Tag: ASUU

Guest Blog Post by Adeshina Afolayan: Is ASUU a union of role models?

Ikhide R. Ikheloa1 Comment

Dr. Adeshina Afolayan teaches philosophy at the University of Ibadan and a card-carrying member of Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

‘Dele, it is time to go wash the plates,’ the mother said to her son.

‘My teacher said I must always do my assignment first thing when I get home,’ Dele replied, already opening his books.

‘But I need those plates to make your food now,’ the mother shouted, already exasperated. This isn’t the first time Dele would be contradicting her with what his teacher said.

‘Mummy, my teacher said if I want to be a great person, I must always do my school assignment before any other thing.’ His head was buried in his book, and his pencil was already furiously scribbling.

I’m certain only few parents will not recognise this scene. It plays out in many homes where the teachers used to wield an enormous influence over the students. Yes: used to. It would seem, quite tragically, that this incidence is now restricted to the kindergartens and nursery schools, if at all. Teachers have been demystified. The implication of this demystification is that we are no longer the custodians of higher education values that parents can conveniently relinquish the care of their children to. We have abdicated our role as the second agent of socialisation; we have become unscrupulous. We can no longer be trusted!

I can already feel the hostilities bristling. And this time, I may have more than university lecturers to contend with. Of course, I know there are good teachers who are role models for their respective students. But I speak to an overwhelming preponderance in the question that my title raises. That ought to be the norm in an institution meant to cultivate the future. And how is ‘preponderance’ measured? In the reflection of what our students are able to do, how far they are able to go in life, what values they embrace, what they are able to do with their education. Now, when you look at the state studentship has fallen into in Nigeria, what do you come out with? We have a mirror reflection of what the teachers have also become. I suspect Fela just came into your mind. It’s impossible not to remember him and his prognosis of what lecturers have become. The Ivory Towers are no longer edifying; so many values have broken down. We now have only a fraction of our students to celebrate; the majority have been lost to valuelessness. Generalisations? Crucify me if you can.

I am not afraid the fingers point at me too. I am raising a self-reflexive issue that lumps me within the framework of educational rot I am pointing at. Epimenides, the Cretan philosopher, gave historical and philosophical credence to the paradox of self-reflexivity. Epimenides is reputed to have made the allegation that ‘All Cretans are liars.’ If what he says is true, then it must be a lie because he is also a Cretan! I will leave the reader to decide whether I am also guilty of the self-reflexive paradox. I am an ASUU member, and I am no saint. I am involved. My lecture attendance is less than a hundred percent, sometimes my scripts don’t get graded on time, I’ve never been subjected to the assessment of my students, some of the students claim that I am too stern and distant, one of them even accused me of sexual harassment before (and you don’t need to bother about my statement of innocence; I leave that too to your judgment).

Yet, in spite of my involvement in the higher educational issues that impugn ASUU’s credentials, I suspect that I am not Epimenides and these issues transcend me. I will phrase my concern in this piece as a question: Is ASUU a body of teachers or educators? Are we role models who practice what we teach or we are just rote facilitators? I see ASUU not only as a trade union but as a professional body with the same weight of professional responsibility as the Nigerian Medical Association, the Nigerian Institute of Safety Professionals, Pharmacist Council of Nigeria, Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria and the Nigerian Institute of Building. This analogy is deliberately. It seems to me that these professional bodies cannot afford to be restricted to the minima of check off dues and traditional unionism. Their responsibility demands more: They are life professionals. ASUU should not be less. We mould lives. We prepare future leaders. We stand in the breach of national reckoning. We speak to countless future and generations. That’s what makes teaching a spiritual endeavour; we are not less priestly than the Pope. We owe it to those whose future depends on us to monitor and circumscribe our professional products as best as we can. Don’t tell me we are trying; we haven’t tried enough. Check the evidence!

Unionism has happened to ASUU so much so that it seems to have torpedoed our professional vigilance. This is the paradox for me—ASUU is a professional body which seems to have somehow lost its professional credentials. It is a professional body which somehow has succumbed to series of unprofessional activities that in no way flatter ASUU’s lip-service to being the guardian of higher educational values in Nigeria. Consider two issues. First: teachers now poach on the students they are supposed to be educating. Second: As a professional body, ASUU has now become a body of teachers who hide under the protective might of their union to perpetrate and perpetuate gross misconduct. These two issues coalesce to ensure that character and learning—the deep motto of the University of Ibadan—has become a surface slogan in almost all universities in Nigeria. And ASUU is responsible. Forget about the Federal Government for now, abeg! Why? Apart from the student body, we are the next significant constituent of the university. When we stand in the class to teach, what do the students perceive? I am not raising a philosophical question; yet it is difficult not to distil a philosophical implication from how a student relates with his/her lecturers in four or five years. We seem to have inverted Thomas Szasz’s maxim: We now wield maximal power and minimal authority. Doesn’t this justify our students perceiving us as a pathetic bunch of intellectuals? Aren’t they justified to ask whether we can actually educate them or impart character? Shouldn’t they repeat Fela’s song to us?

