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FESTUS IYAYI NATIONAL SECRETARIAT COMPLEX, UNIVERSITY OF ABUJA, GIRI, ABUJA
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!TEXT OF THE PRESS CONFERENCE OF THE ACADEMIC STAFF UNION OF UNIVERSITIES (ASUU) HELD AT THE END OF THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE COUNCIL (NEC) MEETING HELD AT THE UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN, OYO STATE, 17TH-18TH AUGUST, 2024
1. PROTOCOLS
11. INTRODUCTION
Comrades and compatriots of the Press,
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) held its National Executive Council (NEC) meeting at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, between Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th August, 2024…..For More READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE ▶▶
At the meeting, the union undertook a comprehensive review of the outcomes from its engagements with Federal and State Governments on various outstanding issues that have encumbered the development of our universities and hindered university workers’ drive to reposition them for the transformation of Nigeria.
The meeting further appraised, worsening living and working conditions in our universities and the nation at large. The meeting received alarming reports on the failed promises of the Government on addressing the lingering issues that forced the union to embark on the nationwide strike action of February-October 2022.
Seasoned and experienced scholars have continued to flee to countries that are less resource-endowed but where their expertise is better appreciated. Reports presented to NEC indicate that Government does not appreciate the enormity of the problem and the dire need to arrest the ugly trend with utmost urgency.
Our union is worried that Government appears fixated on its self-serving approach of legalistic and bureaucratic arm-twisting. ASUU calls this press conference to intimate Nigerians and lovers of Nigeria of the grim situation our universities have been grappling with since Dr. Chris Ngige and his collaborators truncated over five years of Government-ASUU renegotiation in 2021.
III. Continued Poor Funding of Universities and Education in General ASUU’s advocacy for adequate funding of the nation’s universities, and indeed the education sector, is to make education play its role as catalyst for sustained development of every sector of our national life.
In truth, our advocacy is in harmony with the goals of the African Union’s (AU) educational development strategy as articulated in the AU Agenda 2063: “peaceful and prosperous Africa, integrated, led by its own citizens and occupying the place it deserves in the global community and in the knowledge economy”…..For More READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE ▶▶
The Continental Education Strategy for Africa, 2016-2025 (CESA 16-25), reinforces this with a mission for “reinventing Africa’s education and training to meet the knowledge, competencies, skills, innovation and creativity required to nurture African core values and promote sustainable development at the national, sub-regional and continental levels”.
We challenge Nigerian Governments at all levels to give honest accounts of how much they have done to implement the AU agenda to which Nigeria is a signatory.
Fellow compatriots, in the last decade or so, ASUU has consistently pushed for the implementation of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities’ (UNFPA) specified 15%-20% annual education budget for underdeveloped countries like Nigeria.
However, the national budgetary spending on education has remained below 10%. Indeed, the average has hovered between 5% and 6%. The consequences are there for all to see: our universities can no longer provide basic services such as uninterrupted power supply, piped water, and maintenance of clean surroundings to their communities.
The little support from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) is also being frittered away by some university administrators for lack of accountability. ASUU rejects the Federal Government’s recent move to divert TETFund’s intervention grants to the Students’ Education Loan Scheme. The move is antithetical to the original intendment of the Law establishing the Education Tax Fund which now operates as TETFund.
Funds from Education Tax are for the development of the nation’s tertiary institutions, not giving loans whose sustainability cannot be guaranteed. In addition, we restate our position that grants from TETFund as an intervention agency should not replace adequate and regular budgetary allocations by Federal and State governments for capital and recurrent expenditures in public universities.
IV. Renegotiation of FGN/ASUU 2009 Agreement
Ladies and gentlemen of the Press, you would recall that agents of the Federal Government unceremoniously terminated the process leading to completion and signing of the renegotiated 2009 Agreement in 2021.
The current administration has given “salary award” of 25%/35% increase to Nigerian academics. However, the award cannot replace the renegotiation of our conditions of service. Every Agreement ASUU has had with the Federal Government of Nigeria since 1992 was usually comprehensive, capturing not only the salary component but also requirements for benchmarking a competitive university system designed for addressing the developmental challenges of Nigeria.
