After eight long months of braggadocio, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has come to eat the humble pie. All the emotions it threw into the gamble have come to naught. They have become wasted. The union has ended up broken. Having sulked for so long without respite, it has accepted its humiliation by the Federal Government of President Muhammadu Buhari. The union ended the way it did because it was unwise. Its approach was most impolitic. In the end, it was left with two unpalatable options: either to go on with the strike and destroy its members and the university system in the country or back down ignominiously the way it did.
If ASUU had made hay while the sun shined, it would have saved itself from the rout it suffered. Can ASUU, in all honesty, say that it gained anything by last Friday when it capitulated? Was the situation any different from what it was in February when it thoughtlessly shut down the country’s universities?
If I blame the union for the trauma it has taken its members and the students through, it is simply because it did not gauge the mood of the government it was dealing with properly. ASUU was completely lacking in circumspection, a critical tool that an intellectual should readily deploy in situations that do not admit of easy solutions. But here, the union did not apply any rigour. There was no introspection. Its movement was unidirectional. That was tactlessness of the worst order. In the process, it almost made itself a bull in a china shop.
Rather than push aimlessly the way it did, the union should have stopped for a moment to reflect on what it was confronted with. If it had done so, the disposition of the Buhari government to developmental issues would have been clear to the ASUU, led by Prof. Victor Emmanuel Osodeke, from the outset. The union would have appreciated the fact that the minister in charge of education, Adamu Adamu, has no record of any remarkable educational attainment. Buhari placed him in the all-important ministry not on the basis of competence but by sheer whim. For the President, expertise does not matter. Anybody can preside over any department of government. Was it this seemingly anti-intellectual minister that ASUU chose to engage without looking back? The union should have known better.
The signs that the education minister was not interested in the issues being contested by ASUU were manifest from the beginning. The man was dismissive and impatient in his dealings with the union. He did not show any temperament that borders on accommodation. For the most part, he saw ASUU as an irritation. The minister was merely tolerating ASUU. For him, the union should face the classroom for which it was employed by government or go to hell. Its load of demands, for the likes of Adamu, was a distraction. And so he was not interested in addressing them.
In a proper setting, the President who engaged the services of the minister would have been embarrassed by the stagnation and decay the education sector was facing and is still facing. He would have given the minister marching orders to turn the situation around. But that was never the case. Rather, we saw a President who was not bothered, just like the minister. Adamu was insensitive to ASUU and its affairs because he knows that he has the ears of his boss. The President will listen to him in all circumstances rather than to ASUU. It was because Buhari, like Adamu, did not care a hoot about ASUU’s demands that he (the President) refused to grant audience to the union. A President who cares about the improvement of education and the positive impact it will have on the overall development of the country would have acted otherwise.
This reality should have informed the union that it needs to put on its thinking cap. It should have learnt to engage rather than opt for a complete showdown. Trade unionism is not war. It should be about constructive engagement. But it does appear that what qualifies those who aspire to lead ASUU is mere radicalism. Those who have led the union in the past had or pretended to have this disposition. But then radicalism can produce the desired effect when it is measured. Unfortunately, what ASUU’s leadership has been more inclined to is infantile radicalism. The leadership has always behaved as if it was an extension of students unionism of yore. But the times are changing and ASUU must understand this and embrace present-day realities.
It must be acknowledged that, in recent years, a section of ASUU has not been easily persuaded to vote for the strike option. These are the people who feel that ASUU can press home its demands without paralyzing the university system. These members of the union who are so disposed may have had their voices of reason drowned by the cacophony from the strike advocates. But experience shows that they make sense in the long run. The way this last ASUU strike ended in disgrace should serve as a lesson to the academics. In fact, it is regrettable that an ASUU, which was faced with all the anti-education disposition of the present government, did not see reason for a change of strategy. Instead, it stuck tenaciously to the strike option. That recalcitrance was needless. It was foolhardy. The union failed to apply the brakes when it mattered. That was why it fell from Olympian heights to the abysmal chasm where it has found itself.
There is a lesson for ASUU and the rest of Nigerians to learn from the disorder that the Buhari government has foisted on education in Nigeria. That lesson is that leadership comes with passion. We are told that nobody can ever give what he does not have. In the same vein, those who do not have passion for leadership cannot lead well. In Nigeria, we have had a surfeit of cases where people throw themselves up for public office not because they want to improve the condition of the people but because of other motives that are largely self-serving. Members of ASUU as well as the larger Nigerian society have been part of the problem. Our attitude to leadership selection has been cavalier. As an elite group, ASUU ought to play more than just a passing role in matters that border on leadership choices. Why should those that know not be interested in setting an agenda that will work for the country? ASUU, like other elite groups in Nigeria, has failed in this regard. But this culture of indifference must be reversed. Nigerians should no longer sit askance in situations where they should be fully involved.