SO THAT WE MAY LEARN FROM HISTORY.

ACADEMIC STAFF UNION OF UNIVERSITIES (ASUU)

Protocols:
Preamble
Gentlemen of the Press,
On Monday, 20th August 2013, our Union met with a Federal Government Team led by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) and Governor Gabriel Suswam over the on-going strike in the universities. This was about the tenth time we were meeting with Government since the action commenced on 2nd July, 2013. As you are aware, the strike in the universities is about getting Government to implement the 2009 Agreement as captured in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by Government on 24th January 2012 and Recommendations in the Report of Government’s Committee on Needs Assessment on Nigerian (Public) Universities (CNANU) of July, 2012.
At the Monday, 20th August meeting, the Government Team spoke with a tinge of finality. As already widely reported, Government had declared that it will not implement the agreed massive injection of fund to revitalise the public universities. Rather, it is only making a dubious statement of supporting some universities with the sum of N100 billion. Government had also declared that it will not pay university academics their Earned Allowances which accumulated from 2009 to 2013. Rather, it is talking about providing N30 billion to assist various Governing Councils of Federal Universities to defray the arrears of N92 billion owed to all categories of staff in the university system. It was a sinister ‘take it, or leave it’ threat of grab-the-crumbs or starve-to-death!

ASUU was shocked at the level of deceit, dishonesty and lack of integrity displayed by Government. Here was a Government that had been propping on the Union at least since the release of the MoU in January 2012! Never in the history of ASUU-Government relations have we, as a Union, ever experienced the kind of volte-face exhibited by Government. At one stage in the interaction, the SGF ridiculed the Agreement, the MoU and the Needs Assessment Report, mocking the Minister of Education to “go and give them N400 billion.” At which members of the Government team scornfully laughed!

As a Union whose members constitute the intellectual cream of society and which operates on the basis of principles, we find the events of 20th August and other recent positions on the matter by Government bewildering, embarrassing and highly unacceptable. ASUU cannot believe that the Agreement, the MoU and the Needs Assessment Report undertaken and endorsed by the highest public officials in the land would be so blatantly ridiculed by the same people.

At this stage and in order to counter the persistent and pernicious Government propaganda about ASUU’s responsibility in closing the Universities and its desire to have the Universities reopened, it is important that we give a blow by blow account of the issues and events that have resulted in the current situation.
Between hope and haplessness
In effect, Government appears to have repudiated the 2009 Agreement, the MoU and its own Needs Assessment Report. What has emerged is that Government never intended to implement the provisions of any of these important documents; while publicly and privately encoring ASUU and the country to trust it and to believe that, for once, it was determined to address the decay and rot in the universities, its true intention all along was to take the country and ASUU for a costly ride.

Gentlemen of the Press, you would recall that early into the strike, a meeting was facilitated between ASUU and Government by the Education Committees of the National Assembly on how to resolve the crisis. Unfortunately, this did not yield meaningful results mainly due to Government’s acts of deception and insincerity. Subsequent meetings have also failed to address the outstanding issues about the Agreement and MoU in ways that would suggest that Government is seriously committed to arresting the further decline of the already appalling state of our public universities. Consequently, our universities have remained closed to academic activities, our children are losing precious time required for teaching and learning and our country continues to lose out in the many facets that connect to the provision of high quality education.
The Governor Gabriel Suswam-led Implementation Committee
Gentlemen of the Press, in the course of discussions leading to the 2012 MoU, Government assured ASUU that N100billion was available to immediately stimulate the revitalisation of public universities, once the priorities of the academic institutions were determined. This gave rise to the setting up of the Committee on Needs Assessment of Nigerian Universities (CNANU). The Committee, headed by the erstwhile Executive Secretary of TETFund, Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, submitted its report to the Federal Government in July 2012.

Meanwhile, in the 2009 Agreement, the funding requirement provides that all Federal Universities would require a total sum of N1.5 trillion spread over three years (2009-2011) to address the rot and decay in the universities. The three-year period lapsed without any serious efforts to implement the provision. With the coming of the MoU in January 2012, Government promised “to stimulate the process of revitalizing the university system with an initial sum of N100 billion” for 2012 which will be built up to a yearly sum of N400 billion “in the next three (3) years” (2013-2015) as intervention. Government however insisted that it will need to conduct a needs assessment to determine what exactly would be done with the fund. This is what gave birth to the Needs Assessment Committee which conducted the Exercise. Coincidently, the Technical Committee on the Needs Assessment Report (set up by the National Economic Council) also came up with about N800 billion as the estimated amount needed to revitalize Nigerian public universities in the short run of two years; translating into an annual intervention of N400 billion.

