The little reprieve which came to the nation’s universities following the suspension of the warning strike embarked upon by varsity lecturers, might be a graveyard peace as the lecturers would return to the trenches should the Federal Government fail to accede to their demands within the next four weeks.
Disclosing this is in an exclusive interview with Sunday Telegraph, President, Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU), Prof. Chris Piwuna, said that universities in the country needed about N1.3trillion to survive. He also said that the lecturers would down tools, if the government characteristically reneged on the agreements.
He said: “We have suspended the strike so that students can go back to class, and that we are ready for peace. We have spoken to the government in a very fair and reasonable manner. But we have the capacity to be as tough as inflexible as we can be. We have given the government four weeks.
“It (strike) is something that is in our DNA and we will not hesitate to pull out that trait in us at any time. Being gentle or talking with them on the table does not mean that we do not know where the streets are; it does not mean we cannot set ‘fire’ anywhere if we want to.
We have that capacity and we just hope that the government will not allow us to go that far.” Pinuwa added that Nigeria ranks second to the last in salary payment for its academics in Africa.
“The only country that is below us is Zimbabwe. Countries like Egypt, Uganda pay their lecturers $4,000 equivalent in a month, but what we get here is $320 a month.
How would a Nigerian in Uganda leave and return to Nigeria to earn … $320?” He added that it was inconceivable that the same Education Minister, Dr. Tunji Alausa, who once concurred that Nigerian professors shouldn’t earn below $2,000 monthly, was now insisting on a 35 per cent increment the lecturers earlier rejected.
Beyond the call for pay rise after 16 years of stagnation, Pinuwa said the lecturers’ struggle is precipitated on the need to revisit the 2011 Mahmood Yakubu report which recommended N1.3 trillion revitalisation fund and annual N70 billion for each university to improve on their infrastructure and make them competitive with their foreign counterparts.
“That body was chaired by Prof Mahmood Yakubu, the immediate past INEC chairman, who was the Executive Secretary of TETFUND at the time. What the committee came up with was staggering.
It saw students sharing toilets that had been converted to hostel accommodation; it saw laboratories where kerosene stoves were being used as bouncing burners; it saw pictures of students listening to lectures standing outside the window.
So, that needs assessment led to a report that Nigerian universities need about N1.3 trillion to revitalize the system. That is what we are talking about. “ASUU believes that every Nigerian child deserves to be educated; every Nigerian child deserves to have the best that this country can offer, in terms of education, social, economic and political opportunities.
We believe that our struggle is not only humane, but constitutional, because even our Constitution guarantees the right to education. So, to look at it from that perspective, we believe that ASUU has this onerous responsibility of ensuring that every Nigerian child benefits maximally from every opportunity that this country deserves to give to him or her.”
According to him, governors can fund education. “In the last one or two years, state governments have quadrupled what they used to get. It is in this country that we were told that governors have spent N900 billion on entertainment.
Some N30 billion, some N20 billion and all that. How can we say that they can’t fund education? We believe they can and we are insisting they should.”