ASUU is a powerful body, but in a negative sort of way. Yet we are intellectuals and that ought to count for a whole lot of creative responses to what our roles ought to be in the society. We stand at a juncture when we should confront our demystification. We ought to come under interrogation of ourselves by ourselves. I suspect it would be too much to task ASUU with the responsibility of refurbishing its members’ characters; but we can monitor them beyond the circumscription of unionism. This will constitute the first step in balancing the proportion between the good and the bad. ASUU has a serious task to build a preponderance of role models if we want the society to take us serious. Let me shock you—in conclusion: If we continue complacent, then we are looking at the end of the university as we have come to know it consequent on our failure as life-minders.

Asa asked a fundamentally question in ‘Fire on the Mountain’: Who’s responsible for what we teach our children? Is it the Internet or the stars on television? Does ASUU have a role to play? Can we initiate a paradigm shift in the future? Can parents trust us with the future of their children? I don’t think so, at least not when there is still a raging and unchecked fire on the mountain! I will return again.

10 points on the ASUU wahala: It is all about the data and communications

Ikhide R. Ikheloa8 Comments

Nigeria is on my mind. Specifically, I am thinking of the crippling strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) that is almost six months now. It is common knowledge that the situation in the campuses is grim (see a grisly report by ThisDay here, sobering pictures from a “NEEDS assessment” here, and these particularly upsetting photos on Linda Ikeji’s blog, of university facilities in utter disrepair). I have weighed in on numerous times, since 2009 (read my last rant here). The situation is dire and both ASUU and the federal government are fiddling. Meanwhile Nigerian students are at home. Well, not all of them. Private universities are still in session.

ASUU was created for good reason and at a time when Nigeria had very few universities, all of them government funded. Today, there are more than ten times that many universities, several of them privately owned (ironically by the thieves that ran the public universities aground). ASUU as a central force is a behemoth that must go. There is a compelling reason why ASUU must be disbanded at the national level and strengthened at each institution. A cookie-cutter approach to advocacy using strikes that shut down all public universities while the private universities stay open introduces an inequity. It is this: The children of the poor are disproportionately impacted by these shut-downs since they are the ones most likely to attend the public, decaying tertiary institutions. The children of the rich are either in private schools or abroad in good schools.  Indeed it is the case that the children of many professors do not attend public universities. They are either in private institutions or abroad. It is the truth. Your guess is as good as mine as to how they can afford to raise their kids in private schools or abroad. They can’t. They do. This is all so sad. And Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the man who gave me a free and appropriate primary education turns in his grave. The legacy of Nigerian leaders will be to prove through corruption and incompetence, that a free and appropriate public education is a myth.  It is a shame that no one on either side seems to give a tinker’s cuss about this. Our leaders have lost the plot. Elsewhere real leaders are dreaming of and implementing the classroom of the future, It is called Skype. It is free, Ask our children. They would know. They live there freely. On Skype.

I must concede, as many people keep reminding me, that I am not there in Nigeria and much of what I have been saying is informed by my stay in the West where as an educational administrator, I have everything at my disposal to ensure that every child in my local community has access to a free and appropriate public education, in a wholesome and nurturing classroom. I will also concede that in that respect, coming from a different culture, I would be at sea in Nigeria, and with my imported ideas, I would fail. For good reason. There are clearly serious challenges in Nigeria’s educational sector that are exacerbated by poor attitudes among labor, management and government. Many of us who have spoken out loudly against the deleterious antics and tactics of ASUU (largely Diasporans) have strained to offer common-sense suggestions, but have been met with comical retorts. This is a crying shame.

Regardless of where you are, there are certain things that must happen, to maintain an appropriate standard of education. With the current ASUU wahala, all sides appear unwilling or unable to learn anything new and refreshing. No one is willing to accept responsibility, and in my view, ASUU is the worst culprit. Let me simply observe that these dysfunctions did not start yesterday, they were already manifesting themselves robustly in my time at the University of Benin, Benin City, in the late seventies. It is hugely hypocritical for anyone now to suddenly wake up, look around and smell decay. And by the way, ASUU, Ikhide has been telling you to clean up something as simple as your website since 2009, yet not a typo has been touched. What gives Ikhide or anyone the confidence that anything will change when you get some more money? The culture of abuse and mediocrity is pervasive. There needs to be a Needs Assessment done in that area. Seriously.