ASUU’s demand for negotiated salaries and other conditions of service is anchored on the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention No. 98 which underscores the principle of collective bargaining. The last FGN/ASUU Agreement was signed in 2009. Consequent upon the ASUU’s persistent calls for review for almost one decade, our union went into renegotiation with the FGN in 2017. We started with the Wale Babalakin-led Joint Renegotiation Committee and later went into the Emeritus Prof Munzali Jibril-led phase.
The renegotiation was eventually completed by the Late Emeritus Prof. Nimi Biggs-led team with the production of a draft Agreement in 2021. Unfortunately, Dr Ngige and his cohorts in the Buhari government frustrated the signing of the Agreement.
Government’s reluctance to review and complete the renegotiation of the draft Agreement is a blight on its trust quotient. Since the truncation of the draft Agreement, the Nigerian University System has continued to sink deeper and deeper into the abyss of arrested growth and underdevelopment…..For More READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE ▶▶
We must note with a sense of responsibility that the pervasive low academic staff morale, and the feeling of despondency and diminishing sense of patriotism manifesting in the Japa syndrome are mild signs of a bigger crisis within the system.
For the umpteenth time, ASUU calls on the President Tinubu-led administration to immediately set in motion the process leading to the review and signing of the Nimi Briggs-led renegotiated draft Agreement as a mark of goodwill and assured hope for Nigeria’s public universities.
V. The Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System Monster
Compatriots of the Press, at our last press conference in May, 2024, we expressed our dismay that payment of university staff salaries had not been moved out of the fraudulent IPPIS platform as against the directive of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
As at today, the salaries of many of our members who were on visiting, adjunct and part-time appointments are still whimsically withheld just as third-party deductions such as cooperative contributions, pension deductions and union check-off dues are not released.
The platform, with all its fraudulent manipulations, is still being used to pay our members under the guise of the “New IPPIS” contrary to the understanding reached at the 11th January, 2024 stakeholders’ meeting held at the National Universities Commission (NUC). The platform has attained a level of notoriety that can no longer be tolerated by our Union. Government should hold itself accountable for any action ASUU- NEC eventually takes on this matter.
Beyond vacating IPPIS, ASUU’s position on anti-academia policies has not changed. Government should tow the path of reason and release the universities from grip of the destructive doses of all policies that have extended financial tokenism to the education sector. Government should revert to quarterly releases of university funds to enable the institutions design and implement their salary payment plans under the supervision of their Governing Councils.
This is the touchstone of a truly autonomous university system as experienced in Nigerian universities of the 1960s and 1970s. In the interest of industrial harmony, government should direct the immediate release of all outstanding deductions, unpaid promotion arrears and salaries of university academics which were unjustly withheld by the corruption-ridden IPPIS regime.
Government must, as consistently promised, embrace home grown solution to our national challenges rather than attaching itself to the apron string of foreign exploiters. A good start would be the adoption of the University Transparent and Accountability Solutions (UTAS) developed by Nigerian scholars as the payment platform. The platform is not only functional, it dwarfs the corruption-ridden IPPIS in efficiency.
VI. Proliferation of Universities Our fellow compatriots, the matter of proliferation of universities was one of the issues that led to the strike actions of ASUU in 2020 and 2022 respectively. The union demanded and still demands that the 2020 ASUU-FGN Memorandum of Action (MoA), which stressed the need to review the NUC Act to make it more potent in arresting the reckless and excessive establishment of universities, be fully implemented.
During the lifetime of the last 9th National Assembly, a joint committee of ASUU and NUC submitted a draft bill to the legislature on this matter. However, that bill did not see the light of the day! Rather, the frenzy by the Federal and State Governments to birth new universities and other tertiary institutions without concrete plans for their development has increased in leaps and bounds.
This trend came to a worrisome height recently when a sitting Governor boastfully declared that he would establish ten universities in his State before the end of his eight-year tenure!
Nigeria boasts of over 170 universities. Out of this number, 79 are owned by individuals
and private organizations while 43 and 48 belong to the Federal and State Governments
respectively. However, about 95% of the students are still found in public universities.
