By Bestman Michael

The 2020 ASUU strike is the longest strike of university lecturers in Nigeria’s history. ASUU commenced the indefinite strike on March 23, 2020, over the federal government’s attempt to force the discredited IPPIS on lecturers and the failure of the government to implement previous agreements it entered with the union. At the moment of writing this piece in December 2020, ASUU strike is still on, though at the verge of ending due to ASUU’s victory over an irresponsible government based on the outcome of recent negotiations. But the issues about the strike, of inadequate funding of education and the perennial strike it causes on campuses, will not be ending soon.
As with previous strikes, lecturers have been blamed as insensitive to the plight of students and parents. This is the stories that the government frequently canvasses to the members of the public, because of its deep purse and the wider access it has to the media over ASUU. The government often says that the ASUU strike was about IPPIS, which, according to government officials, was designed to stop corruption in the civil service.
But the strike has also been about decaying infrastructure, which ASUU chooses to refer to as “revitalization” and proper funding of university education in Nigeria. These schools are in conditions that make teaching or learning either difficult or impossible to carry on. In a scathing description, the editorial board of Punch Newspaper wrote: “The crisis plaguing the university system goes beyond any payment platform. The entire system is putrefying: libraries, laboratories, hostel accommodation and lecture halls are in the worst form of degradation” (Punch 16/10/20). What ASUU had called “revitalisation fund” has always been another name for funds to build hostels, laboratories and lecture halls, a truth newspapers editors have not failed to see despite their soft attitude to the regime.

The 2013 agreement that outlined how an intervention fund would be disbursed over 5 years was broken by the government. The government’s habit of breaking agreement is unwholesome. It is the stock in trade of the Buhari government, which has broken almost all the promises it made with the Nigerian people before the 2015 and 2019 general elections. For ASUU to take up the government over the question of honesty alone is justifiable, because the government cannot go on taking the poor people for a ride. However, the 2013 agreement is about putting in place quality education through the funding of facilities like laboratories, libraries and hostels that will make it happen.
The Nigeria government has funded the entire education sector with between 5-9% of Nigeria’s annual budget since 1999. This is a far cry from the 20-26% recommended by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) for the funding of education in less-developed countries like Nigeria. What the Nigerian politicians spend on education is a small piece of what they spend on themselves as bogus allowances. A deadly form of capitalism is at play here.
Nigeria’s capitalism is neocolonial. This means it has retained the roles it played during colonialism more or less. It is still seen in the global market as a deposit of raw materials, the same role it served for the British colonialists. The country is afflicted by a ruling class that makes so much wealth from selling crude oil, which requires limited technical know-how. It doesn’t even refine it in Nigeria. The implication is that the capitalist elites see education as useless because it is not important to how they make money. This is the root cause of the disgraceful budgetary allocation to education; it is responsible for the state of mass unemployment in the country by implication.
The ploy of the government to completely abandon university education to the private sector was exposed during the series of negotiations the government had with ASUU before the March 23 strike. The Chairman of the government’s negotiation team, Wale Babalakin, the same man popular for getting paid for government-projects he did not execute, put ridiculous options of alternate funding before ASUU. He proposed that Alumni should fund schools, or Schools should seek funds to fund themselves, or tuition fees should be introduced.
All the options are impractical and are a ploy to burden Nigerian parents during an economic crisis. Alumni are already funding schools and there is no sign they would do more than they are doing. Schools can only get research funds under capitalism if the economy is not monotonous and neocolonial as ours is, because businesses fund researches that promise expansion of profits. There are few businesses other than oil in Nigeria. The other option is to revert to the weakest victim, who are the poor parents. And the attempt to increase fees under any guise must be resisted, not under an economy run aground by the Buhari regime. However, ASUU strike by its resilience gave us an insight into the oppressive policies the government had in stock for working-class parents.
The sequence of events between the union and the capitalist government persisted amidst the coronavirus pandemic, which further exposed the backwardness of Nigeria’s education sector. While schools continued virtually in some parts of the world, it was impossible to organise such scale of virtual learning or teaching in Nigeria, another pointer to the rotten state of education in the country. For example, most public institutions could not hold online classes because there is no free internet zone in the country; no stable power supply; and prevalent poverty made the high cost of data unthinkable for students and their parents.
The working masses should not join a snobbish mob to condemn the strike of ASUU for the revitalisation of the university system. If the underfunding of education continue unchallenged at this rate, it is the working-class families that will be cheated out. It is the children of the working class that will be denied accessible and quality education, like those the present elites received almost free in the 70s and 80s. If the schools are sold out, as they are being primed for, it is working-class families that will also be denied access to the schools. The struggle of ASUU to force the government to fund education is also a struggle for the children of the poor to have access to quality education.
Even right now, the 2021 budget before the National Assembly shows that the Buhari administration has not repented from its policy of increasing mass illiteracy and ignorance. Premium Times’ report of the education budget is stark enough with the following as its opening words: “Despite the challenges faced by Nigeria’s education sector and calls for the government to increase funding to the sector, President Muhammadu Buhari is proposing to give the sector its lowest allocation in 10 years, when measured as a percentage of the total spending plan” (PT 24/10/20). The N742 billion allocated in the 2021 budget represents a tiny 5% of the budget, while a huge N3.12 trillion is proposed by the Presidency to be devoted to debt servicing. What needs to be said too is that despite the lip service the Buhari ministers pay to education, the budget to education under Buhari has steadily gone down.
When ASUU call off this strike, the working-class should know that the issues causing unending strikes are emerging from the endorsement of neoliberal capitalism emerging from the President’s desk and the entire crops of the ruling elites, with its rabid drive to hand over all sectors of the economy to the members of the billionaire club as milking cows for their greedy quest for more and more super profit at the detriment of the wellbeing of the working masses, even in the face of the wealth of the country that will then be reserved for members of the ruling elites.
As far as the 2021 budget is concerned, the President is unready to resolve them. Rather, the Minister for Labour and Productivity is moving to break ASUU by registering a faction of the union. This is a shameful act on the part of the government, which has thrown everything at the union from sheer blackmails to stopping its members’ salaries. The working class should be united in condemning such anti-democratic moves and unite its voice in calling for proper funding of the education sector.
ASUU likewise must open itself to the solidarity of the working class, and ally with other working-class unions to take up this capitalist government on matters that affect the oppressed people of Nigeria particularly. For example, other unions in the university system share ASUU’s grouses over a range of issues involved in the 2020 strike; ASUU should reach out to these unions and forge a united front. It is important to recall here that it was not only ASUU that had reservations about IPPIS; other unions in the university later called it a ripoff and embarked on strikes no matter how shortlived.
So far, we can begin to understand the nature of the capitalist government and its unreadiness to make free and quality education accessible to all. Rather, we are introduced to privatisation and commercialisation where profit is the hallmark of the capitalist ruling class. And this means education becomes business only for the rich who can afford it, while the poor struggling working-class are kicked out of the door.
While we call for an education wide struggle of teachers, students and parents for adequate funding of the education system to provide succour, the genuine way out of these crises in the education sector and other sectors remain the nationalisation of the banking, agricultural, transport and other key sectors of the economy, which will be placed under the democratic management and control of a workers and peoples’ government.