It is really all about data and with respect to financial data; there is not a whole lot to see from anywhere that would inform good decision making and objective analysis. What little has been only proves that funding for the university infrastructure is beyond woeful; it is appalling and disgraceful by any standard. Focusing strictly on the decayed infrastructure, inspired by the (lack of) data and transparency that we have witnessed on the ASUU government tug of war, here are my closing thoughts:

1. There should be an annual Needs Assessment done on each university institution. There is a structural and systemic way to do this. It is called a yearly capital budget and a capital improvement plan which is an annually updated Multi-year strategic plan that, using demographic and revenue projections anticipates an institution’s capital needs. This document is typically a volume of data and visioning and implementation prose that is designed with multiple audiences in mind.

2. There should also be a facilities maintenance budget in the annual operating budget that funds maintenance workers, supplies, contractual obligations and maintenance equipment (if it is not budgeted out of the capital budget).

3. Again, a university is a university anywhere in the world and it must be kept up to acceptable standards. No one is going to cut you slack because you are in Africa, what does that even mean? There should be guidelines: How much should it cost to build a classroom? That is easily attained. In my community here in the US, one classroom costs $500,000. It is expensive I know, but there are code specifications that must be adhered to, technology upgrades that are mandated by law, etc. and of course, labor is prohibitive in the US. I say to ASUU and management: You must know your numbers; how many students are projected to come in next year, the next 10 years? Are the facilities capable of absorbing them? If you don’t know these things, you are driving blind. Data. Demographics. Start simple. How many students do we have today? Add a multiplier for each year. In the long run, hire experts in demography.

4.Example, in our local school district here in the United States, we are faced with capacity issues. In the next several years, thousands of kids are coming in, most of them elementary school kids. The school system has done a Needs Assessment and has figured it will cost about $600 million to get the classrooms. They might either tax the citizens or borrow the money by floating bonds or a combination. Floating bonds might cost $50-60 million annually for 20 years. There is a communications plan that includes a document that breaks everything down and there was a press conference trumpeting this initiative. The local government will fund some, but the school district needs help from the state. Collaboration is crucial. The unions were of course standing with management and politicians at the conference. You need information and mass communication experts. All this beret wearing, comrade calling, hands pumping the air nonsense belongs in the Cold War era. Get an attitude update, while you are at it.

5. Facilities management is expensive. A new building that is not maintained will give you the kinds of horrid pictures of Nigeria’s institutions that have shocked the world. There is no going around this. You will need an army of maintenance workers for every institution, with teams parked in every facility.  A roof leak should not last a day; you are asking for trouble.

6. Competition will force a culture change. There is ample dysfunction on all sides. Clearly ASUU has its challenges, government is clueless, corrupt and inattentive, and management is comically imperial and inattentive. If they all had to compete for attention and resources, if they had to face daily parents, politicians and others armed with reams of data asking hard questions they would all sit up.

7. I cannot overemphasize this: The top-down approach, the overly central bureaucracy is killing Nigeria, ASUU, education, health, and pretty much everything that sustains nations. ASUU and university governance and management must be decentralized. I would restructure the National Universities Commission (NUC) to be truly independent and robust  (read this good editorial on NUC and ASUU’s expose on the TETFUND) and make it truly an office that ensures adequate standards, accountability and oversight.

8. Nigeria urgently needs a Marshall plan to restore tertiary institutions (actually all institutions) to acceptable standards. There are huge capacity issues, and near-insurmountable infrastructure (renovation and modernization) issues. We are talking about a huge infusion of cash and a lot of work being done in a fairly short period of time. That would require expertise and an existing structure and infrastructure that can absorb the build-up. I would not release a penny to the tertiary institutions without a road map to the future that includes structural changes that will make our universities real universities, one that protects staff and students. Doing anything less would be irresponsible. And while we are at it, where is the vision? Have we looked at other innovative approaches to building institutions? Should we build smaller, more manageable institutions? What is wrong with a small community university that is well-run, meets all established standards and is wholesome and welcoming to students, faculty and staff? Why don’t we build institutions that amplify our strengths (that rugged individualism) and minimize our weaknesses?