This underscores the imperative of prioritizing the federal and state universities in Nigeria. However, rather than supporting our advocacy for adequate funding of public universities, the Nigerian law makers surreptitiously push for the establishment of universities as part of their constituency projects. In the same vein, Visitors to state universities who could not fund existing universities are creating two or more purely for electoral gains. Invariably, TETFund’s intervention funds are now diverted to establishing new universities contrary to the provisions of the agency’s Act.
ASUU shall explore all legal means to resist the increasing moves by politicians to keep proliferating crisis-centres for the education of children of the poor in the name of universities. We again urge the Tinubu-led administration to refrain from further proliferation of universities and refocus the system as hub of solutions to Nigeria’s developmental challenges…..For More READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE ▶▶
VII. Management Crises and Victimization in Universities
Compatriots of the Press, we again express our displeasure and disappointment at the unwillingness of the respective Visitors to arrest the unending management crises and victimization in some Nigerian public universities. These institutions include but not limited to Kogi State University (KSU), Anyingba; Ebonyi State University (EBSU), Abakaliki; Lagos State Universities (LASU), Ojoo; Ambrose Alli University (AAU), Ekpoma; Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO), and Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University (COOU), Igbariam.
In these and other universities, our members are being victimized through such avenues as illegal termination of appointments, withholding of salaries, and denial of promotion. ASUU is particularly disturbed at the seeming travesty of justice in the judgment delivered against our members at the Kogi State University, Anyigba, after seven odd years of waiting! We are also worried by the extended period of court proceedings in respect of our colleagues illegally sacked at Lagos State University for upward of five years!
Without doubt, the undue elongation of court proceedings in matters of life and livelihood has created untold hardship on our affected members. It is a typical instance of justice delayed being justice denied. Again, we are deeply disappointed with the refusal of the Lagos State Government to release the White Paper on the Visitation Panel to LASU more than two years after the exercise.
The seeming conspiracy of silence on this matter is unbecoming of a democratically elected government. We therefore call on the Lagos State Governor, Babajide Santwo-Olu, to redeem his pledge to do the right thing at LASU and ensure the recall of our unjustly sacked colleagues.
ASUU is equally dissatisfied with developments at EBSU where, rather than implement the court judgement and reinstate our sacked colleague, the University is again buying time by appealing the judgement. While appreciating the intervention efforts of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) in Ebonyi, NEC calls on Visitors to the Ebonyi State University and other state universities where ASUU members are being persecuted to take decisive steps to resolve all lingering matters and give their universities a new breath of life. In addition, we urge Governing Councils and Visitors to state universities to take special interest in the application of the Laws governing their respective institutions and ensure that tyrannical tendencies of certain Vice-Chancellors are curbed.
To register ASUU’s displeasure with the avoidable labour management crises in LASU, KSU, EBSU, FUTO and other public universities, NEC has declared Tuesday, 10th of September, 2024 as Victimized Lecturers’ Day. The Day shall be used to solidarise with our unjustly persecuted members across Nigerian universities.
VIII. Arrears of Earned Academic Allowances and Non-Release of Owed Salaries Compatriots of the Press, the December 2020 MoA between FGN and ASUU reaffirmed our understanding on mainstreaming of EAA into lecturers’ monthly salaries while scheduled tranches of the allowances were to be paid in 2021.
However, the scheduled payments were not only aborted, the mainstreaming of EAA as from 2022 has remained a mirage in all federal and most state universities. ASUU is equally displeased that the outstanding three-and-half months’ salaries withheld during the preventable 2022 nationwide strike action remain unpaid to our members in federal universities. Similarly, our colleagues in many state universities are being owed arrears of EAA, withheld salaries, third-party deductions for several months and other entitlements due to them. These and other unresolved issues would only breed endless crises on our campuses and make our dream of undisrupted academic calendar unrealizable.
ASUU condemns federal and state governments’ seeming indifference in spite of countless attempts to make them attend to the plight of our members across Nigerian public universities.
