The Senate, last week, passed a resolution mandating the Senate President, David Mark, to mediate between the Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, over the current industrial action by the dons. GEORGE OJI writes that going by the past track records of the red chamber, this strategy may prove to be the magic wand needed in resolving the imbroglio.
The Senate again last week demonstrated statesmanship by rising to the occasion to seek a unique approach to resolve the current strike embarked upon by members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, which has entered the fourth month now.
This is not the first time the Senate has risen to such a patriotic duty as stabilisers of the nation's polity to stabilise the tide and restore normalcy in the country. Very recently in 2011, when organised labour and the civil society organisations threatened to shut the entire country down following the withdrawal of fuel subsidy by the Federal Government, it was the Senate that rose to the occasion and staved what would have resulted into a very catastrophic situation.
Again, last year when the nation was at the precipice of a near irresoluble quagmire following the opposition by Nigerians to the insistence of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, to introduce the N5,000 note denomination into the nation's economy, it was the Senate that finally saved the occasion.
So, when last week the leadership of the upper legislative chamber of the National Assembly decided to step in to seek a way forward to resolve the four-month-old strike by members of ASUU in July, the senators were only traiding a familiar path of stabilising the polity.
In a well rehearsed and strategically planned move last week, the Senate devoted an entire day, during which, the lawmakers took time to debate the issue and came up with what it expressed would lead to the final resolution of the impasse. All other matters on that Wednesday's order paper were purposely adjourned to other legislative days.
For full effect, the motion was slated for Wednesday, a day the red chamber enjoys live coverage from the national television station, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA).
To also underscore the very importance and seriousness of the motion, it was sponsored by none other than the Senate Leader, Senator Victor Ndoma-Egba and co-sponsored by all the rest 106 senators, excluding the Senate President, David Mark, and the yet-to-resume Senator-elect from Delta Central.
The Senate President ensured that the usual national politicking and ethnic colorations that attained the consideration of such important debates were excised from the issue from the beginning. "Let me quickly add that what we want to do here is to broker peace, we want to ensure that at the end of the day we are seen as honest peace makers in this on-going dispute between ASUU and the Federal Government," Mark appealed.
He observed that "I know we are all very emotional about it but I just want to appeal that we stick to the facts and remove the emotions from the debate that is going to take place here. I feel I should make this appeal so that we are not seen to have taken sides even before we start the discussions. We just want to deal with the facts that are available at our disposal and then ensure that we intervene to resolve this as quickly as possible."
With that note of caution, Mark then invited the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Education, Senator Uche Chukwumerije, (Abia North), to commence the debate by appraising members of the latest developments with the strike actions.
The lawmaker started by letting his colleagues into the contents of the controversial agreement. He disclosed that in 2009, ASUU entered into an agreement with representatives of the Federal Government, which covered the following areas: salary structure for academic staff of Nigerian universities, earned academic allowance, which encompassed the post graduate supervision allowance, teaching practical/industrial supervision/field trip allowances, honoraria for external/internal examiners (post graduate thesis), honoraria for external moderation of undergraduate and postgraduate examination, post graduate study grant, external assessment of readers or professors, call duty/clinical hazard, responsibility allowance and excess work allowance.
Others are non-salary condition of service vehicle loan/car refurbishing loan, housing loans, research leave, sabbatical leave, sick leave, maternity leave, injury pension, staff schools, provision of office accommodation and facilities, pension of university academic staff and compulsory retirement age, formation of the Nigerian University Pension Fund administrator, national health insurance scheme and the funding of universities, which comprised that all regular universities shall require the sum of N1,518,331,545,304 for the period 2009 – 2011, each state university shall require N3,680.018 per student for the period 2009 – 2011, a minimum of 26 per cent of the annual budget of the state and the Federal Government be devoted to education, education shall be put on a first charge, Federal Government assistance to states for higher education, education tax fund to be amended to its original conception as higher education fund and governing council of universities shall access and effectively utilise funds from PTDF for research, training and development of academic staff.
Also, the agreement included the transfer of landed property, patronage of university services, funds from alumni associations, private sector contributions, cost saving measures, duty free importation of educational materials by universities, setting up research development unit by companies operating in Nigeria, budget monitoring committee (each university council shall set up budget monitoring committee), university post doctoral fellowship (each university governing council should introduce post doctoral fellowship leave with pay outside Nigeria), provision for teaching and research development and national research fund.
The rest of the agreement involved university autonomy, membership of the governing councils, review of laws that impede university autonomy, academic freedom, internal accountability and transparency, no sole administrators for Nigerian universities, pre-degree/remedial programmes to be limited, pyramidal structure of academic staff establishment in universities, expenditure on academic affairs.
