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Nigeria owes a debt of gratitude to the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) for finally succumbing last Friday to pressures and blandishments from all sides to conditionally suspend their eight months strike against their better judgement. They know by history and instincts that whatever agreements the federal government reaches with the union is often not faithfully honoured. What they cannot tell is how soon the government will throw them under the bus, or what tonnage of bus would mangle them. The union knows that in the past two decades or so, there has been no agreement reached with them that was honoured beyond the initial commitment, or at best after a second tranche had been grudgingly executed. Yet, they stood their ground for eight whole months. It is not often that teachers of theories and principles live out their dictums. But reassuringly, given the wasteland of principles which Nigeria has become, a group still exists that can be trusted to courageously stand by what they teach and believe, and this despite the criticisms of many well-intentioned opinion moulders and statesmen.
The country also owes the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, a debt of gratitude for wading into a fight that was strictly speaking not his, nor that of the legislature. There is of course much more to his involvement than the public has been told, but since he is the public face of the negotiations between ASUU and the legislature, he must be singled out for mention and lauded for his painstaking thoroughness. Hon Gabajabimila did not always look nor sound like someone who would make a success of his assignment as head of the lower chamber, especially given the despairing compromises that saw his emergence as speaker and the entire National Assembly as the lapdog of the controlling Muhammadu Buhari presidency. Not only has the speaker measured up adroitly as a principal officer, he has been measured in his tones, sparing in histrionics, and has obviously become a dealmaker and consensus builder. It is true he has shown no philosophical bent in his assignment nor exuded significant profundity in managing the lower chamber, but he pursued the negotiations with ASUU with single-mindedness until a truce was reached. Few critics gave him a chance, but he delivered where others had failed.
But what shall the country say to the Buhari administration for allowing this costly and utterly needless strike to continue for a whole eight months? The deal reached last week was not so unearthly that its terms could not have been reached two weeks into the strike, had the presidency demonstrated passion for education and loyalty to the constitution and the affairs of the country. But the administration first allowed the lengthy flexing of muscles, then it lapsed into suspended animation, and finally watched with bemusement as both the Labour and Employment ministry and the Education ministry tangoed over who had the ultimate right to disentangle the ropes with which the strike was knotted. A month or two into the strike, it seemed as if the administration would finally in exasperation wade into the fight and call everyone to order. Four months into the paralysis, the administration inexplicably switched off. And months before the 2023 defining polls, one in which the ruling party had so much more to lose, the administration and its phlegmatic leaders fecklessly sat idly by as the frustrations built up and impressions and speculations ran rife that the ruling party aimed to deliberately lose the elections.
It is not clear yet what kind of pressures Hon Gbajabiamila brought upon the administration, or why the fatalistic administration eventually had second thoughts about crashing the ruling party’s election vehicle, but whatever the reasons, the country must, it seems, heave a great sigh of relief and thank the president for acceding, however grudgingly, to the few concessions needed to get the strike temporarily resolved. Given the reluctance, if not disdain, in which the administration holds agreements, there is of course little hope that anything substantial will be done to uphold last week’s deal with ASUU in the long run. But since the president agreed among other concessions to waive the ‘no-work, no-pay’ rule in order to find common grounds with the union, he must be lauded, even if reluctantly. Well, at a time when everybody is reluctant about everything, Nigerians must also find the good humour to applaud the administration. Embedded in the final agreements are, however, snippets as to how to subsequently fund tertiary education, but these snippets are in turn seeds for future upheavals in the education sector, particularly because the embedded snippets are so disjointed and incoherent that it is hard to see how they could be implemented without seismic shifts in national culture and public policy.
