Nigeria’s foremost activist platform, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has a new president. He is Prof Chris Piwuna of the University of the University of Jos.
He emerged president at the just concluded National Delegates Conference of ASUU in Benin City, Edo State in Southsouth Nigeria.
At the time of reporting, not even Prof Piwuna’s discipline is known, not to talk of his tendency in ASUU politics. It would be interesting to know if he is a champion of the view that ASUU needs to amend position or reinforce the strategy of holding the government to its responsibility to fund education.
The Federal Government is making the point that, for the first time in recent history, the university system has run for two years without closure of public universities due to strike action by ASUU. It is not clear if there has not been a strike action in the period because the Federal Government has become more responsive and responsible or because is cowing to strike fatigue and/or has run out of gas in terms of capacity to sustain strike action among its members as well as declining support in the society
Whichever is the case, the university system in Nigeria is, by popular consensus, confronting moral, systemic and academic collapse. Curricular is not only terribly outdated, the facilities that make university education global such as libraries, staff/student ratio or diversity are not there and the pay structure simply antiquated. Nigerian universities suffer from excessive in-breeding as well as horrible university governance processes. Horrible university governance stretches to a very routine thing as obtaining transcripts or getting a letter of recommendation.
The TetFund, for example, pumps a lot of money but in a typically meaningless Nigerian way of throwing money at problems. Nigeria cannot get anywhere in terms of world class universities with the level of ‘Philosophy of Science’ in place now but nobody, including ASUU, talks about that.
ASUU has since the collapse of NANS been the only platform advancing the cause of quality education but ASUU itself has run into image problems following misunderstanding of its agitation. Somehow, it appears that ASUU has not adequately explained to Nigerians that it is Nigerian parents who should be fighting the fight it is undertaking; that it is only fighting out of patriotic consciousness and not necessarily for better pay.
Against the foregoing, the election of a new ASUU president comes with new hopes and expectations. How all these work out remains to be seen.
This story will be updated as new details emerge!