IX. The State of the Nation
Our dear compatriots, it is now a familiar story that Nigeria is enmeshed in multidimensional and multi-layered crises owing to the thoughtless embrace of neo- liberal policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by our ruling class. The now infamous “subsidy-is-gone” pronouncement of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu at his inauguration and the floating of the US Dollar’s exchange rate with Nigeria’s Naira are two planks of neo-liberal policies which were undergirded by the roll- back-the state mantra of the international capitalist networks and their comprador foot soldiers.
The twin policies have imposed a never-experienced-before hyper-inflation on the citizens, while the political class continues to swim in bizarre affluence at the expense of the ordinary Nigerians.
Indeed, it was a story fore-told that Nigerians would sooner than later take their fate in their hands. The #EndSARS# protest of 2020 and the recent #End Bad Governance# riots are symptomatic of this story of a failing state called Nigeria.
As ASUU has always warned, until and unless concrete and conscientious efforts are made to address the inexplicable widespread poverty in the face of enormous resource potential exploited by a tiny few, the deepening sense of disillusionment among our teeming jobless and hungry youths is bound to threaten the stability of the country as well as the safety and security of the high and mighty. Unfortunately, the political class has remained insensitive to the escalating resentment and rage among the citizenry. It is glaring that the platitudes of “bear with us” no longer resonate with the suffering masses who cannot fulfill their family obligations or afford the prices of essential commodities.
ASUU decries the precipitous decline in the quality of life of Nigerians. Governments at all levels must live up to their primary responsibility of ensuring the security and welfare of the people over whom they govern. Beyond physical security, there must be food security, job security, cultural security, environmental security, and economic security including national control over the country’s resource endowments which are currently being pillaged by foreign marauders and agents for multinational corporations.
By all intents and purposes, the recently signed minimum wage Act, facilitated by the struggle of the NLC, is a token and cannot fully serve the purpose of an anti-poverty strategy. However, the token should be speedily implemented across board before inflation catches up with it; while more broad-based, inclusive and sustainable strategies, capable of exiting our people from the grinding poverty regime, are introduced without further delay.
ASUU posits that agents of state and local governments professing their inability to pay the new minimum wage are insincere. They had better watch it before they face the wrath of the people!
ASUU, as a collective of intellectuals, believes in national dialogue. It is through critical engagements that we get to understand ourselves better and shove off ethnic suspicion, religious bigotry, plutocratic tendencies and such other practices that are inimical to our peaceful co-existence and collective happiness as a people of one nation. In furtherance of our patriotic contributions, ASUU drives a process of national dialogue at an interval of ten years. Come October 2024, another in the series of ASUU’s State of the Nation Conferences shall be hosted at the National Universities Commission, Abuja. The Conference theme is: “Nigeria in a State of General Crisis: The Search for a New Path to Development”.
We shall provide further details in the coming weeks. However, suffice to say that the goal of the Conference is “to facilitate critical engagements that interrogate the State of the nation under the very difficult circumstances in which the country has found itself”.
Conclusion
Our dear compatriots of the Press, as we have shown in this address, a number of public university issues over which ASUU has been engaging Federal and State Governments in the last one decade or so are yet to be meaningfully addressed. These issues include review and signing of the renegotiated 2009 FGN-ASUU Agreement; impactful funding, including emergency revitalization fund, of public universities; payment of outstanding earned academic allowances; and release of withheld salaries, promotion arrears, and third-party deductions of our members. Other issues include stoppage of illegal recruitments; proliferation of public universities/abuse of universities’ laws, regulations and processes; and removal of universities from the treasury single account (TSA) and new IPPIS vis-à-vis to herald the autonomy of our universities…..For More READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE ▶▶
After extensive deliberations on the foregoing, among others, ASUU-NEC at its last meeting resolved to:
1. condemn in strong terms the seeming refusal of Federal and State Governments to decisively address all outstanding issues with ASUU;
2. reject the slow pace of intervention by the Minister for Education in resolving the aforementioned issues;
3. give the Government 21 days ultimatum to address all outstanding issues; and
4. reconvene at the expiration of the 21 days’ notice to take appropriate decision(s) as deemed necessary.
The struggle continues!
Thank you.
Emmanuel Osodeke President
21 August, 2024