Finally, among the agreement was the setting up of an implementation monitoring committee to monitor the implementation of the agreement. According to Chukwumerije, in July, ASUU commenced an industrial action, which led to the suspension of academic activities in the country's public universities over what the university lecturers alleged was the non-implementation of some aspects of the 2009 agreement between ASUU and the Federal Government.
The lawmaker also recalled that earlier in 2011, academic activities were also suspended due to what ASUU alleged was the failure to commence the implementation of the funding, earned academic allowance, university autonomy and other matters. But this was reversed due to the intervention of the National Assembly, Secretary to the Government of the Federation, SGF, Minister of Education and other well-meaning Nigerians.
Some of the immediate measures taken by the Federal Government to address the outstanding aspects of the agreement following the January 2012 resolution, in particular, the retirement age was the passage of a bill by the National Assembly raising the retirement age of university teaching staff to 70 years which was immediately signed by the President.
The government also set up a committee on the needs assessment of Nigerian universities to appraise specific and general needs of public universities headed by Governor Gabriel Suswan, with members from ASUU, Senate and House committees on education. He disclosed that following the submission of the report to the Federal Executive Council and the National Economic Council, a committee was set up under the chairmanship of Governor Peter Obi to generate an implementation matrix, which was subsequently approved by the President.
However, in July, ASUU wrote to the then Minister of Education, notifying her of the decision to immediately embark on an industrial action, raising issues of non-implementation of some components of the 2009 FGN/ASUU agreements, despite the recommendations of the implementation monitoring committee and the committee on needs assessment.
The industrial action, Chukwumerije noted, commenced and following series of mediation by the joint National Assembly committees on education with ASUU, Minister of Education and the SGF, the issues were narrowed down to two; earned allowances and funding interventions.
He said on funding, the SGF for the first time agreed that N100 billion was being made available for the immediate implementation of the initial phase of the intervention while N400 billion would be committed yearly thereafter, but ASUU argued that this should be in addition to the current funding to the sector, while the SGF said this included the current funding.
On earned allowances, the lawmaker disclosed that ASUU stated that the recommendation of the agreement implementation committee ranged from 15 per cent to 18 per cent of the 2013 personnel cost, with 15 per cent amounting to N92 billion for the period 2009 to the end of 2012, and that the Federal Government responded with an offer of five per cent and the Senate Committee on Education sought to make it 7.5 per cent, which the SGF promised to get to the Federal Government to consider.
This was the last point when ASUU now insisted that it was not going to call off the strike except the Federal Government honoured the 2009 agreement 100 per cent. Following the conclusion of Chukwumerije's presentations, the other senators took the floor. However, the general consensus of most of the senators, who contributed to the debate on the motion were that ASUU should consider the impact of the strike action on the students, parents and Nigerians and call off their action.
This was as a few senators were of the opinion that the Federal Government should respect the agreement between it and the dons by ensuring that it keeps to its letters. Senator Olushola Adeyeye (Osun Central), university professor, who, until elected into the National Assembly had lived most of his life in the university as a lecturer, was particularly angry at most of the demands by ASUU, which he described as irresponsible.
According to Adeyeye, "When the list of the demands were being read, I asked ASUU, can you tell me one serious nation of the world where many of these allowances you are asking for are being paid? They are supposed to work for at least 40 hours a week according to international standards. But here, a typical university lecturer will teach one or two courses per semester, he will teach three hours a week, that is three semester hours, but you are paid a salary because of the recognition that you spend time on doing other things. If that is so, why should you be paid again for some of these other things?
"Specifically, I want to ask where else in the world do you pay a teacher for examination allowance. Is that not part of a teacher's job? Where else in the world do you pay a professor for graduates' students' supervision. Is that not why he is a professor? "So, what we cannot ask for in other spheres ought not to be asked for in this same republic if we want to make the same progress that those other countries are making. Some of our best professors were trained in some of the best universities in the United States of America.
There, the standard practice when you go on sabbatical leave is that you are paid for six months. If you want to request for more than six months, you must find your own funding, either from grants or from your own private sources. "We also must ask ourselves; where else in the world do you say that the Federal Government must also be involved in the payment of state schools? On the one hand we want federalism, on the other hand, we want the Federal Government to be the golden eagle that lays every egg."
Senator George Thompson Sekibo (Rivers East) while stating that he would refrain from blaming either the Federal Government or ASUU on the matters contained in the 2009 agreement noted that once an agreement has been entered into and it is not implemented two years after, that becomes a problem. The question he has for ASUU was that must the union go on strike first before the agreement was implemented?
"While not blaming any party, on my part, I wish to call on both the Federal Government and ASUU to understand that the fate of the nation for tomorrow, not just the students alone is at stake," the lawmaker noted, stressing that "the quality of the students we are producing today will determine the quality of the leadership of the future of this country."
The Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, expressed worry at the recent statement credited to the education minister, Chief Nyeson Wike that, "he hoped that the crisis would be resolved in a few months." According to Ekweremadu, such a statement was capable of making Nigerians lose faith, because the ASUU crisis is a matter that ought to have been resolved since yesterday. The lawmaker, while noting the negative impact of the prolonged ASUU strike, stated that "our students have indulged themselves in different unacceptable activities and we must be able to ensure that this strike ends so that they will be able to go back to school." He stated that having listened to the details of the 2009 agreement, he was worried that even the full implementation of the agreements, may not, on a sustainable basis save our educational system.
The Deputy Senate Leader, Abdul Ningi, described the explanations made earlier by Chukwumerije as an eye opener, adding that because the Senate was looking for solutions, it was not going to sit on a judgement of the agreement. He noted that one important fact from the explanations was that there was an agreement and it was signed by representatives of the Federal Government and ASUU.
"We must accept that there was an agreement, whether the agreement has gaps, some of the agreements was something ordinarily nobody should have signed, but it was signed," Ningi said, urging that, "It is a moral duty for all of us to know that once an agreement is reached and signatures are appended, then that agreement becomes binding." Indeed, it was Senator Ahmed Lawan (Yobe North) who raised the point that ASUU was willing to suspend the industrial action but wants to do so on the condition that they (ASUU) needed the assurances of a very credible Nigerian they would trust to continue the negotiation with the Federal Government.
The lawmaker, who was once a university teacher before being elected into the National Assembly may have divulged privileged information to his colleagues and it was perhaps based on that, that the decision was taken at the end of the day to elect the Senate President to be the mediator between ASUU and the Federal Government.
It was based on that information that a decision was reached at the end of the debate on the motion to expand the original two-point resolutions contained in the motion to three, to accommodate the proposal to elect Mark as the mediator between the two parties, i.e. the Federal Government and ASUU. Thus in the additional prayer raised by Ndoma-Egba, it was proposed that the Senate should, "Mandate the Senate President and Chairman of the National Assembly, Senator David Mark to engage the President and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and the leadership of ASUU, with a view to bringing the strike to an end."
This was in addition to the two other prayers, which were earlier adopted by the Senate to wit; "Appeal to the striking lecturers to suspend the strike and return to work to prevent further devaluation of the country's education fortunes," and, "Mandate the committee on education to continue to liaise with the Federal Ministry of Education, the National Universities Commission, NUC, ASUU and all other relevant stakeholders to proffer lasting solution to stem further strikes in the education sector."
But before arriving at the resolutions, Mark in his closing remarks urged members of the Senate Committee on Education and all those who had joined the committee in the negotiations and discussions with ASUU and the executive arm of government to continue with the dialogue. He particularly appealed to ASUU to sheath its sword on the matter in the interest of the students, parents and the entire nation as a whole. Mark said: "I want to appeal to ASUU, in fact, let me even use the word, I want to beg ASUU on behalf of the Senate that they should resume and come back to work.
They have made a strong case, their position is obvious now and we can see the consequences of their action. I will personally beg them if that is the word that will help them to go back to work." The Senate President urged that the issue should not be viewed from the point of either a winner or loser by both parties, stressing that, "there is no winner or loser in this exercise, as long as the strike continues, nobody will win and everybody will lose." He also urged that the parties should refrain from perceiving the matter from political standpoint, cautioning that, "it is not a matter of PDP or APC or party, we are all Nigerians and if we don't build a solid foundation in education, we are going to lose at the end of the day."
The Senate President also expressed shock at the contents of the agreement and remarked that any right-thinking person should know that there was no way such an agreement was implementable. He wondered the level of intellectual ability of those who signed the agreement on the part of the Federal Government.
According to him, "looking at the agreement that was signed by the Federal Government, I was wondering whether this was actually signed or whether it was a proposal. It only showed the level of the people the executive sent to go and negotiate on tis behalf."
Mark also accused ASUU of bad face with the agreement. He chided ASUU for taking advantage of the ignorance of the Federal Government representatives by allowing them to have appended their signature to such a bogus document, knowing that there was no way the contents of that agreement would be honoured wholly.
Even though the Senate did not set any time line for Mark, within which to accomplish the onerous responsibilities entrusted on him by his colleagues, it is believed that he will use his good office and his cordial relationship with President Goodluck Jonathan to hit the ground running.
The Senate is expected to once again demonstrate leadership by ensuring that the crisis is quickly and amicably resolved so that the lecturers will in no time, return to the classrooms and the students return to school and the polity will once more, return to normalcy.