By Isma’il Auta
Whatever made the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) blame the Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, for the ongoing strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is steeped in error. It is either the students lacked information or were disinformed on the essentials of different roles assigned to all parties in the series of social dialogue between their teachers and the Federal Government. From the tone of their threatening press release, one cannot also rule out exuberance, spurred by scanty information. Regardless, no Nigerian conversant with the efforts put in by the Minister of Labour and Employment towards the restoration of normalcy in the university academic calendar, indeed, the resolution of cascading industrial crises occasioned by the drop in national earnings since 2015, won’t doff the hat for the former Anambra State governor. Since assuming office as the competent authority and chief conciliator of labour disputes in the country, Ngige has used his wealth of experience as former civil servant, governor and legislator to dispense a unique labour administration, marked by openness and forthrightness, with the resultant relative quiet in the nation’s productivity milieu. The crises in the higher education and health sectors are intriguing as they are overwhelming, but, as a statesman with an in-depth knowledge of the intricacies in the age-long challenges in the two most vexed sectors, Ngige has helped the Muhammadu Buhari administration achieve considerable calm in the tripartite community.
Indeed, it is not as if other internal publics of the university system like the students are oblivious of the commitment of the labour minister to the return of the glory days to the Ivory Towers. For instance, the leadership of ASUU, then under Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi, had, in one of the negotiations on September 18, 2017, described Ngige as the “only public officer in recent time who came out to say something was wrong on the side of government and showed honest commitment to redress it.”
Similarly, the leader of Joint Action Council (JAC), comprising non-academic staff members in SSANU, NASU and NAAT, in the September 2020 negotiations, Peters Adeyemi said of Ngige, “Some of us have known you long ago, before you became minister, and we know what you can do. It is not only the President who employed you that should be commending you, even those of us that you are working for, we have to commend you too.”
SSANU was later to separately give Ngige an award as an excellent labour minister in 2020.
Conciliating the university disputes is such that spots Ngige in an inverse situation. Will he side with the Federal Government whose appointee he is or the teachers of his three children and numerous beneficiaries of his education foundation in various public universities? In the heat of the strike in 2020, his children Raphael, Azuka and Andrew, were all in the medical colleges of COOUTH, Awka, UNILAG and UNIABUJA. Like the children of the poor, Ngige’s children also bear the brunt of strikes by lecturers and, like every parent, Ngige feels the heat. Therefore, the usual accusation that ‘big’ government officials are nonchalant because their kids are either studying abroad or in private schools does not arise.
But a different thought will take pity on these students who might have heard of the excellemce of Minister Ngige, thus, erroneously made of him a superman whose office alone must solve the entire problems in the university system. Why not? Their teachers themselves were said to have asked, in one the negotiations in November 2020, that Ngige’s name be appended in the MOA for tracking the timelines as the only guarantee for success! Who blames poor teachers and students in a time of exemplar scarcity in Nigeria? Ngige has so distinguished himself all through, demonstrating that a public officer can be trusted. But Ngige cannot do it alone. He is only one of the 43 ministers! Here then is a case of misplaced disillusionment by the students. I recall as an editor of an online medium during one of the negotiations in 2017, when Ngige, in establishing the difference between the Buhari administration and the preceding ones, asked the ASUU leaders, “Is there any promise I made here that I did not fulfill?” and silence took over the hall. Ngige then went ahead to add, “If, under the previous administrations, unions went as far as negotiating with the President and still came out unfulfilled, I assure you that, as cabinet ministers in this administration, we negotiate and get results.” And Ngige has been getting results.
Dear students, solving the problem in the universities cannot start and end in Ngige’s ministry alone. He is only a conciliator of disputes between workers and their employers, be they government or private. The longer part of the stick in this matter is majorly with the Ministry of Education, the employer of university workers, as well as Finance Ministry, Budget Office and the Accountant-General of the Federation who deal with the budgeted money. Ngige plays his part excellently.
But how has Ngige been taking on this huge challenge? First is that he adopted measures that earned him the confidence of university workers and ensured the success of negotiations. Key is openness, a no-holds-barred atmosphere under which parties ventilate all issues, in line with social dialogue principles of the ILO. From the beginning also, Ngige demonstrated to ASUU that he negotiated with firm authority of the Federal Government but with a caveat that the state of the economy would guide negotiations, since ability to pay was a cardinal ILO principle in collective bargaining. Ngige was quoted in the press in 2016 as telling labour unions, “I bring to the table the intent of government as well as her manifest capacity to meet up obligations. My intention is to lead you into the true position of the finances of government and allow such reflect on the request you bring to negotiation.”
That’s how he was able to influence ASUU scale down the N1.3t 2009 agreement with government of President Jonathan, a period of boom , which he later re-negotiated in 2013, promising to pay N220B in six tranches but ended up paying only N200b in 2014. After weeks of sleepless nights in 2017, Ngige succeeded in renegotiating the agreement with the release of N20 billion for revitalization and N28b for Earned Allowances to all unions in the universities, making ASUU call off strike on 18 September, 2017. N25b was also released twice in 2018 while the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETF) maintained its funding obligation to the universities.
Besides, the minister set in motion, mechanism to ensure negotiations have full representatives of stakeholders and equally developed a template to ensure that each fulfills every role assigned in any agreement. I sighted a press statement by Samuel Olowokere, then Deputy Director Press in the Ministry in August 2017, quoting Ngige as warning that “ the era when agreements entered into is left to gather dust in the shelf is over. Everybody must strictly play the assigned role and faithfully too.” The statement specifically frowned at the lackadaisical attitude of the then office of the Accountant General of the Federation over the release of funds approved by the Federal Government for specific purposes and warned all the agencies that has role to in the MOA with ASUU to be up and doing . It added the Minister had instituted a model where all the stakeholders in the MOA, will accord priority to it.
But even with these measures, the usual factors badgering most government policies would come in between , forcing Ngige to take extra steps to ensure compliance. Do Nigerian students in NANS know that Ngige personally goes to the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation as well as the Ministry of Finance to hasten payments to either university workers or doctors? I’m sure if they do, their leader who threatened to mobilize students against Ngige will rather honour him with the defender of university education award.
So, whither issues now? Speaking on the current action by ASUU, the Ministry of Labour in a statement on February 16, 2022 stated that the Federal government paid N40B Earned Allowances in March 2021 and N30B revitalization earlier delayed , also paid in October 2021. Another N22.72B mainstreamed into the 2021 Budget was also paid November 2021. According to the statement, “ in all, a total of N92.72B was paid as per the December 2020 Agreement apart from the withheld salaries running into hundreds of billions of naira.
Unfortunately, the University Transparency Solution (UTAS) which ASUU developed to replace the existing Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System(IPPS) was said to have failed 300 of the 500 tests conducted on it by the National Information Technology Development Agency(NITDA) The way forward then, is to make up the areas of inadequacies in the platform rather than ASUU asking Ngige to decree the platform with all the inadequacies into use. Dear students, can you now appropriately locate the blame and apologize to Ngige?
• Auta, a journalist, lives in Abuja