The National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Prof. Abiodun Ogunyemi, in this interview with ZAINAB ONI speaks on the challenges facing the education sector in Nigeria and proffers solutions. Excerpts:
The Federal Government recently gave a directive to the authorities of Federal universities to stop charging students tuition fees. As ASUU president, what’s your take on this?
The point is that education should be provided free, as clearly stated in our constitution, Section 18, Chapter 2. If government is saying that they should not charge tuition fees in Federal universities, government is not saying anything new.
For some time now, government’s position has been ambiguous. They will say don’t charge fees, but vice chancellors will introduce what they call service charges and the service charges will be running into tens of thousands of naira to the extent that in some Federal universities, they are charging well over N30,000 per bed space. That is also an indirect introduction of fees. So, any government that will make education unaffordable to Nigerian youths, ASUU is against it. So, what they are saying now is because they can see the ripple effects.
Many of these universities have been exploiting and extorting our youths and their poor parents. The state universities are the worst because their owner-governments have actually abandoned the universities and you would see that they pretend that they love the indigenes of their various states by establishing more universities. What is the essence of establishing universities that are not funded? The real demonstration of love for Nigerian students is not just to direct that their universities should not charge fees, but to make a policy that will commit government on what percentage of the budget must be allocated to education, and in doing that, state universities should also not be spared because they have now become centers of exploitation.
State governors have established states universities that they are not ready to fund and by doing so, the vice chancellors and the Governing Councils in those universities have been introducing and scaling up unaffordable tuition fees. What the Federal universities are trying to do is to copy what state governments in their universities have been doing; and any policy by state universities or Federal universities to extort and exploit our students, ASUU is strongly opposed to it.
So, the Federal Government should lead by example for the state governments to follow, by making it categorical that education in Nigeria should be free at all levels; it is then that ASUU can applaud government, but not that they will say don’t charge fees and they will turn blind eyes to other forms of extortion going on in Federal and state universities.
In recent times, we have had cases of protests by students of state universities over frequent hike in tuition. What role is ASUU playing in checking the state governments regarding this issue?
Yes, our branches in state universities have been opposed to hike in tuition fees in state universities and at the national level. We have been condemning it and we will continue to condemn it. Our major source of worry, really, is that states that cannot afford to run one university effectively have gone ahead to establish the second and third universities, and in such states, tuition fees have not just been introduced, tuition fees have also been made the only source of funding for those universities.
We have condemned such practice in strong terms and we will continue to challenge them because such state governors are establishing universities in order to satisfy their constituents. They have turned establishment of state universities to constituency projects.
What is the update on the Memorandum of Understanding that the Federal Government signed with ASUU on arrears of earned academic allowances and other issues?
We really have a big issue with the Federal Government on that. As far as the Memorandum of Action, which we signed last September is concerned, it appears that the Federal Government is not taking our terms for suspending the last strike action very seriously.
Talking specifically about the earned academic allowances, our Memorandum of Action states that government would complete the ongoing verification on what has been allocated and do forensic audit. They started the forensic audit but more than seven months after, we have not heard anything from the government. Government has not come out to tell us their findings on the forensic audit and our members are already complaining that it appears the government just used the forensic audit to placate us and buy time for doing nothing. We have written to the Federal Government recently and we are expecting that they will respond positively to our position and demands on that.
What do you think the Federal Government can do to revamp the education sector? Early this year, Government promised that it would declare a state of emergency in the education sector in April, but it has not done so…
Yes, when they said that, last November, at the inter-ministerial retreat in Abuja, that they were going to declare a state of emergency, we had our reservations right from that time because, for a government that would declare a state of emergency, there would be a line of activities rolled out. For instance, you cannot address a problem until you fully define the problem.
The crisis in the Nigerian education sector has not been holistically evaluated. Apart from universities, where we had this NEEDs assessment report since 2012, which government has refused to implement, no such assessment has been carried out in the primary, secondary and other subsectors of tertiary education. So, the Government really does not have the full idea of the problem; that is our first reservation.
The second line of reservation is that if a government says we will declare a state of emergency, what is their response in terms of funding? This last budget of the Government was about the lowest in the last five years; that is budget allocation to education. Does that portray the Federal Government as serious about addressing the problem of the education sector? At that inter-ministerial retreat, our minister said that, among the G8 countries (least developing countries), that it was only Nigeria that would allocate less than 20 per cent of its annual budget to education. But what we found was that they allocated less than seven per cent to education. If they wanted to make a difference, you would have seen them gravitating towards what they are doing in other developing countries.
Talking about private universities, the Federal Government keeps granting licences for the establishment of more private universities. Will these new universities cater for the deficit of university admission in Nigeria?
Establishment of private universities will never solve the problem we have in university education in the country. Look at what has happened to primary and secondary schools in the country. They became mushroomed the moment government started underfunding, mismanaging primary and secondary schools in Nigeria.
And they said private sector participation, as we call it, and those private mushroom primary and secondary schools were proliferated and, before we knew it, we started having miracle centres, because the private institutions are out there to make profit and the competition they have always had became unhealthy for us.
Private primary and secondary schools started to outdo themselves in order to attract clients. See where that has landed us. The same thing we are trying to do now with private universities. Infact, we have it on good authority that one of the former leaders of this country told ASUU leadership some years back that he knew how to solve ASUU’s problem; that he would flood Nigeria with private universities and ASUU will become irrelevant. That was a president saying that at some point, but then we told him that the position will come back to haunt not just him and others, it would lead to further destruction of Nigerian education. Just like the example of miracle centres that we have had with secondary schools, the private universities are now competing to give first class degrees so as to attract customers. Visit them. I can assure you that more than 90 per cent of those private universities do not have competent and qualified hands to teach students at the university level, but because they have bribed their ways to get licence, we have opened the floodgate to getting institutions to provide half-baked education and what that means to us in ASUU is that we have to be worried because if care is not taken, in another few years, we would be experiencing what we have experienced with flooding of the country with private primary and secondary schools. Many of them borrow money to build beautiful structures, but what makes education is not the physical structure. It is the intellectual architecture.
