olayinka’s essay. 

I may just add four things about Professor Olayinka’s reflections on ASUU’s responses to the trajectory of the crisis in higher education. First, he said very little about himself. I gathered from my research, however, that he was born in 1958; that he studied at the University of Ibadan, at Imperial College, and did post-doctoral studies in Germany; he started to work at University of Ibadan in 1988. He is a Professor of Geology. Secondly, IO is an insider in the NUS. Thirdly, apparently because of limitations of time and space, IO did not address the issue of the scandalous and embarrassing condition of teaching and learning in our universities and especially, the conditions under which our young people are living in university hostels and especially in university towns! Happily, Governments’ own 2013 Needs Assessment Report especially on teaching and learning, and living conditions of students [even in the university hostels] are eloquent testimonies to the irresponsibility of Nigeria’s ruling class. The Needs Assessment Report is in public domain. Fourthly, contrary to what IO said about what Obasanjo told him concerning  his [Obasanjo’s] support for lecturers’ salary increase in 2001 or so, the truth is that it was Mr. Olaiya Oni, General Abdulsalami Abubakar’s Minister of Education, who signed the first major salary increase agreement on May 26, 1999 which Obasanjo refused to implement. ASUU actually had to declare a strike in 1999 to get Obasanjo’s government to implement the agreement reached with Olaiya Oni; it was Mr. Philip Asiodu that Obasanjo appointed to settle that crisis. And even with that, Obasanjo extracted 49+ pounds of ASUU flesh and many gallons of blood from 49 lecturers at Unilorin after the 2001 ASUU-FGN Agreement. 

Back to Professor Jide Osuntokun (JO) who also informed us in his essay that he knows the Nigerian University System well and worked in universities in Nigeria and abroad. I have corroborated this from various sources; Professor Osuntokun is a highly-regarded scholar, a reputable teacher, an author of many books, a Fellow of Historical Society of Nigeria, a Fellow of Nigerian Academy of Letters, and an awardee of Nigerian National Honours (OON).

It is also important to emphasize that JO, over a long period of time, worked closely with the Nigerian government during military rule, and as direct appointee of military rulers, some of who transformed into ‘civilian’ Heads of State in Nigeria and/or have remained critical power brokers and ideological spearheads of the current economic and social policies; those who inaugurated and superintended the current Neo-liberal Capitalist Siege against our country.

Professor Osuntokun was NUC Director in Washington [1972-1982], Director NUC office, Ottawa [1978-1979], and [according to The Nation, 26 April, 2022], the first Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Nigeria to the United Republic of Germany [1991-11995], Honorary Presidential Adviser [with Anyaoku and others] on International Affairs [1999-2015]. He was also reported to have been a member of the Nigerian delegation to the UN General Assembly in the USA (1988, 1989, 1991-1993, 2005-2006, 2009, 2011, 2012).

The import of this exploration of Professor Osuntokun’s engagement with the overlapping regimes of Nigeria’s ruling circle is to emphasise that he was serving at a period when they were imposing the ideological foundations of private, and largely primitive, accumulation and abandoning public purpose in Nigeria; a period when the ruling circles were particularly hostile and brutal to the students, labour, and the academics (ASUU, NLC, and NANS) which, in the late 1970s and early 1980s had already clearly apprehended the then unfolding economic, political and social disaster and foretold the current crisis. It is the same ASUU that the same ruling circles and their hangers-on are vilifying today. Clearly, our material circumstances forge our consciousness! Don’t they?

Professor Jide Osuntokun’s article

Below I have copied Jide Osuntokun’s article as it was circulated widely on social media, verbatim for the convenience of readers, and to avoid any possibility of taking any part of it out of context. Thereafter, I have responded to aspects of the article, mostly briefly, because of limitations of time and space.

“I cannot pretend I do not know what is happening to higher education in our country. As a retired professor, I am a stakeholder in higher education in Nigeria.  Having studied at the University of Ibadan, and for higher degrees studied in Canada, Britain, Germany and France, and taught in a Canadian and a West Indian university as well as the universities of Ibadan, Jos, Lagos and Maiduguri and in the Redeemers University, and served as Director of the National Universities Commission in Ottawa and Washington and was  a member of council in four universities in Nigeria before becoming a pro-chancellor and chairman of council of a state university, with all modesty, I know a little about universities worldwide.

This is why I am writing this article. It is extremely difficult for any retired professor not to be emotionally involved in the plight of university staff in Nigeria and particularly in the condition of academia generally.

Let me say right away that the current industrial action of the Nigerian universities has gone on for too long and would have more than destroyed the university system by the time it is called off. This could not have been foreseen by ASUU. But this is the reality. Strikes in the universities began in the 1973/74 session and has been a yearly occurrence since then. It seems to me that ASUU has played into the hands of its enemies, so to say, because very few governments that I know would have allowed the current strike to go on for this long without doing something about it.