9. This is about mass communication. Remember, Achebe keeps reminding us, until the lion tells his own story, the hunt will always be glorified by the hunter. In the 21st century, you can do it yourself. And it is cheap. I say to ASUU, get a blog, get a Facebook account, get a Twitter account and post what you need to post to as many people as you want. ASUU is blessed with many people I know who are some of the world’s best recognized experts at Internet technology and social media. One of them is Dr. Obododinma Oha. I don’t know of any scholar that is as good as that man when it comes to using technology and social media for sharing his art and communicating with the world. He is at the University of Ibadan.  And before you start saying, no light, no water, armed robbers, e gba mi, etc., this blog was created for me by Kola Tubosun, over the phone and on chat; he dreamed of it, designed it and created it for me. For free. I don’t know how these things work. Ask him. He is in Nigeria in the Lagos-Ibadan axis. We have a lot of resources, we have incredibly gifted people, there is this thing that happens to us once it is not our personal initiative. ASUU is losing the PR war because its strategy belongs in the 60’s which is simply this – wear an ill-fitting French suit, call yourself a comrade, make some horrid noises, etc. They are not going to win with such ancient methods. They need to partner with young folks, they need to get rid of patriarchy, gerontocracy and misogyny, and invest in a real PR machine.  That website is their enemy, trust me. It is not helping.

10. We know why we should invest in schools and a quality education for the children of our communities. It is about community, it is also about the health and national security of a nation, as has been said ad nauseam. I must admit I am pessimistic. Can it be done? Yes. In Nigeria? Yes. Look to the prosperity churches in Nigeria. They have everything I have just talked about. Do you know why? They know the meaning of competition. They have functioning and impressive websites. Do you know why? They know the meaning of competition. If they don’t compete, they die. Like our universities. Again, imagine how perversely efficient Nigerian prosperity churches are. There is a motivation. Competition to “save souls” because each “saved soul” is dollars. Ka ching! Ka ching! Imagine if the federal government owned the churches. The congregants would be at home half the time! I have said my own.

        Notes: The full report on the Needs Assessment on Nigeria’s universities may be accessed here.  The 2009 ASUU- Government agreement may be accessed here. The January 12, 2012 memorandum may be accessed here. Professor Bolaji Aluko’s website is useful for monitoring information and data on the ASUU wahala (here).

ASUU is on Strike Again! Tell Us Something New!

Ikhide R. Ikheloa2 Comments

Nigeria’s Academic Staff Union (ASUU) is on strike again. That is really not news, they are ALWAYS on strike; it would be news if they announced that they were going to be in the classrooms doing real work on behalf of the hapless children of the dispossessed trapped in those decaying pretend institutions euphemistically called “universities.” The abuse of other people’s children in Nigerian “universities” has been going on for a very long time. Below are two articles I wrote in 2009 about ASUU that dysfunctional body. Nothing has changed with ASUU, that bully-pantheon that has been hijacked by thugs in academic gowns.

By the way, this is not about individual members of ASUU, many of whom I admire individually as dedicated professionals. This is really about ASUU as an organization living on borrowed time and playing with our children’s future. ASUU is seriously farting its way to glorious irrelevance. Nothing demonstrates it better than the quality of its “communiqués”, “press releases” and similar articles of mediocrity that it has lovingly pasted on its pretend-website. Reading the politico-babble of ASUU (what little I can understand, such intemperate incoherence) one imagines that ASUU is still being hijacked by people called “comrades” who are under the delusion that the Soviet Union still exists and Che Guevara is writing romantic manifestos from some foxhole in Cuba. ASUU’s recommendations for solving what ails the educational system are alarming in how out of date they are. The language that ASUU employs is a throw-back to 60’s and 70’s Soviet era militancy when as youths, we wore berets, drank the cheapest beer in town (free!), and smoked anything that would light up. In those days, anyone that dared start a conversation that we didn’t like was roughed up. Nothing has changed; well, except the world. The world has changed. Listening to the histrionics of ASUU you wouldn’t know it. There is a joke that deep in Enugu’s Milliken hills there is a pre-Biafra war family that refuses to come down to the plains – until the Biafran war is over. ASUU is at war with imaginary enemies and refuses to come down from its high horse until its war with itself is over. We may have to relent and give them whatever they are asking for – gobs of useful US dollars. Maybe then they’ll teach our children and free them to go to the next step in their life – unemployed Nigerian graduates. ASUU has mastered a perverse form of bait and switch. In ASUU’s parlance it is called kidnap and blackmail:

Enjoy… or weep for our children!

And read this also while you are at it!