PROF. FESTUS IYAYI is a former National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). In this interview,
he explains why university teachers nationwide are on strike; saying
the action is to compel the Federal Government to implement the
agreement it reached with ASUU on funding of universities. Iyayi,
currently Head of Dept, Business Administration, University of Benin,
insists that the union members are prepared to stay at home for the next three to five years until the right thing is done. Excerpts:
BY GABRIEL ENOGHOLASE, BENIN
ASUU has gone back to the trenches with the Federal Government. Why are you on strike?
The short answer is this: Government believes that Nigeria should
continue to be not just a second rate country but a third rate country
because the quality of development, the kind of society you have depend
on the kind of education that the people have and the quality of
education that exists in the country.
In 2009, ASUU reached an agreement
with government on how to rehabilitate and revitalize the universities.
That agreement was a product of
three years of negotiation, from 2006 to 2009, and government agreed
that it will provide funding for universities to bring them to a level
that we can begin to produce graduates that will be recognized
worldwide, and our universities can also be classified and rated among
the best in the world. People keep talking about universities rating,
but no Nigerian university features among the first 1,000 in the world
because of the issue of lack of facilities.
So, from 2009 to 2012, ASUU
waited for the Federal Government to implement that agreement and what
government did was to believe and present the argument that what ASUU
was looking for was money, and
so, they implemented part of the salary component; they did not
implement the agreement on funding. As academics, if you pay us
N10million a month and we do not have the tools to work with, that money
is worthless because we want to be able to conduct research, teach
students the latest that is available in the world of knowledge. Those
tools were not available and are still not available. So, in 2011,
precisely in December, ASUU went on strike to force government to
implement the funding part of that agreement.
What did the government
do? They apprehended the strike in January 2012 and the Secretary to the
Federal Government invited the leadership of ASUU for a meeting in his
office. We went there, discussed with them on the basis of which on 24
January, 2012, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the
government under the title, “MEETING OF THE SECRETARY OF THE GOVERNEMNT
OF THE FEDERATION WITH THE ACADEMIC STAFF UNION OF UNIVERSITIES “and
signed by Prof. Nicholas A. Damachi, Permanent Secretary, Federal
Ministry of Education on behalf of the Federal Government. The most
important of the items signed was 3.0, that is, “FUNDING REQUIREMENTS
FOR UNIVERSITIES”. And this is what the Federal Government said it would
do: “Government reaffirms its commitment to the revitalization of
Nigerian universities through budgetary and non- budgetary sources of
funds; government will immediately stimulate the process with the sum of
N100billion and will beef it up to a yearly sum of N400billion in the
next three years”.
As we speak now, not a Kobo, not an iota of
intervention has taken place in the universities. Yet, government
itself, in the various studies it has done, said it recognizes the
pathetic state of the universities. In order to implement this
agreement, government first gave a reason saying, ‘oh, for us to apply
the funds, let us first of all identify the areas of priorities to
which the funds will be applied’. Government also said, ‘we are not
going to give the money to the universities, what we are going to do is
to identify the projects, we will them call on government agencies such
as the CBN, PTDF, ETF to deliver the projects to the universities that
would then be estimated’. So the money is not coming to the
universities, government will do the costing and get people to come and
do all those things such as the rehabilitation of the laboratories,
classrooms and a variety of other things.
Prof. Fetus Iyayi
Needs assessment committee
Now what should be those things: Government set up a committee called
the NEEDS ASSESSMENT COMMITTEE and it went round the universities and
what it found was shocking. First, it found that the students – teachers
ratio was 1-400 on the average instead of being 1-40. It found out that
the classrooms were grossly inadequate and could accommodate only about
30 percent of the number of students that needed to enter those
classrooms; they went round and found students standing in their lecture
theatres with other students writing on their backs; they found
lectures going on under trees in some of the universities; they went to
laboratories where they found people using kerosene stoves instead of
bushing burners to conduct experiments; they found specimens being kept
in pure water bottles instead of the appropriate places where such
specimens should be kept. They found chemistry labs without water; they
found people doing examinations
called theory of practicals and not the practicals and you will imagine
what the practical ought to be. And when the report was eventually
presented to President Goodluck Jonathan at the Federal Executive
Council, we understand that Jonathan said that he was embarrassed and
did not know that things were all that bad.
