By Dozie Iheakaram
The ASUU strike and negotiation deadlock have been bandied and written about so much that it is losing its mojo, but like every other Nigerian who is concerned about the quality of education in the country, it is important we keep it on the front burner. It is not surprising too, that pressure groups are springing up, demanding that ASUU call off the strike. These groups demand that the strike be called off in the interest of the students for whom, presumably ASUU embarked on the strike for, in the first instance. ASUU has not helped its cause either, by not socializing its demands. It is therefore a legitimate call by every concerned citizen to request that ASUU make their demands public. I find it difficult to continue to support ASUU if they are unwilling to tell the taxpayers what their demands are; yet expect that those demands should be met with the taxpayers’ funds and our collective wealth.
I have also likened the FG/ASUU faceoff to a re-enactment of the Republicans/Obama faceoff which resulted in the shutdown of the US Government for over two weeks. In either scenario, the actors hoped that the public would blame the other for the crisis. But unlike the US scenario where both parties are of equal strength and with equal media capabilities, ASUU cannot really match the FG in the propaganda war. Recently the FG announced that it has offered ASUU N200b annually for the next 4 years, which ASUU rejected simply because they do not trust the Federal Government to keep its part of the agreement, a consequence of previous behavior. However, it is difficult to decipher if ASUU’s loss of public goodwill is borne out of informed outcomes based on the ongoing negotiation or merely out of frustration by parents whose children have spent over 100days at home. They are so frustrated that they would rather have ASUU call off the strike and graduate their children who will come out of the university production line half-baked and into a global employment marketplace. For them, they are not thinking about tomorrow.
I have been a supporter of ASUU strike over the years for a different reason. It has been an effective way to bring government and public awareness to the decadence in the nation’s education sector and the university system. Dr. Sunny Ighalo, an ASUU member buttressed this position when he stated that “the strike is meant to find a lasting solution to the decay in our education system”. Herein also is my reservation about the strike. Is the present strike highlighting the decay in our education sector or merely addressing the issues that affect university education in Nigeria? It will be misguided and non-maximization of our resources if the universities are transformed and reinvigorated to world class standards as being bandied around without corresponding investments in the primary and secondary school systems. The Polytechnics and Colleges of Education should not be left out either. If this is not done, the education sector will be a beautiful egg with a rotten yoke. Now the question is, is a beautiful egg with a rotten yoke a good or bad egg?
I do not limit the call for education reforms to only universities upgrade to world class standard and increase in Lecturers’ salaries, allowances and research funding. My view of the education sector is comparable to a factory production line. The raw materials are fed into the primary level production and if refined to an acceptable level, they are moved into the secondary level production and the output from this level is then separated into various lines in the tertiary education production cycle. The least malleable ones can be used as immediate resources in the environment for their level of efficacy while the best outputs move to the tertiary level production of university, polytechnics, and colleges of education for final refinement. Education is a production line and if you get defective products in the primary and secondary production levels it will cost more to rework at the tertiary production level, if ever possible. Bearing this in mind, I call for a bigger and mother of all strikes and demonstration in support of total education reforms by these protesting women and coalition of civil society groups but this time around the demand is different – REFORM AND FUND THE EDUCATION VALUE CHAIN!! While ASUU it seems has enough clout to fight its battle, the citizens of this great nation should stand up and fight for the Nigerian Union of Teachers.
ASUU’s demands which have not been well socialized should include the strengthening of its primary and secondary production lines to reduce the poor quality of products it receives for final refinement. It is important to state that the quality of the Nigerian graduate is not totally a result of poor university education but more a consequence of the quality of primary and secondary education in the country. Recently, I was in Atlanta and visited my niece’s school with her mum. The Head Teacher introduced herself as Dr. Susan. She has a PhD and that is a primary school!! Imagine what quality she has to impact on the teachers and pupils under her supervision. It’s about time we rise in support of ASUU, NUT and the education sector. We need radical policy and procedural reforms not only the repainting of classroom blocks and planting of grasses and trees. We need teachers who have been properly trained through colleges of Education and who undergo periodic, consistent and adequate retraining.
As recent as 2012, UNESCO indicted Nigeria as having one of the worst global education indicators. These indicators show that Nigeria might not achieve the goal of “Education for All” before the 2015 global timeline.
