University lecturers blame strike on government insincerity

As its members in some federal and state universities nationwide enter the first week of an indefinite strike, the National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Ukachukwu Awuzie, has told NEXT that the Senate’s reported intervention is nothing out of the ordinary, as “that is part of their responsibility.”

Speaking in an exclusive telephone interview with NEXT on Tuesday, Mr. Awuzie said the strike would continue as long as the federal government delays in the signing of an agreement it has negotiated for two and a half years.

“We had a warning strike for two weeks, from May 18th to the 31st,” he said. “It could have ended with that warning strike. They should have looked at the budget from the beginning, and they (the Senators) should have told the Executive [arm] that the budget they proposed was useless.”

Negotiations between the government team and the ASUU negotiating team were completed in December 2008 and the two sides were at the point of signing the agreement.

However, Gamaliel Onosode, head of the government negotiating team, reportedly said he has not been given the authority to sign.

“He said having negotiated on their behalf, the government must give him written permission to sign. When you have not given, in writing, a commitment that you will comply with your own part of the bargain or with the agreement....that made it impossible for him to sign. This led to the warning strike,” Mr. Awuzie said.

He said the agreement addressed university autonomy, infrastructural decay and improved working and teaching environments in the country’s universities. “We need to start implementing this,” he said. “For example, the autonomy of universities is something that academic institutions enjoy everywhere all over the world. Freedom of speech, freedom to follow due process and rule of law, freedom to air your views about the system without political hindrance, freedom to seek knowledge, preserve and propagate knowledge.”

Strikes as symptom

Drawing a parallel with the ongoing industrial action by the Non-Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (NASU), which started last Monday, Awuzie said strikes are “symptoms of a deep-seated sickness. And the sickness in this case is government’s lackadaisical attitude to education. Because if you look at this year’s budget, education got an allocation of 7.2%, a reduction from 8.5% in the previous year. When countries like Ghana had about 30% allocated to education. We are still insisting on 26%. But we are not saying it must be done in one year. But where 26% cannot be achieved immediately, there should be no year where education is given less than 15%.”

Confirming that a few universities were not observing the strike, Awuzia said institutions like Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka have no leadership of the union there.

He asked parents and students of all affected institutions to be calm and called on the government “to take the path of honour because, if they do, this strike can end today.”

ASUU was formed in 1978, from the Nigerian Association of University Teachers (NAUT). The union has had no fewer than seven such strikes for improved academic and socio-political conditions since 1988, when its members kicked against the effects of the military government’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) on the nation’s university system.