How Many Strikes Will It Take To Fix A School?

The federal government would move heaven and earth to blackmail university teachers back to work. They have tried every trick in the book, including threats, where simple good faith would have been sufficient. Trust between both parties has broken down so badly that it is being said in family circles that the death of former ASUU president Festus Iyayi may not have been just an accident, after all.

Iyayi died with two holes in his body – the first was on the left side of his chest, just below his breast, and the second was on his upper right shoulder. On the face of it, none of the wounds looks like impact from the accident presumed to have been the immediate cause of his death. The suspicion is that Iyayi may have been “taken out” by those who desperately wanted to portray the ASUU strike as an extension of the north’s war on President Goodluck Jonathan. Iyayi’s decision to be present at the Kano meeting after he had been warned not to attend it was going to be a show-spoiler for the ethnic warriors.

The rational thing, of course, would have been to believe that the convoy of Nigeria’s most accident-prone governor, Idris Wada, had, yet again, bested even its own worst record in a second accident within one year. But in the dispute between government and ASUU, trust has been the first casualty. For five months now, all that ASUU has been asking the government to do is honour an agreement reached four years ago to, among other things, revamp infrastructure in the universities, restructure lecturers’ pension fund, pay the entitlements of the Unilorin 49 reinstated by the Supreme Court, and commit to gradually up-scaling funding to the sector.

For its part, the government has been behaving as if it would have to drain presidential blood to keep an agreement it freely entered into. Let’s face it: sometimes, I feel like hanging ASUU leaders by the next pole. Do they tell themselves the truth? If the universities were to be run like universities, I’m not sure how many of them would remain on the payroll. With dated curricula, poor work attitude and a broken system that can barely hold them to account, a number of them would be better off doing something else, frankly.

But that’s for another day. What the government wants us to believe is that ASUU is asking for more than it can afford to pay. Seriously? How can a government that turns a blind eye while rogues steal an estimated $6bn worth of crude oil yearly say it cannot find the money to pay teachers’ salary? How could a government, which undersold the 800MHz and 450MHz spectrums (among other premium digital assets) by about N53.9billion to an unlicensed company and granted a waiver of N1billion to a company in which its own top official had interest, claim that it does not have money to pay teachers? How could a government whose minister purchased two bulletproof cars for N255million and repainted a so-called Nigerian Eagleaircraft for N500million – only to repaint it again – claim that it does not have money to pay university teachers?

After threatening to sack the striking teachers if they didn’t return to work by Wednesday, the government is now saying that it has lodged N200billion with the CBN to fix the universities. Nice one. The government probably expects lecturers to run back to the classroom, to prevent hundreds of newly trained Niger Delta militants from taking over teaching jobs by Monday. It’s more about common sense and decency – both of which are in short supply – than it is about the money. The way the negotiations have been handled all along – the shafting of Gamaliel Onosode and the arrogant, dismissive attitude of government officials – signals a deep lack of concern about the direction in which our schools are heading.

It’s bad enough that Nigerians now spend an average N78.5billion every year on education tourism in the US and Europe and nearly twice as much in Ghana. It’s a shame that not a single Nigerian university ranks among the first 1,000 in the world. But the damnation of it all really is that Nigeria’s first government under a PhD holder doesn’t even appear to understand that a country is just as good as the quality of education its citizens receive.

We’re done for. Why is Julius Okojie surprised that ASUU does not believe it has lodged a kobo with the CBN? Except by some magic or through overnight quantitative easing, it’s hard to imagine how a government that said it couldn’t find a kobo in the morning suddenly shelled out N200billion into the coffers of the CBN by evening time. The same way the Ministry of Finance under Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala turned the heat on rogue governors by publishing the amount of money allocated to their states monthly, lecturers must, as a minimum first step, find a way of holding the government to account without punishing innocent students and parents.

 They could, for instance, publish an annual list of all children of government officials in foreign universities – one major reason why they don’t care if our own universities rot. If the bird has learnt to fly without perching, the hunter must learn to shoot without missing.

A Dangerous Way To Fly
How long is the runway at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja? I’m told that the runway is currently about 2.5kilometres, 600 metres  short of the required length for a standard airport. The perennial hole-patching on the runway has clipped its length, leaving pilots with a shorter, more difficult range to stop their planes.

Sadly for a Saudi Arabian B747 cargo plane this Wednesday night, the pilot rammed into repair equipment on the tarmac and part of the engine caught fire. No life was lost but passengers on Air France/KLM and Luthftansa travelling out that night were marooned for hours before the authorities could figure a way out.

And yesterday, the airport was shutdown for the whole day because the aviation authorities couldn’t tow the damaged cargo plane. When Ghana’s Accra airport recorded an incident sometime ago, it took only two hours to fix. Is anyone in charge?