I know, of course, that these are trying times for this government. It is faced with the problems of insecurity, collapsed economy and corruption; and each of these problems is capable of tearing the country into pieces. There is also the problem of over administration, too many states and too many local governments all guzzling disproportionate share of the national revenue. There is also the issue of over centralisation and concentration of too much power in the centre. The government is at the same time facing the demands of workers for better salaries in the face of rising inflation and wholesale devaluation of the national currency.

The fact is that these problems are intricately interwoven. Without corruption and insecurity, and with the right structure of government, the economy would not be in the dire condition it finds itself. Our country must undergo a complete overhaul of the economy to recover enough for the government to meet its responsibilities. Our country is not mobilised for production and productivity. We all rely on collecting commissions on oil and gas exports and our people, apart from the salaried ones, do not pay taxes, and our country is almost unique in this respect.

This is why we do not have a government that responds to the wishes of the people because it can exist while ignoring the people because it does not depend on their taxes. Whatever it, therefore, collects it can afford to dissipate and share it with whichever sector of the economy that is critical to its survival. That is why the security sector is favoured above the social sector of health and education.

If my people in ASUU will understand this, they will have a different strategy than going on strike every year and expecting different reactions from the government. This is the height of madness. What ASUU should now be fighting for is university autonomy, which the law has, in fact, granted. ASUU should take governments, both federal and state, to court over university autonomy.

Once university autonomy is granted, each university should cost what it will take to educate students across all disciplines in the universities in a differentiated school fees and come up with the economic cost. The government should then grant annually whatever it says it can afford while parents of students would have to come up with the remainder of the cost. Not all parents will be able to pay the economic cost of their children’s education. Such parents would have to be assisted by the federal, state and local governments scholarship awards. Churches and Mosques as well as NGOs, corporate bodies and individuals would also come in knowing that whatever assistance they provide will be tax deductible for those of them who pay taxes.

This will lead to differentiated payments of fees and salaries by each university. Each university will develop unique characters rather than the homogenised national, or is it federal character, that we currently have. For example, the universities of Lagos, Ibadan, Ahmadu Bello, Bayero, Obafemi Awolowo, Port Harcourt and Nsukka, because of their reputation and location, may be able to generate revenues that will make them pay their staff better salaries than the current poor national remuneration.

Governments at all levels must stop meddling in university administration. Some state governors that are not providing adequate funding for state universities are in the habit of announcing over the radio that their universities must not charge more than N50,000 per student per year when the actual cost of their programmes range from N500,000 to N1,000,000. The federal government also imposes arbitrary ceiling on fees for accommodation and tuition leading to poverty of accommodation and tuition not fit for human beings with the result that foreign students no longer come to Nigerian universities while young Nigerians flock to universities in neighbouring countries of Niger, Benin, Togo and Ghana, some of which are specifically established for Nigerians and, in some cases, by Nigerian business men and women!

A properly funded university system where the universities are allowed to generate their own revenues through fees, grants, innovation and copyrights will free them from the deadweight of government control. Economic fees may also put an end to irresponsible fathering of children that they cannot support by men and this may indirectly curb the galloping rise in our population.

A government that cannot fund existing universities finds it easy to announce new universities of “medicine” “transportation“”Navy”, “Airforce”, “Police“and “Army” etc. One former president during an after-dinner speech announced the establishment of eleven new universities with a grant of one billion take off budget!

The cost of higher education can be moderated if, instead of establishing new universities, the current ones are expanded thus saving administrative costs of paying tens of vice chancellors, registrars, bursars and so on.

My advice, therefore, to ASUU is to find a better way than embarking on strikes to fight a just cause. It should go to court to enforce university autonomy, and it should then raise revenue the way it must and allow the government to come up with whatever it says it can afford to grant the universities without any right to fix salaries and school fees. This is what university autonomy is all about.

If the universities can improve and fix their dilapidated infrastructure and dilute the local staff with distinguished academic staff, perhaps people on sabbatical leave from the international academic system, foreign university students paying hard currencies will come as it was in my days as a student at the University of Ibadan.

Universities, after gaining back their autonomy, can approach both Nigerian banks and the AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK, and the WORLD BANK, for loans and grants to improve their physical, laboratory, teaching and research infrastructures. If their programmes are well packaged, foreign governments’ grants will find their ways into the universities rather than into the bottomless pockets of the corrupt bureaucracy of government.

ASUU should pick up the gauntlet thrown at it by the government and methodically rise up to the occasion. Results will not be immediate and instantaneous but this is the way to go to put an end to this unending and degrading regime of annual strikes.”

