Governance That Elevates – ASUU

By Sulaiman Salawudeen

We come once again to assessing, amidst lamenting, causes of criminal misperformances and sorrowful zero-scores by those directly minding affairs in Nigeria/over Nigerians. Is lack of passion for ennobling results not at the roots of a malaise that has condemned once-promising enclave to abject ruination on multiple fronts?

Just more critical look at the conducts of occupiers of political positions will clarify this explication better. Is it not common knowledge notable figures in Nigeria don’t allow their children/wards attend tertiary institutions in the country, simply as they want the best for such children?

Who, especially against the decay that has overrun the system, would not prefer degrees obtained from Harvard, Kent, Stratford, Oxford, Surrey, Cambridge, Universities to those from OAU, UI, Nsukka, FUOYE, Ilorin, LAUTECH, others, the international ratings of which advertise deeper-reaching insufficiencies? Quite recently, there were sights online of daughters and sons of this and that, particularly those of serving/former ministers and other helmspersons, graduating from some of these foreign institutions!

Those who spearhead campaigns on preference for locally made products – Aba shoes; Lagos ankara; Ogun adire/batiks; Innoson automobiles; and this and that – have ritualised, even deeply entrenched, pastime of going foreign at every opportunity to procure certificates, exotic clothing materials, psychedelic autos, alongside other expensive, economically suicidal, indulgences!

FG equally exhibits the perverse indulgence of keeping disturbingly awesome section of the citizenry in poverty partly through rejecting proposals for better service conditions for workers across the tiers. It is the readiness to alter this tendency which partly informed the Academic Staff Union of Universities’s (ASUU’s) decision to boycotting work for over six months.

This is because government has rejected entreates by the union to emplace dignifying work conditions for the lecturers and revamp the decadent infrastructure across institutions. That government has reportedly approved paltry 100% increase in monthly take-home for ASUU’s purported 250% demand should come to no one as disappointment.

But, is it not time people query how the Salaries and Wages Commission calculated packages of political office holders to arrive at several millions of naira which they each earn monthly, but actual knowledge about which they vigilantly, but unsuccessfully, try to conceal? One wonders again what percentage of this humongous, preposterously abusive, packages the entire 250% being reportedly proposed represents!

The so-called 30,000 minimum monthly earnings of public servants – which many state governments have mutilated while pretending to implement – is gross, even criminally under-assessment/appreciation of substantive facts of the Nigerian economy. Is it not common knowledge that even pets of some of our politicians consume meals well over double this sum monthly?

Any wonder Nigerians are in their thousands joining other Africans in a race off the hellish world spots into more welcoming climes overseas! Is it not indeed preferable to expire on the high seas and the fearsome deserts than being mauled by a multiplicity of errors that have worsted the home-front into unmitigated cauldrons?

For governance to promote inalienable essence of living, remedy a country as much from physical darkness via ever-failing electricity grids, as from others imposed by mis-performing superintendents, standards must be strengthened through rigid structures to regularise/regulate official conducts and halt whole horde of untoward deceits among the political class.

Transparent humanity which cannot be offered conscientiously and voluntarily as indefeasible components of public administration must be exacted by rule of force! Indeed, infrastructure standards have to be genuinely upgraded and turned round – roads/bridges, piped water, electricity, hospitals, refineries, but such must never interfere with deliberate commitments to systemic enablement of mercilessly pauperised populace.

If an administration which had forced people into fixations through selfish schemes came with some funny afterthought of post-COVID-19 palliatives – N30,000 for 10,000 indigent families, N50,000 for 20,000 artisans, and N100,000 for 50,000 small scale industrialists, alongside one free meal per day for schooling kids, it must be discharging deeds for which it deserves no, and should therefore not expect, thanks!

The option of ludicrous lenitives now being rolled out is rather belated consequence of decades of catastrophic official summersaults which have driven individual lives to apparent cul-de-sac on varied fronts, creating wondrous list of renegades who have welcomed the socially disapprovable routes to survival. Would citizens have ever preferred bailouts to dignifying conditions of existence which are superbly possible if government was what it should be?