It is important to stress that, by our own estimation, the MoU should have fetched Nigerian public universities a total sum of N500 billion by now if Government were to faithfully implement the understanding reached with ASUU in 2012. A continuation of that process would have yielded a Revitalisation Fund of N1.3 trillion by the year 2015 as earlier explained. In the alternative, Government could have set aside the estimated sum of N800 billion required to implement the short-term recommendations of the Needs Assessment Report for 2012 and 2013 put together. But, alas, all the Government is gloating over now is N100 billion which is nowhere near the scientifically-arrived congruent sums in the 2009 Agreement, the 2012 MoU and the 2013 Technical Report on the Needs Assessment of Nigerian Public Universities. What further evidence do we need to establish Government’s bad faith?

As discussions on the foregoing progressed, the Federal Government set up a new Implementation Committee of the Needs Assessment Report headed by Governor Gabriel Suswam of Benue State. The initial reaction of our Union was that bringing new persons on board in place of the earlier membership, would amount to undue delays and a clog in the path of sustainable implementation of the Report. On a second thought, however, ASUU decided to overlook this and accepted to work with the Committee; if only to demonstrate the union’s genuine concern for speedy resolution of the matter.

Our Union has had a number of interactions with Governor Suswam Committee since then with the hope of aligning the patriotic zeal that gave rise to the Agreement with its implementation. We are at pains to report that the Government side has fully reverted to its “no-fund” refrain which epitomises a grand design to frustrate the 2009 Agreement and all other procedures related to it. This is highly unfortunate. How could the same Federal Government that, within the last three years, generously supported private concerns like the Airlines and Banks with trillions of Naira from the public vaults as “bail outs” suddenly turn round to say it has no fund to conscientiously revitalise its own public universities? The Government largesse which was extended to the Nollywood is also still fresh in our memory. Again, we ask, why should the funding of education, and university education for that matter, continue to be treated with levity?

Available information indicates that the Suswam Committee was to be used as smokescreen to deceive ASUU, Nigerian students and their parents as well as other unsuspecting members of the public on the purportedly released N100 billion for the implementation of the Needs Assessment Report. First, Government plans to divert the regular yearly allocations to universities by TETFund to make at least 70% of the N100 billion. This is unacceptable to ASUU; it is like robbing Peter to pay Paul, since the idea of ‘revitalisation’ took full cognisance of the intervention role of TETFund ab initio.

Again, contrary to subsisting operational procedures, about 75% of monies meant for revitalising universities would not be released directly to them as the Suswam Committee plans to hand over the construction of the hostel projects to the Federal Ministry of Education and/or the National Universities Commission (NUC) for implementation. This is illegal; neither the Ministry nor NUC is backed by Laws of Nigerian public universities to divert monies meant for the development of these institutions into centrally-executed projects.

Until and unless the Suswam Committee gives the Union a guarantee that it will not serve as another means of re-cycling TETFund money and of diverting funds meant for the universities, ASUU will not continue to participate in the deliberations of that Committee.
In addition, we see a continuation of outrageous contract regimes in the plan to centrally coordinate the construction of student hostels as done in the case of the 12 newly established federal universities with the TETFUND resources. Our students, no doubt, deserve decent accommodation for them to live and learn better than what obtains now. Nevertheless, the NUC has been acting contrary to its statutory function as a regulatory agency, transmuting itself to a “Tenders’ Board” which awarded contracts for the construction of 560 bed spaces hostel for each university at a whopping sum of N1.2 billion. This contract sum translates into N2.143 million per bed space and N8.571 million per room. We foresee more of such scandalous contracts with the new students’ hostel project being planned by the Suswam Committee. To be specific, the Committee is proposing to commit as much as N1.6 million to a bed space; whereas our random check suggests that this could go for between N200,000.00 and N400,000.00 – depending on location. We call on the National Assembly to further investigate this matter as part of their oversight function.