My Comments on the main issues in JO’s article

ASUU has always been clear about the need for university autonomy and academic freedom. Both are entrenched in the laws that establish the Nigerian universities in spite of government interventions since military dictatorships took over our country and imposed the ideology of privatisation, private accumulation and abandonment of public purpose especially since 1984. These governments that then saw their mission as the dismantling public purpose started interpreting university autonomy as giving them licences to sink or float. A program which had been in motion, really, since the early 1980s where administrators [who are actually governments’ appointees] loot university resources and walk away! This ‘less government’ conception of university is the equivalent of World Bank’s SAP prescription of less government that allows rulers and their private sector friends to loot entire countries and walk away touting the success of ‘Africa’s richest woman’, ‘Nigeria’ richest man’, etc!      

Jide Osuntokun’s proposals on university autonomy is neither original nor new!

Imperialism, via its clergy in the World Bank, already sold the blueprint for the demolition of higher education to Nigeria’s military rulers by1978 [see B.Y. Usman’s (1978) For the Liberation of Nigeria. New Beacon Books, London. pp.72-77]. The authors of the 2003 Reports on the Status of Higher Education in Nigeria, anchored by William Saint, who was also in Nigeria about that time to inspect the progress of Obasanjo’s World Bank policies on education, observed in utter excitement: “The present government undertook more policy and institutional reforms in higher education over previous two decades. Among its notable actions are…revocation of the vice-chancellor’s former privilege of personally selecting 10% of each year’s students intake… councils with broader representation, the licencing of seven private universities, exemption of university staff from public service salary and regulation and 180% increase in funding of the university system…a new government policy on Autonomy for universities…proposals designed to reform existing higher education laws… the proposals reportedly would give institutions control place curbs on the rights of thereby ending their adherence to government regulations of employment, pay and benefits. As far as higher education is concerned, Nigeria is finally a country on the move”.   

By 1983,1984, the World Bank demobilisation of Nigeria’s public-funded education sector was in full swing, NUC and the Federal Ministry of Education had been mobilised for the demolition; and Professor Jubril Aminu who headed NUC before becoming Education Minister and Petroleum Resources Minister was already canvassing for privatisation of Federal Universities [in a speech published in Quality and Stress in Higher Education in 1986!

Osuntokun advices ASUU to take the Federal Government to court to ask for autonomy of the University System. This looks like an expensive joke! First, these are political, not legal matters! More importantly, even existing issues that are legally guaranteed by university laws and statues, like powers of councils, senate etc., have been rubbished by government and its agencies. As for legal and court processes, only individuals and organisations that have suffered the impunity of state power, even under this so-called democracy will understand why taking court action on the question of university autonomy is a joke. There is really nothing to go to court over!

 JO advised ASUU to go collect autonomy from [Nigerian] courts and proceed to the World Bank and AfDB to solicit for LOANS to run these future universities that would be allegedly independent of government; loans that will, of course, set further underdevelopment agenda as it had done in close to a full century in Africa! Loans that will also be guaranteed by Nigerian government that sold, and is today stii actively selling, Nigeria into debt peonage!

There are two legs, as far as I understand ASUU’s position, on school fees which in truth, are being paid under different guises in public universities—state and federal. At least one of the fees, Acceptance fee, is ludicrous! There are others like Sports Fees, Examination Fees, Health Services fees, etc., that are paid in many universities for services that are not rendered to the payees! One crucial leg of ASUU’s position is that Nigerian parents are already over-burdened even without tuition fees! And the truth is that a whole lot of eligible candidates are excluded from tertiary education because of non-affordability and restricted accessibility! ASUU also insists that education is more public than private good and should be fully funded in public interest as is done by responsible governments all over the world. ASUU had raised reservations about Education Bank and students’ loans because the scheme failed in Nigeria and other places. In the USA, President Joe Biden just wrote off thousands of students’ debts only a few days ago! Yet people like Yusuf Alli continue to peddle the illusion of students’ loans as a solution to the question of non-affordability of education for millions of Nigerian youth! The second leg of the argument is where increased funds for education will come from. Various innovative sources had been proposed by ASUU, including the TETFUND which, like various fund generating parastatals, have become cash cows for those in power. But the biggest source of fund is the public treasury which overlapping regimes of the ruling class have been looting. Nigerians have all the records and the identities of the robbers and culprits!

There is money to fund not just education, there is money to fund public health, to fund good roads and public transport, water supply, food production, effective security, and so on. The ruling class just needs to be stopped from looting public treasury. But ASUU and other conscious Nigerians are just being asked to surrender and look for ALTERNATIVES!