READ ALSO: 8-Month Strike By ASUU Conditionally Suspended
Since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, no administration has done a phenomenal job in grappling with the dynamics of the education sector, particularly in terms of funding, ownership and operations of public tertiary institutions. The old and existing paradigms have become truly dysfunctional, absolutely inoperable. And with a political system that is draining, enervating, and also parasitic, little resources get allocated to tertiary education. The agreement reached last week with ASUU says nothing about finding the equilibrium in public finance that would make it possible to run a cost-effective political system which allows for proper funding of the public sector. To devolve the costs to an increasingly pauperised populace is nothing but an invitation to future destabilisation. The evil day has simply been postponed. Hopefully, the next government will thrash the infantile assumptions that undergird the FG/ASUU agreement of last week and produce a more enduring roadmap to higher education as well as find a more productive paradigm for the entire public sector.
Finally, what indeed shall the country say to both the Education and Labour ministries who bear direct responsibility for prolonging the ASUU strike for about eight sickening months? There was a brief moment when the Education minister, Adamu Adamu, seemed animated enough to want to take over the negotiations with ASUU. But that fleeting moment was soon shot down by the more loquacious and grandiloquent Labour minister, Chris Ngige, citing some arcane International Labour Organisation (ILO) rules. The Federal Executive Council (FEC) has not always given the impression to the country that its debates are robust or that they do not engage in the constant and irritating habit of reading the lips of the president before making contributions to policy matters. So, by some interpretative sleight of hand, Dr Ngige easily got the upper hand, monopolised the negotiations with ASUU and proceeded offensively to talk down to the union, shoot down many of their proposals, and ultimately balkanise them by registering countervailing university unions.
Not only did Dr Ngige bully the Education ministry on the grounds of the so-called ILO rules, the aloofness and reticence of the presidency also enabled him to turn the negotiations into a contest of wills from which he was determined to have the last and dominant say. Had he the power to subvert the involvement of the legislature, especially seen how he had insulted them at some of their committee hearings, he would have sought for ways to shut out Hon Gbajabiamila for being meddlesome. In any case, in addition to balkanising the union, an action that may still be upturned by the courts, Dr Ngige also sought the destruction, neutralisation and entire capitulation of ASUU. The House of Representatives ensured he achieved only a limited part of his objectives, and even that could in the end prove to be a chimera. Both the country and ASUU should not imagine that Dr Ngige is through with them. He will continue to imprecate them and the agreement, and he will snort contemptuously at the agreements cobbled together by the union and the government as well as seek a pretext against them, if possible to upturn the deal or vitiate it. It is in his character to scoff at anything and everything that does not massage his grandiose ego.
ASUU may have conditionally suspended their action, and are gloomy about the few concessions they had wrung from the prolonged strike, but even they are sensible enough to know that this is probably the last strike they will embark on in the life of this administration. The National Assembly, which has found the affected mannerisms of Dr Ngige both provocative and off-putting, will do their best to retain and honour the 2023 budgetary components of the federal government deal with ASUU, but they are unlikely to be able to force the parsimonious Finance ministry to back the deal with sufficient cash when the time comes. As for the Buhari administration, which is basking in belated achievements on the security front, particularly the pacification of the Northeast and Northwest, it will congratulate itself in reaching the deal with ASUU or, more accurately, in signing off on the deal with the union. The administration will not feel bound to do any follow-up, for as it is wont to say, if there is no money, no one should expect the government to kill itself. Nigerian youths and students will naturally move on from this unfortunate debacle, having lost in many cases years of their lives idling away. If their parents who are even more profoundly impacted by this strike will not eschew sentiments in their voting behavior but will endorse glib talkers and greenhorns, then they haven’t seen anything yet.
After being challenged by the flurry of street rallies deployed to devastating effects by the Labour Party’s Peter Obi shortly before and after the ban on campaigns was lifted, the disquieted APC and PDP are beginning to settle down to the drudgeries and complexities of organising and funding their bid for office in 2023. Seeing his dainty rallies take off in different parts of Nigeria and how they disarmed sceptics, Mr Obi and his supporters naively imagined that street rallies were all it took to win elections. Indeed, at a point in those giddy few days of rallies, the LP candidate imagined he had won already. But after rallies by the other parties had proved even more overwhelming, the LP had begun to confront painful reality with less optimism.