No intervention
It was on that basis that they said that this money should be spent. As we speak, the money
has not been provided, no intervention has taken place and the
academics are tired. We negotiated for three years, 2006-2009, we went
on strike in December, 2011 and government apprehended that strike; we
signed an MoU in January 2012, between then and now,
nothing happened. That is why we are on strike. We are saying, ‘look,
rehabilitate the universities’. As a reporter, you can go round our
classrooms and you will see what our classrooms are like. In this era,
it is the quality of knowledge that you acquire that will determine the
position you occupy in any part of the world. We did this and government
did not do anything. A professor came from Bayelsa State recently to
the University of Benin, looking for journals. We went to the library
because we have an e-library and he could not do anything there because
there was no light for two days in the library. If you go round here
now, lecturers have generators in their offices to be able to work,
every department has two or three generators to be able to do their
work. Is that what a university should be like? If you go to the
students’ hostels, they in a sorry state, they live 12 in a room; they
are like piggery; they now have what they called short puts, they
excrete in polythene bags and throw them through the windows into the
fields because there are no toilets. If you come into this building
(faculty building), there are no toilets and, if walk round, you will
find faeces sometimes in the classrooms because students have no place
to use. And it is like that in all other universities.
Enough is enough
Academic staff has said enough is enough, we cannot continue to work
under these conditions, especially when government gave commitment in
2012 that this matter would be addressed but up till now nothing had
happened. We had several meetings between 2012 and now and they will say
‘next week this one will happen; in two weeks time that one will
happen, give us one month, this one will happen’, nothing has happened.
And when students leave here, they apply for progammes in the United
Kingdom, United States and other countries for their master degrees, PhD
or other postgraduate programmes and they are told that they cannot be
admitted because their degrees are suspect. Shell here in Nigeria spent
millions of dollars re-training graduates, people who made First Class
and, when they test them, they found out that they have problems. How
can you take an engineer who has not conducted an experiment, all he did
is the theory of practical? He does not know how the equipment works?
If you want a properly educated student population, you have to provide
the facilities. That is what ASUU is on strike. What government has done
in the past is to say that we are on strike because of money, now they
don’t have that excuse.
It is true that part of the agreement we have
with the government also talked about academic allowances, but academics
are saying that we are not interested in that; we are saying that
government should rehabilitate facilities and once they are
rehabilitated and they are up to standard, we will come back to work. If
you go to our classrooms, we use chalk boards, the situation of the
1960s but people are using multi-media facilities, mark boards where you
can download information. That is not available here and government is
not interested in that. No country developed without a sound educational
system and the foundation is not the primary school incidentally, it is
at the university level because it is the university that trains other
levels. For instance, if you want to teach in primary school, you need
people who attended the Colleges of Education; if you want to be teacher
at the Colleges of Education, you must have a degree from the
university; so, the university provides the manpower for other levels of
education and that is why you must concentrate efforts on the
university education. If you don’t do that, other levels of education
will suffer and that is what has been happening in Nigeria.
Against this backdrop, of your complaints more private universities
are being approved by government. Will this help to solve the problem?
Even the National Universities Commission (NUC), which is licensing
private universities, has now drawn attention to the crisis of quality
in many of these private universities. You know what government does: We
have refineries in Port-Harcourt and Warri; I was just talking with
some people recently and they said, oh, Port-Harcourt refinery is in a
state where it can refine whatever amount of crude oil sent to it; its
plants are all now working,’ but, as at today, government has not send
crude oil to it and they cannot process anything because they want to
import. Nigeria is the only OPEC member country that sells crude oil to
its refineries at the international price? Does that work? It doesn’t
work, but they use international price to sell crude oil to refineries,
to make it impossible for the refineries to process crude and then they
go to Spain and other countries to import refined products.
So, what is happening is that government wants to kill the public
universities just as it has killed its own enterprises so that it can
invite people to come and buy over the public universities?
Unfortunately, it will not work because universities are not like
enterprises. In the UK, most of the universities there are public owned;
in the US, most of the universities are state owned; the one you hear
about, HARVARD, is a private one, but most of the universities in the
world are owned by government because education is a social service; the
revenue and tax collected by government comes from the people, the
commonwealth, that is the fund that is used in funding education. And
what the government is doing is to under-fund public universities, give
them a bad name and provide an excuse to license private universities
many of which borrow lecturers from public sector universities, many of
which do not have the equipment which public universities ought to have.
