By Adagbo Onoja
For an organisation that was told by a sitting president and Commander-in-Chief, (not President Buhari) that it would be drowned out into irrelevance as soon as he, (the C-in-C) flooded Nigeria with private universities, the successful grounding of public universities in a warning strike Monday February 7th, 2022 by the Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU) must now be understood by all stakeholders beyond another industrial strike action over wage conditions. This lack of a situated understanding of the protracted ASUU-FG conflict might better explain why it is still there in its current phase since 1993.
Understanding it beyond another industrial relations stuff implies Federal Government functionaries coming out of their concern with how a bunch of employees would be dictating the dynamics of a contractual relationship to their employers. Even if that were what has been happening, there is no anomaly there as long as Nigeria is a capitalist country, albeit a dependent one. Once you accept capitalism, whichever variant of it, you must also accept the right of workers to unionise and safeguard their collective interests. If a nation state has workers who cannot do that, then the state must realize that what it has are not workers but some glorified serfs. Even as not too advanced in the modernist sense as the Nigerian State, it is assumed it would not like to parade serfs in the 21st century because it should be very embarrassing for it in the comity of nations.
Understanding it beyond another industrial relations stuff also implies the need for other stakeholders to intervene, invited or not, because the matter has become truly all-consuming. Traditional and religious leaders, business leaders, parents and the civil society should be particularly important in this. It is a major paradox that parents in Nigeria do not see the point in what ASUU is doing or that ASUU is actually doing what they should be doing. Intervention is most warranted now that the tune from Government quarters is changing from bravado to one of commitment to honouring its agreements with ASUU, although the Federal Government of Nigeria needs to do more than declare commitment to honouring specific agreements. The degree of decay in the educational sector demands more than that. What is called for is a holistic overhaul, a task to be assigned to an absolutely informed and highly independent minded Nigerian educational leader. At the risk of being declared unpatriotic, there is no education going on now. Whatever is going on now in the name of education is too weak to sustain the materialization of Nigeria on the global scene in tandem with her national self-understanding as the leader in Africa and defender of Blacks worldwide. This is such a weighty but noble commitment that ought to have been compelling every Nigerian leader and his party in terms of what goes on in the educational sector.
Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Even ASUU which has been reminding successive governments and leaders is seen in government quarters as a rebellious bunch that should be dislodged as soon as that can be achieved. This was the obvious logic behind the idea of drowning out ASUU through a strategy of flooding Nigeria with private universities. Unfortunately for such leaders, that strategy has not produced that outcome. Private universities are here and in large numbers quite alright but the public universities are still the pace setters. It is unlikely that anything will change this in the next few decades because it is largely from the same human resources in the public universities that most of the private universities are drawing their own staff, models and practices.
What is the lesson from all of that? It must be that there are no alternatives to a national university system that can visualize the nation in the image of ASUU. ASUU is not a perfect organisation but it is fighting a perfect cause, notwithstanding what that fight has caused a few of us, personally. Neglect of what exists and lack of a grand idea of what the universities ought to be accomplishing for the nation state called Nigeria is a fundamental explanation for the current crisis.
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Prof Asisi Asobie, a former president of ASUU, once put his fingers on how this played out. In an interview with Community, the now defunct Quarterly publication of the equally defunct Community Action for Popular Participation, (CAPP) a copy of which is not within reach immediately, Asobie said universities have a tradition of retaining its products who emerged with a First Class or Second Class Upper. The assumption is that those in that category are the best and brightest and ought to be retained because they appreciate the mandate of knowledge. But if the same chaps become lecturers without the opportunity of attending any conferences anywhere else to mix and update themselves on what might be going on in the world of knowledge, to be able to publish, to rethink and to challenge and even possibly upturn older explanations, then they have ceased to be lecturers. Rather, they have become story tellers and preachers, transformed from academics to ‘broadcasters’. ‘Broadcasters’ is the name students reserved for lecturers who come and read ancient notes for students in the name of lecturing, year in, year out. And that is what is at the root of the rot today. If the ‘take home’ pay cannot take the average lecturer home, then the idea of knowledge production dies because such a lecturer becomes more involved in survival games and coping strategies than worrying about the tedious but liberatory challenges of knowledge production. Poverty of the type generated by the ‘take home’ pay crisis in the Nigerian university system is crucial to understanding the tension Nigeria is dealing with. There is no magic about it: knowledge must be funded. This is why there are immense efforts in organised societies in this regard, a tradition that has accepted that the depth of reflection that can generate grand ideas can never be possible under stressful, poverty stricken living. Governments in Nigeria have not been led by people who appreciate this and there may be no better time than this moment to make them and this society to develop that appreciation.
