PROF. FESTUS IYAYI, a former National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), until he was killed in a road crash on Tuesday, was Head of Department, Business Administration, University of Benin. In Iyayi’s last interview with Sunday Vanguard, he defended the university teachers strike. He insisted that ASUU members were prepared to stay at home for five years if the demands that led to the strike were not addressed.
Excerpts:
ASUU IS BACK IN 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 depends 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 about how to rehabilitate and revitalize universities.
That agreement was a product of three years negotiation from 2006 to 2009 and government agreed in 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 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 now 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 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 reaffirm 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 beefed it up to a yearly sum N400billion in the next three years’. As we speak now, no a kobo, not an iota of intervention has taken place in universities. Yet, government itself in the various studies that it has done said that it
recognizes the pathetic situation 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 cost’, so the money is not coming to the universities, government will then 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.
‘NEEDS’
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, if 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 practical and not the practical 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.
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 MoU in January 2012 and, 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 around 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 for two days, there was no light 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 piggeries, like potteries, they now have what they called short put, 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 all over Nigerian universities.
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 and up till now nothing has 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 programmes outside of Nigeria say to the United Kingdom, United States and other countries for their Master’s Degrees, PhDs 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 in re-training graduates, people who have made First Class after they have left the university and,
when they tested them, they found out that they had problems. How can you take an engineer who has not conduct an experiment, all he did is the theory of practical? He does not know how the equipment works. We have said that we cannot continue. If you want a properly educated student population, you have to provide the facilities. That is why ASUU is on strike.