And many of the private universities focus on the social sciences, law
and arts; they do not go into engineering, medicine or sciences because
you need a lot of capital outlay, you need to spend a lot of money
building laboratories.
I went to Oxford University last year and they
showed me a laboratory that was built last year, a huge building where
people from different parts of the world went there to conduct
experiments. It cost billions of pounds and no private sector person
will like to invest such money because the returns on investment cannot
be recouped. So, private sector universities are gimmicks by government
to say that they are better than the public sector universities, but
then, how many people are there how much fees do they pay and how many
people in Nigeria can pay the sum of N350,000 and above paid in private
universities? Those universities are not meant for the children of
ordinary Nigerians and development has to be about the ordinary people,
it cannot be about the rich. So, there is no way, not in this century,
not the next or in a life time that private universities will become
more important than public universities.
Prof. Iyayi
So what is The Way Forward?
The way forward is that the ruling elite in Nigeria must be sure of what
that want. We have an example; many years ago, Ghanaians were here;
they flooded our universities; when the Ghanaians rulers saw what was
happening, they took a step back and said, lets us change direction’.
They closed down the universities for three years or so, rehabilitated
all the facilities in the universities and brought the students and the
lecturers back. Now, the CBN Governor Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi
disclosed that Nigerians spent about N62billion paying school fees for
75,000 Nigerian students in Ghanaian universities.
Our people are in
South Africa paying fees there, but who those going there; they are the
children of the rich. Ghanaians are in Ghana universities but they are
not paying what Nigerians are paying there. So, the way forward is that
government makes up its mind that Nigerians must have a place under the
sun and that place under the sun can only be guaranteed with a sound
university system. It must make up its mind; is it to close down the
university system for three years or so, do what should be done and then
invite students and lecturers back? For instance, in the University of
Benin, you don’t have a foreign student and if you go to other
universities in Nigeria, I don’t think there are foreign students.
When I
came to the University of Benin, I was interviewed by Prof. Smith, a
Briton who was the Dean at the time and many people from different parts
of the world were here as teachers and students. But, right now, they
are not in Nigeria; instead, Nigerians are everywhere. That shows that
the system has collapsed. When we went to the National Assembly, Sen.
Uche Chukwumerije and his colleagues told us that they were on the knees
begging us to recall the students because they are on the streets
posing dangers and problems, and we said, it is better for them to be on
the streets than on the campus of universities learning ignorance. You
cannot teach ignorance to people or half knowledge to the people because
they will be more dangerous to the society.
‘Not asking for money for ourselves’
If you have a doctor that is not well trained, and you say ‘go and
remove an appendix’, and he goes to remove your heart because he doesn’t
know where the appendix is; it is better not to have doctors than the
one who will go and remove your heart than the appendix. That is what
the Nigerian government wants us to do and the academics in universities
are saying no, for once, let us do the right thing; we are prepared to
stay at home for between three and five years until these problems are
resolved. We are not asking for money, facilities must be provided to
make the universities truly what they ought to be. In terms of how to
solve the problems in the universities, when the financial crisis broke
out in 2007 and banks declared that they were in trouble, government
brought out N3trillion to bail out the banks. First, they gave the banks
N239billion, another N620billion and N1.725trillion making a total of
N3trillion.
Then the aviation sector said that it was in distress, they gave the
sector, N500billion and they gave even NOLLYWOOD billions of Naira.
These sectors are important, but they are not as important as the
fundamental which is the education sector. If you can give the banks
N3trillion and all the universities are asking for is about
N1.5trillion, the same way in which they sourced the money which they
gave to the banks which they are now saying that they should not pay
back, they should be able to do more for education. So, nobody should
come to us and say that government has no money.
If they can bail the banks with N3trillion, banks owned by the
private sector, they cannot tell us they cannot fund the education
sector because the World Bank told them that Africans do not need higher
education, that what Africans need is middle-level technical
education; that is what the Okonjo-Iwealas and Goodluck Jonathan are
for. So, let them do what they did in the case of the banks to education
and if they do that, the problems will be solved.
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