Salaries and allowances for Nigerian workers remain among the lowest globally, inflation rates, in consequence of ill-managed economy, among the highest, and socio-infrastructural facilities are such as make outsiders wonder if Nigeria is indeed not a name for a vast collection of feral brutes and an assortment of wild animals in Kenya’s Masai Mara, rather than a nation of almost 200 million humans!

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Nigerians are being forced to endure basic lacks across health, roads/highways, education, electricity supply, even security, but those privileged to make decisions on their behalf possess enough wherewithal to commit fortunes into accessing any of these on paradisal scale anywhere and anytime, given their incomes which, if emptied, may cease the flow of the Atlantic!

Their salaries and allowances in one month are as heavy as whole annual budgets of some countries, even while they still perpetrate straight thefts to complement unjust fat earnings, but career workers – whose regular toil helps to steady the bureaucracy in many critical respects – must endure take home packages that would take them hardly one/tenth of their ways home!

How come the Nigerian leadership expect to access superhuman conducts from beings they keep under/torment with subhuman conditions?

Do not Nigeria’s direct superintendents know the way if uplifting people and country is goal? Education standards at all levels have nosedived over the years, having suffered denials like other sectors, and FG keeps nose-leading and sponsoring individuals to blame and blacklist ASUU for mounting the honourable guard to rescue what remains a roaring shame upon a country quite staggeringly blessed with resources to render whatever lack groundless.

Factually, a minimum of three quartres of Nigerian workers should receive at least 3 times their current earnings, factored against obvious realities, but the lame duck that is the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), which should commit needful focus and fidelity into fighting for and achieving this, has learned to adopt and operationalise a vision which apparently stands insolently diametrically opposed to the spirit which spurred its founding.

ASUU is unwittingly but irreversibly, with ongoing agitation, spearheading campaigns to reverse/revolutionise this shameful, servile, distressingly inhuman and fantastically unrealistic salary structure for civil/public servants across the tiers, across the country.

It is therefore fighting a universal cause, but with a specific flavour! The Union is demanding, among others, implementation of Prof Nimi-Briggs FGN/ASUU Renogotiation Committee report which made fairly tolerant recommendations upon a 2009 agreement, a report that did not find favour with the FG which alleged same as having awarded N2million as monthly take-home to professors, calling the Union’s leadership names to scandalise quite tolerant lot! ASUU further insists on UTAS as the acceptable, transparently tested payment platform for university teachers, but FG insists on IPPIS which is proven to be fraudulent! To punish ‘recalcitrant’ teachers, FG then concluded upon “No work, no pay” policy, which ASUU has met with a “No pay, no work” decision, as final order to members on what it now calls “Indefinite Strike”. It is a dicey cliffhanger which ultimately is unlikely to benefit the FG!

There has never been enough cash to implement any conscientious/honourable earning regime for the Nigerian worker, but there has always been enough to sate condemnable gluttony of the few who steal their ways into, or have barest links with, power.

The same Ministries, Departments and Agencies in which FG today financially embarrass millions of individuals with demeaningly condemnable pays on monthly/yearly basis is same where gargantuan stealings are routinely reported – a story that expose ENDEMIC POVERTY UNDERBELLY of a nation leadership of which implacably advertise insolent disdain for welfare of, and barricaded itself away from the followership! And what is the sentimental, even logical, appropriateness of/justice in a professor of over ten years experience teaching in a federal university earning much same, or even not as much, as a PhD holder in an NCE or a polytechnic, in this same country?

Is it again not unsettling to realise there still are other FG institutes, including Nigerian Horticultural Research and Training (NIHORT) and Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria (CRIN), which are similarly currently on strike, but have continued to receive their monthly pay?

What then is the justification for government’s misbegotten and misplaced hate for ASUU? Buying up/sponsoring select journalists, alongside sundry internet vermins, labour leaders and writers, including professors – who seem to have entirely missed the points behind the struggles, possibly being not in the country’s mainstream education system – to paint ASUU black and call it names because the latter has refused to capitulate by returning to class and forfeiting 6-month pay, cannot be the solution to a wrong which the union has endured decades, but which obviously can no longer stand the test of time!

 

Salawudeen, can be reached through [email protected]

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