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If
the remark credited to the Education Minister, Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau
lately, that the Federal Government would henceforth embrace dialogue in
bridging the communication gap between it and the Academic Staff Union
of Nigerian Universities (ASUU), then the end of the era when students
were detained for periods longer than the number of years stipulated for
their studies as a result of prolonged strikes by lecturers, is in
sight. The same tokenism suggests, too, that the FG has realised the
need to mitigate the negative impact of incessant strikes on tertiary
education in a country where university teachers and workers in other
sectors are always warming up for industrial actions due to the
nonimplementation of agreements reached between them and the
authorities.
Of special significance, perhaps, was the minister’s claim that the contentious issue of funding universities had been resolved. “I tell you, some of the institutions, their money is waiting for them and allocations are being made in the last couple of weeks… They are just waiting for due process to be followed for them to access the funds. So it is not the problem of need. The need has to be accessed. Government is providing the funds and we are releasing the funds gradually. ASUU is part of the implementation committee. So ASUU is following the picture of what is going on and I am sure with that, the days of strike will be over… ”, Shekarau said.
It is common knowledge, however, that a committee that investigated the needs of the universities came to the conclusion that the Federal Government needed to inject about N1.3 trillion within the next five years into the universities if it sincerely wished to properly address the numerous problems plaguing them. The FG was said to have approved N220 billion to be disbursed annually amongst all the nation’s 40 federal universities over the next five years. Each of the federal universities would get N910 million; each polytechnics N650 million; and each colleges of education N550 million. The monies were outside what the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) would give to the higher institutions.
There appears, however, a serious question mark on Shekarau’s declaration that majority of the universities were yet to access their funds for reasons not unconnected with processes. It is not impossible, for instance, that the government is repeating its old ways of handling fund disbursement to tertiary institutions, whereby monies were allocated to them without previous discussions with stakeholders on how best to access them. The result, most times, is that in the end, the funds are not accessed because the guidelines are found to be extraneous to the nature, processes and laws governing the operation of universities. This seems a major system snag that Shekarau needs to clarify. Does his remark, for example, that ASUU is part of the implementation committee and thus following the picture, imply that the problems associated with accessing the funds have been resolved? If the answer is in the negative, then the FG should quickly explore how best the funds could be accessed by the universities with minimum hitches.
Adequate funding is critical to quality performance by the education sector. Even the N910 million to be disbursed to each university annually is reportedly far below what was recommended by the committee mandated by the government to determine the actual needs of the universities. For roughly 40 years of military rule, Nigeria did not spend up to 8 percent of her annual budget on education, contrary to the 26 percent recommended by UNESCO. The highest budgetary allocation to education since the inception of the current civilian administration in 1999 was 8.42 percent, and happened in 2012 under President Goodluck Jonathan.
Therefore, making ASUU strike a thing of the past demands, among others, that Nigeria must both scale up funding for education and making the funds easily accessible; on the one hand; and on the other, ensure that they are judiciously applied through close monitoring. And to truly ensure academic stability in the nation’s universities and, indeed, other sectors, the government should take pains to respect agreements it freely entered into with organized labour. Most of the strikes the nation has witnessed so far were the fallouts of government’s repudiation of or outright contempt for such agreements.
Of special significance, perhaps, was the minister’s claim that the contentious issue of funding universities had been resolved. “I tell you, some of the institutions, their money is waiting for them and allocations are being made in the last couple of weeks… They are just waiting for due process to be followed for them to access the funds. So it is not the problem of need. The need has to be accessed. Government is providing the funds and we are releasing the funds gradually. ASUU is part of the implementation committee. So ASUU is following the picture of what is going on and I am sure with that, the days of strike will be over… ”, Shekarau said.
It is common knowledge, however, that a committee that investigated the needs of the universities came to the conclusion that the Federal Government needed to inject about N1.3 trillion within the next five years into the universities if it sincerely wished to properly address the numerous problems plaguing them. The FG was said to have approved N220 billion to be disbursed annually amongst all the nation’s 40 federal universities over the next five years. Each of the federal universities would get N910 million; each polytechnics N650 million; and each colleges of education N550 million. The monies were outside what the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) would give to the higher institutions.
There appears, however, a serious question mark on Shekarau’s declaration that majority of the universities were yet to access their funds for reasons not unconnected with processes. It is not impossible, for instance, that the government is repeating its old ways of handling fund disbursement to tertiary institutions, whereby monies were allocated to them without previous discussions with stakeholders on how best to access them. The result, most times, is that in the end, the funds are not accessed because the guidelines are found to be extraneous to the nature, processes and laws governing the operation of universities. This seems a major system snag that Shekarau needs to clarify. Does his remark, for example, that ASUU is part of the implementation committee and thus following the picture, imply that the problems associated with accessing the funds have been resolved? If the answer is in the negative, then the FG should quickly explore how best the funds could be accessed by the universities with minimum hitches.
Adequate funding is critical to quality performance by the education sector. Even the N910 million to be disbursed to each university annually is reportedly far below what was recommended by the committee mandated by the government to determine the actual needs of the universities. For roughly 40 years of military rule, Nigeria did not spend up to 8 percent of her annual budget on education, contrary to the 26 percent recommended by UNESCO. The highest budgetary allocation to education since the inception of the current civilian administration in 1999 was 8.42 percent, and happened in 2012 under President Goodluck Jonathan.
Therefore, making ASUU strike a thing of the past demands, among others, that Nigeria must both scale up funding for education and making the funds easily accessible; on the one hand; and on the other, ensure that they are judiciously applied through close monitoring. And to truly ensure academic stability in the nation’s universities and, indeed, other sectors, the government should take pains to respect agreements it freely entered into with organized labour. Most of the strikes the nation has witnessed so far were the fallouts of government’s repudiation of or outright contempt for such agreements.
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