Edo state and Kaduna State audit of their teachers have shown that it is not enough to leave education at the state level just yet. The Federal Government should call for a state of emergency on the education sector and take far-reaching steps to revive it, including if I may suggest, making the teaching profession attractive by giving teachers special incentives, giving classroom teachers their own salary scale and sharing the burden of enhanced teachers’ salaries with the state Governments. This could be done for a ten-year period until the indicators are positive again. I know there is money if we set this reform as a priority. Senator Mohammed Ndume told us weeks ago that NASS budgets N100billion yearly for constituency projects and has spent N900billion in 9 years. So here again is my defiant solution.
Every citizen of Nigeria who is in the category of education value chain consumer is also a part of a NASS members constituencies, can the N100b budgeted for NASS constituency projects be used for funding of the education sector? This will obviously be money well spent and its effect can easily be monitored. When issues are as bad as they are in the education sector, we need radical changes and out of the box thinking. Remember education is the bedrock on which the country will thrive. If we do not provide the right quality of education at all levels in Nigeria, we are inadvertently restricting growth, stifling our potentials and ultimately hurting the nation.
The ASUU struggle is not an easy one considering the enormous challenges before it and the actors involved in the negotiations. You do not need a soothsayer to confirm to you that none, yes none of the negotiators on the FG side has his or her child in the Nigerian Universities. You also do not need anyone to tell you that none, yes none of the influential Nigerians; from Governors, past and present; to senators, past and present; Honourables, past and present; Ministers, past and present; PDP stalwarts have their kids in the Nigeria public school system. So, what will they stand to lose if ASUU closes for a year? Their wards are in the UK, US, Canada and Malaysia and worst-case scenario they are in the private universities owned by their friends in Nigeria.
ASUU is also fighting a battle against foreign and private universities in Nigeria, who are waiting for parents to get tired of the strike, withdraw their wards from the public universities and send them to the private and foreign universities. The foreign universities have discovered a gold mine in the vacuum created by poor education system in Nigeria. These foreign universities have representatives in Nigeria who lobby our scholarship agencies to send Nigerian students to their institutions. The capital flight out of Nigeria for educational purposes is mind boggling. If our education system remains comatose, the foreign universities will keep getting our money. It is a new form of oil wealth for them, and they will not give it up without a fight. You do not also need a soothsayer to tell you that elbows are greased, and all forms of lobbying techniques employed before these Scholarship Boards send students to specific universities abroad.
Here is a quick view on the amount of money leaving Nigeria yearly for the UK as a consequence of our comatose educational system. In 2012, Sheffield University had an inflow of £120million from foreign students of which 4.2% was from Nigeria. This is approximately £5.04m or N1.3billion (£1/N260). I am aware that there is a university in UK with about 900 Nigerians currently studying there in the 2013 session. For simple arithmetic and at a conservative £12,000 school fees per student, this amounts to £10.8million or N2.8billion naira.
These are only school fees and is exclusive of living expenses such as feeding, accommodation and clothing. Multiply any of these figures by a minimum of 30 universities in UK on a conservative scale and we are talking about real money. Then reminisce that there are Nigerian students in US, Canada, Malaysia, Ghana, South Africa etc. Now tell me how you feel? In 2012, a newspaper reported that Nigerians paid N160b as tuition for 71,000 students in Ghanaian Universities. A 2010 report recorded that Nigeria funds the UK education sector to the tune of N246 billion. In 2011, the Federal Scholarship Board (FSB), spent more than N900 million to sponsor 150 students abroad.
Imagine how much capital flight for tuition and monthly upkeep expenses PTDF and all the states’ Scholarship Boards who yearly send a minimum of 100 students per state for studies abroad are inadvertently investing in other countries education sector while ours rot away. A responsive government will look at these mind-boggling figures, invite ASUU and other stakeholders including Captains of industries (for we need to know their skill needs of today and the future) to a round table discussion and ask this question, “what do you need to help us reverse, trap or reduce this capital flight in ten years?’.
Nigeria needs a long-term reform in several sectors no doubt, but you need people with some level of skill and ability to produce in these other sectors. The education sector is too important to be ignored if we want to think about tomorrow in Nigeria.
Dozie Iheakaram (dozxy@yahoo.com)
This was originally written in May 2014 and marginally updated in November 2019.