The propaganda about universities generating their own funds has a long history. Universities actually made efforts through endowments, and certain commercial activities—petrol stations, commercial farms, transport companies, guest houses, hotel and hospitality services, bookshops, consultancy services, etc. but what happened? Most of them collapsed while those ‘managing’ them got richer and their contractor friends were smiling to their banks? And why? They were looting exactly the way the Nigerian ruling class that appoint university administrations loot public resources! And because the looters are always connected to, have, and maintain, political power at all levels, the are able avoid sanctions. Indeed, it is the whistle blowers in the trade unions and other segments of the class of victims that carry the can! In any case these are the same governments that assign oil blocks to single individuals that we know: not to state governments or local governments, NUC, or Governing Councils of Universities!

But the foundation of all of this crisis is the ideological triumph, since the early 1980s, of private accumulation, individualism and relegation of public purpose. The antidote, the task, is reinstatement of collectivism, public purpose and democratic control of plans, programs and processes which used to be guaranteed by the underlying ethos of self-governance and committee system in the universities! That reinstatement is a political project, not just in the university system but in the polity at all levels: a project that the ruling class and their intellectuals cannot touch because of their commitment to the status quo. Only the victims of the entire system and their allies will carry out that task! 

The tell-tale rider by Professor Jide Osuntokun’s advocacy of “Economic fees [that] may also put an end to irresponsible fathering of children….and pay cub to the galloping rise of our population” smells so much not only of the Chicago School Disaster Capitalism interim (or is it “final”?) solution, but of its plethora of variants like eugenics and mass sterilization! It is, to say the least, embarrassing! 

The proposal for economic pricing and “marketization” of education is not new and it’s already having devastating effects! We do not have space to address all the consequences especially as they are already stark in private educational institutions across our country today.

There are, of course, areas of congruence between ASUU and JO. But there are so many contradictions and double-speak in JO’s article that need not delay us.

It is not just the Nigerian University system that is in crisis today. The entire polity, its organisation and its assumptions are all in crisis and the polity is divided.

The primary division is along social class lines. The hegemonic class, those who have cornered most of the resources of society along with those aspiring to join them, are arrayed on the side of the status quo. The victims are the teaming masses who are not only confused, flustered, and angry; but who are divided by the hegemonic class along ethnic and confessional lines.

In these circumstances, neutral intellectuals do not exist and there is no space, “AT ALL, AT ALL O”, for double-speak!

 In his “ASUU and the Limits of Winning the Argument Permanently” (September 2, 2022), Professor Jibrin Ibrahim did a brilliant and supportive piece on ASUU’s “phenomenal” record of resistance against the cynicism of successive governments! Yet my Comrade “Jibo” considered it necessary to refurbish the bogey of “self-publishing” by Nigerian lecturers and deploy the allegation, blanketly, against them. Much more than that, “Jibo” considered i necessary to reinstate all the allegations of crimes committed by lecturers in the NUS—sale of “handouts”, sexual harassment, moonlighting, etc. Jibrin Ibrahim was categorical, “….the struggle of ASUU has not been extended to the arena of the responsibility of academics.”. This assertion by someone who acknowledges himself as a former “leader” of ASUU cannot stand an exhaustive scrutiny!

Yes, some of these crimes are committed, some are apprehended and sanctioned, some are not, some are covered up! But reading Jibo, you will think every lecturer has his/her office fitted with a “handout” kiosk while all male lecturers have their penises permanently erect and out of their pants and with office lockers full of assorted brands of condoms! 

Blanket criminalisation of lecturers, holding ASUU responsible, has actually become a strategic diversion, if not an outright blackmail. It’s as if crimes allegedly committed by lecturers are viable excuses for abandoning public funding of tertiary education!  

The ASUU-FGN face-off happens to be a specific moment in which a particular, significant, and informed segment of the victims is, again, seriously questioning the entire logic of the decay of a critical sector in the midst of so much public resources sequestered, and being sequestered, largely in private custody by a plutocracy and its hangers-on!

This struggle to rescue Nigeria’s public-funded tertiary education goes far, far beyond its own specific and immediate goal. It is part and parcel of the struggle to rescue Nigeria from the deepening economic and social crisis caused largely by ruling-class abandonment of public purpose.

Only the masses of the victims of the crisis can carry out the rescue mission. This is why we insist that ASUU and the tertiary education sector must not be left to carry out this mission alone! We call on the NLC, the TUCN, all trade unions and the informal sector organizations, women organisations and youth organisations, to continue, intensify and generalise the struggle especially via solidarity with ASUU, NARD and other health-sector workers, workers of research institutes, Association of Private School teachers, etc., etc. 

 If, and when, no group can raise the questions that ASUU is raising, our country will have ACTUALLY GONE UNDER!

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ASUU, NECA, “Labour Leaders”, Varieties of Intellectuals, and Unending Neoliberal Siege