If only in that regard, ASUU is then playing out as a force for democratization and social change. But, more than that, it is also offering something else. The collapse of the strategy of hostility to ASUU right from the time of General Gowon to date without the conquest of the body must draw our attention to the question of what sort of political statement can be associated with ASUU approach to politics and what message such an approach might embody for the larger politics of democratic transformation. In other words, the survival of an organisation of teachers who have no money, no territory, no troops nor police of its own against Commanders-in-Chief over the years should make us ask how that has been possible.
Although ALL members of ASUU are united by the title of university teachers, the union is not a homogenous entity in class terms. Majority might belong to the middle class in classical Marxism but it also contains people who are still peasants, who are in truth, shopkeepers, technocrats and of the traditional aristocracy, both in orientation and in behind-the –scene proclivities. They are thus only partially middle class in terms of their official share of income. Being thus diverse in class terms, its ‘rebellion’ is not class politics. It means it is better to understand it and its tentacles in the civil society in terms of a confluence of alienated victims of dysfunctional and unproductive capitalism. And they are relying on certain skills to resist encroachment on collective interests as well as advance their cause in a particular space, borrowing from global practices thereto.
Since the eve and the aftermath of the post Cold War, what has been common to this strand of politics is what post-Marxists call articulatory politics. In a crude, newspaper level analysis, articulation enjoins framing the issue and constituting something more than what Lenin would call an alliance in other to politicise a contradiction. Politicising a contradiction is what is called antagonism. According to its promoters, it is the heart of politics. Antagonism, not contradiction, they argue, is what produces an anti-thesis and brings about change as in the case of what happened to gender inequality. Women have always borne the brunt of history since a long time ago. Things never began to change until the gender movement politicised gender inequality and built a large building block against it. They have won so much even as so much remains to be won, especially in the Third World. So, harping on contradictions and declaring gleefully that the struggle is one’s life is an eminent waste of time. Instead of making the ‘revolution’ a career, build a trans-class coalition against the contradiction through articulation of different victims of a thoroughly insensitive system into a fighting force.
This has proved very useful for victims of neoliberalism in Latin America. In the case of ASUU, they have, in obvious realization of the paradox of their struggle, (the facts that parents don’t see ASUU as fighting the war they should be fighting, for example) abstracted a strand of articulatory politics and relied on it. That is what I think I see in them absolutising the empty signifier called patriotism as the ultimate justification for their struggle. Words such as patriotism, democracy, nationalism which are very emotive and powerful but abstract fall into the concept of ‘empty signifiers’ in Ernest Laclau’s poststructuralist variant of discourse theory. Empty signifiers work wonders, generally.
So, without building a ‘historic block’, ASUU has still been able to sustain its struggle over the years, including the time when being ejected from living quarters of key members, being sacked from their jobs or being arrested and detained were part of the risks. And they have done this even when parents hate them because they see them as the road block to start date and completion date of degrees. Business community are not with them too because, as Claude Ake would say, not being risk takers and having no real factories of their own beyond buying and selling, those we call capitalists in Nigeria are not bothered about the quality of the education offered by the universities as to step-in. It would not have been so if they have factories all over the place and are bound to be interested in the quality of Sociologists, political scientists, Economists, Mass Communicators, medical doctors, pharmacists, biologists and the whole bunch coming out of the universities to run their factories as personnel officers, public relations officers, marketers, lab scientists and so on. We have already mentioned how negatively government functionaries see them.
So, the question is what sort of society is unable to appreciate an organisation like ASUU? ASUU has its doctrines and practices unique to it. It articulates them, seeking unusual quarters to educate them on those demands and the reasons for them. It is open to negotiation, meaning that if governments had their own bevy of adequately informed negotiators, ASUU could also be defeated on its own terms. It is nationally structured. It has a well-oiled succession system. It is a success story in internal democracy to the extent that we have not heard any individual going there and successfully bending the organisation to personal agenda. So, ASUU, irrespective of what we might hold against it, individually, embodies everything Nigeria itself lacks. Yet, Nigeria is not humble enough to seek ASUU’s tutoring on how to manage itself.
Who and/or what can compel Nigeria to seek ASUU’s counseling on how Nigeria might get itself out from the path of voodoo to modernism is thus the second question worth contemplating aside from the first question. The first question is getting vital segments of the Nigerian society into a ‘historic block’ so as to actualize the idea that knowledge must be funded, adequately and NOW.
Of course, this is on the condition that ASUU updates the content of the education Nigerian undergraduates are receiving at the moment. What they are receiving now is nothing to write home about, certainly not in the social sciences. It is possible those in the hard or medical sciences are not that dated. Updating the content is not NUC’s job but the job of academics. Even if it has been defined as NUC’s job, it was wrongly done and should be repudiated or the country might be manufacturing the bomb that will blow it up in the hands of educationally maladjusted graduates who are the ones taking over leadership in the civil service, the military, diplomacy, the media and similar other sensitive national spaces in the next generational shift.
Mr. Onoja, the author and an Editorial Associate of Intervention, teaches Political Science at Veritas University, Abuja
