We believe that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has good point in embarking on their current strike to press home their insistence for improved funding of Universities.
We cannot but lend full support to them. After all, if we calculate the value of looted fund already recovered and paid into the treasury, and imagine that people who occupied the commanding height of executive political portfolio at the three tiers of government ploughed just one-third of such recovered loot into academics and research, we will appreciate better the position of ASUU, even though they didn’t expressly say so.
And so, the finances with which to improve on the quality found in the numerous glorified secondary schools we call public universities or better still, tertiary institutions, are not lacking at all. What is in short supply are men of unimpeachable disposition finding themselves at the corridors of power and being guided by the fact that no nation makes any reasonable advancement in our current state of stupor where academics and research are denigrated.
We can do so and better still, if men of conscience take up the gauntlet, both at the public service and in the leadership of the various Labour Unions, and blow the whistle when financial infractions are being hatched or so soon as they were executed. By the way, the unions can earn humongous amount in whistle blowers fees.
However, ASUU have woefully failed over the period and need to thoroughly examine their almost seared consciences in the following areas: One, can ASUU leadership tell Nigerians how nice and conscionable it had become that students no longer receive their results three weeks after every semester examination were the norm before embarking on strike became so terribly bastardized?
We remember the days of yore when academic calendar was structured and strictly followed such that final semester results were released not later than three weeks after the last examination paper had been written in every department.
How has it become the norm rather than the exception that even degree results are dragged (detained) in some universities upward of up to or above one year (12 months) after the final degree examination had been taken?
Does this satisfy the consciences of ASUU leadership or have something brutally gone wrong within the system? It was the norm those days that students with incomplete results would have unfettered opportunity to resolve such issues and the various Heads of Department reprocessed the results of affected students for Senate approval or obtain anticipatory approval from Deans of the various faculties or from the Vice Chancellor, over such issues.
These were done to enable their prospective graduates catch up with the appropriate batch proceeding for the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme. But all those practice have died. And institutions now take delight struggling over who should acquire notoriety for frustrating its prospective graduands the more.
Is ASUU not aware that these recurring negative processes in our institutiins reasonably contribute to the decadence in the academic system? Similarly, what has happened to the spirit of collaboration between final year students and their project supervisors?
Nowadays, rather than provide needed guide to students writing their final project or thesis, as ought to be the case in advanced climes, academics (members of ASUU) turn into human tiger and engage in subterfuge activities that frustrate students assigned to them, either through excessive demand for gratification or outright mischief.
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And so, The AUTHORITY asks: can we make progress as a nation in this way? Can we in all honesty say the ASUU demands are not to further self-aggrandizement, fuelled from the background by the VCs?
Also, what is the problem with universities accessing research grant to resolve pertinent issues such as dearth of electricity and water supply in the various universities. It is not in doubt that the best brains in the country still reside in the ASUU membership.
But what happened to the spirit of embarking on research and equally putting same to practice through business development by sourcing investors to commercialize such research findings, using the universities as test case, remains an issue?
If the lecturers cannot resolve issues of water shortages, paucity of light or no light at all on our campuses, how do we intend to tackle such national malaise?
A corollary to these are the misnomer of awarding contracts to independent contractors to erect buildings and pave the streets in our tertiary institutions, when we have the requisite skills and manpower there. What could be hampering the various engineering departments?
Prof. Chiweyite Ejike, disproved this assertion when as Vice Chancellor of the then Anambra State University of Science and Technology (ASUTECH), he constructed one of the largest academic complexes in our universities using only in-house engineers and staff of the Works Department who served as artisans. He saved hundreds of millions of Naira in contract sum by looking inward. Subsequently, nothing of such has been heard in any other institution.
It is, therefore, expected that what our education managers and planners need to urgently embark on is to radically re-orientate themselves and depart from the bug of mindless quest for excessive wealth.
