Barely weeks after the Court of Appeal in Abuja ordered the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to call off its eight-month-old strike on Friday, October 7, 2022, the ripple effects are visible across the country.
There have been several protests by lecturers in state chapters of the academic union across the country. The Federal University of Technology Minna, Niger State; Federal University Dutsinma, Katsina State; Ekiti State University; Niger Delta University, Bayelsa State; and the University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State, have each held protests.
The protesting lecturers accused the Federal Government of releasing half-pay, having a hidden agenda, and treating lecturers as casual workers. They also called for the sack of the ministers for Finance, Budget & National Planning, Labour & Employment, and Education as they peacefully protested unpaid and illegally withheld salaries.
The Federal Government, at the end of October, paid lecturers for only 18 working days and didn’t pay for the eight months of the strike during which government-owned tertiary institutions were shut down.
On his part, the Minister for Education, Adamu Adamu, in an interview with Punch, insisted that government will not pay full salaries to lecturers and that nobody would be paid for work not done, regardless of the ongoing nationwide protests, but added that no one could make university lecturers casual workers.
The cause of these protests spreading like wildfire might also be traced to the union’s dissatisfaction at being forced to call off its strike without achieving satisfactory resolutions to the issues raised during meetings with the government.
In a recent interview on Channels Television, the National President of ASUU, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, said that even though the strike was partially successful, pointing to the inclusion of N300bn in the 2023 budget for the revitalization of universities, there was no signed agreement with the Federal Government for when the disbursement will be carried out.
He stated that if money was released in the first quarter of 2023 and each university got two to three billion each, it would greatly change the situation of the universities for the better. Furthermore, if the government took the union’s generous offer of paying up the current allowances and salaries, a concession could be given as regards the old allowances.
However, issues like the no work, no pay policy, underfunding of tertiary institutions, and the loss of colleagues who couldn’t afford to treat themselves when sick because of the policy have remained open wounds that have begun to fester. Which Prof. Osodeke has said the union would continue to fight for.
He said that since universities won’t simply forget where they stopped in the 2021 session and start the 2022/2023 academic session, nor would final year students simply graduate without continuing from where they stopped in 2021, why would the government insist on the no work no pay policy when lecturers were going back to where they stopped.
Osodeke also said the union would not stop making its demands known because the struggle by the union, even during military regimes, yielded results like the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) which handled most of the significant projects seen in universities today, despite the likes of Prof. Attahiru Jega being imprisoned during the strike.
Even though institutions like the University of Calabar sadly lost ten lecturers in the 8-month strike, the National President of ASUU said that would not deter the union’s efforts at seeing to the improvement of the lives of lecturers and advancement of government-owned universities, as such incidents spur ASUU to fight harder.
Citing Ghana’s one-year strike, which led to improved allocations to their education sector - as much as 20 percent of the annual budget, as an example, he said Nigeria’s five percent allocation to the education sector in last year’s budget was the lowest in the world and nothing to write home about.
He lamented that the union signed a Memorandum of Action with the Federal Government after the 2020 strike, which included timelines for the government to pay part of the old allowances in November 2021 and another tranche in February 2022. Still, the government didn’t do it.
Hence, in the present strike, where the court forced the union to call off its strike without a signed agreement, the union could only hope that the issues would be resolved and attended to within a short time.
Looking to the future, the ASUU National President implored the next administration to prioritize all levels of education, stating that any country that trivializes education is playing with its future.
He urged the Federal Government to learn from its neighbours, which allot at least 16 per cent of their budget to the education sector. Stating that if the percentage increased gradually, Nigerians would stop sending their children to study in other West African countries.