President, Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Professor Biodun Ogunyemi, in this interview with TUNBOSUN OGUNDARE, speaks on the unresolved difference between the union and the Federal Government.
TETFUND
Your last meeting with the Federal Government since the commencement of the ongoing industrial action was the seventh, and you said earlier that nothing tangible came out of any of the previous six meetings because the government didn’t show interest in resolving the lingering differences. What made the last meeting to be different from the others?
Let me talk about the differences. For the first time, there was a written proposal from our last meeting, on what government has planned to do. There was nothing like that before now. All along, the Federal Government had been making verbal proposals. And we said it is when we have it written down that we can say there is an agreement. It is the written agreement we will take to our members. For the first time, government wrote a proposal on key areas of our differences.
The reason we did not tell the media that we had an agreement with the government as regards the issues at stake is that the team that went to the government was not given a final word about the proposal. They could only take the proposal to our principal officers for consent. Without that, we can’t make any pronouncement concerning the agreement. So, until our principal officers agree with what is in the proposal, it is assumed that there is no agreement. We have to consult them on the government’s proposal. This is the reason we always tell the Federal Government that we are going to consult our members; and if after the consultation they think the proposal is good enough, then we will come back to inform the government about our decision. But so far on the proposal, we are yet to take a decision.
Why do you need to do that?
It is simple. The instruction they gave to us is that we shouldn’t come back to them until we have got a clear and unambiguous answer to what has they sent us. Having said that, it means we must decide on something solid to take back to them. And that is where the problem is. Of course, government is in a hurry to say that we have reached an agreement. When you have negotiations that involve two or more parties, a party cannot come out to say they have reached an agreement. This is what we have always told them, even before we started holding any meeting with them.
Are you referring to your National Executive Committee (NEC) as your principal?
Before NEC, we have other organs we first report to. They are to be consulted first and this is the stage we are at the moment. Whatever we come up with, at the end of the day still has to go through NEC. It is then that decision can be taken on the next line of action.
But what is the role of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) in all these ASUU issues with the Federal Government, as government claims to have directed the agency to pump in money into the system?
TETFund has nothing to do with the issues at stake; it’s a different ball game. The agency’s role is a different one. When we conducted the NEEDS Assessment exercise on our public universities in 2012, TETFund was in existence, but we didn’t ask TETFund to handle the problem. We did the NEEDS assessment to let government know the extent of decay and rot in our public universities, which they needed to address as proprietors. Government itself found out that our claim had (and is still) very true. If TETFund was not been able to fix that at that time, is it now that government wants to make TETFund, a government intervention agency, a replacement for regular funding of universities? This is not proper. So, government cannot now make TETFund which is meant to be playing a complimentary role to take its place. It’s not done; government must properly fund education through budgetary allocations; not only at the tertiary level but also at other levels.