But despite surmounting the challenges of the rallies, the Peoples Democratic Party less so, the two leading parties have made heavy weather of constituting their Presidential Campaign Councils (PCC). The LP is of course not left out of the fractiousness at the PPC level, but the dissonances in the two main parties have proved more telling and ominous. After series of complaints, the PCCs are being expanded inordinately to accommodate many journeymen and exaggerated tacticians who imagine, quite fancifully, that membership of the PCC would invariably qualify a person for notable appointive positions after election victory. Manifestos are also been reworked or tweaked, and probably harmonised with their parties’ unimplementable and overarching manifestos. And in a crazy instance in the LP, the uncontroverted statement of a PCC member is being used to lynch him. Startlingly, the victim excuses the intraparty mob action, even insinuating that he made the controversial statement because his oath of office enjoined him to some measure of perfunctoriness.
The campaigns are thus stalemated for now. The PDP is harried by the Nyesom Wike bombast, with the Rivers State governor raising many pertinent questions neither the presidential candidate nor the party as a whole has been able to answer. Mr Wike is remorseless in pushing his party, the PDP, to confront and wilt before the moral questions of the day, to wit, how to redeem promises and how to engender fairness and equity. The party is equally adamant, and is unlikely to cave in over whether party chairman, Iyorchia Ayu, should step down or not. They won’t contemplate his resignation, they say; and Mr Wike retorts that there will then be no rapprochement.
If the LP machine is bogged down in the mud of amateurishness, and the PDP is trapped in the follies and insincerities of their making, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has not proved to be immune to its own intraparty foibles. The party chairman, Abdullahi Adamu, like the now taciturn and melancholic Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, is still ruing the defeat caused by his backing the wrong horse during the party’s presidential primary. Despite himself and the best intentions of the campaign group, he continues to manifest a form of disgruntlement that seemingly slows down the pace of the campaign. There are also others in the APC, governors and opinion moulders alike, who appear discomfited by the confident posture of the party’s presidential ticket. They are for now standing aloof from the campaign. While the APC may be able to mollify the anger of its furious members than the PDP can conciliate the raging bulls in its ranks, however, ultimately, it is the ruling party that has so much more to lose precisely because it is the frontrunner. All dynamics favour the APC winning. For the LP, the greenhorns in the party, including their impressionable presidential candidate, will continue to engage in one compromise or another until it lacks elbow room to yield ground.
Whether they like it or not, and in a week or two, the parties will leave behind them the uncertainties and hesitations enveloping their campaign councils and begin to forge ahead. They may, with varying degrees of success, walk with unsteady gait or run on spent steam, but in the end, faced with the urgency of the campaigns, they will wobble and fumble on. The two leading parties in particular already know, in the words of Mark Twain, that they will either all hang together or, most assuredly, all hang separately. The APC is keenest in recognising this solemn zero-sum fallacy.
CJN and political pressures
Sometime in September 2019, former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Ibrahim Muhammad complained that the judiciary’s lack of financial independence hamstrung the administration of justice. He was right, even though, as events would confirm nearly three years later under his administration, financial independence did not invariably mean financial prudence. But something much worse than financial hindrance is bothering the judiciary. After he was sworn in last Monday, Olukayode Ariwoola, the new CJN, pleaded that in order for justice to be dispensed politicians should desist from pressuring the judiciary.
According to him, “Politicians should allow the judiciary to function…Law is not static, and that’s why you have seen that the National Assembly continued to amend the laws and it is the laws that the courts apply to the facts available. We shall continue to do justice, if only Nigerians will allow us to perform and function without any pressure.” It is hard to rationalise the jurist’s complaints. All over the world, pressures are always being brought upon judges, either by politicians, moneyed class, or governments. There will always be pressure, and it is called corruption.
Maybe what Justice Ariwoola should do is ensure first of all that men and women of character are appointed into judicial offices, people who can resist the lure of money and withstand political pressures. Appealing to politicians to desist from bringing pressures upon the judiciary is pointless; let the CJN ensure the right men are appointed into office, and that they resist and even punish those who bring the pressures. It is not idealism.
Idowu Akinlotan
