While the government continues to dither, the recent indefinite general strike action embarked upon by the union of university lecturers, (ASUU) has again dealt a devastating blow on the already prostrate education system in the country.
This is about the third time in as many years that the teachers would be downing tools; an action that usually entails disruption of academic programmes and the dislodgement of thousands of hapless students from university campuses across the country.
The grouse of the lecturers are well known. For years the federal government has refused to concretise agreements reached with them inthe broad areas of better funding for universities and improving service conditions.
Without proper funding ASUU has maintained that the academic environment is bereft of the necessary tools required to impart knowledge, morals and mentoring to students and carry out meaningful research; a situation that manifests in poor standards, deterioration of facilities and rampant examination malpractices.
There is no doubt that the nation’s education system, which was once the envy of sub-Saharan Africa, has been neglected over the years by successive administrations, leading to dismal fall in quality and standards of formal education in the country. It would be stating the obvious to say that successive military regimes introduced the rot in the system through deliberate abandonment of systemic funding for varsities and dissolute bastardisation of academic programmes. Since then, university teachers, who have lost a substantial percentage of their numbers to the brain drain, have been up in arms, pushing a knotty crusade and often deploying the strike tool to drive home their point that the academic environment ought to run better.
It would be recalled that during the military era, universities at a point lost about four academic semesters to strikes by lecturers who were protesting non-funding of education.
The decay in the system and the resulting incessant lecturer’s strikes is so sordid that the academic calendar has completely collapsed with students no longer able to tell when they would graduate.
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Owing to the frequency of the strikes however, some people have accused the teachers of sundry ills including egotism and insensitivity, especially to the plight of the usually marooned students.
But it is difficult to share this view in the light of the fact that nations with better functional and more competitive education systems post better economic fundamentals; a position that finds expression in the reality of a continuing trend of brain drain and the haemorrhaging of the nation’s best manpower to climes where sound educational programmes have fostered better economic conditions.
There is no gainsaying the importance of education in the life of a nation, the recognition of which informed the United Nations recommendation of 15 percent budgetary funding for the sector. It is self evident that the quality of higher education plays a key role in the realisation of a nation’s aspirations for economic growth and development. There are ready examples in many emerging economies such as China and India where better funding and planning have produced a robust education system that is in turn feeding and sustaining a healthy economy with quality manpower.
It is therefore surprising that even with their claims to redemptive missions, successive later day civilian administrations have failed to redress the wrongs done to the sector by the plundering military regimes.
In the case of the Yar’Adua administration which has identified education as one of the main pillars of the defining Seven-Point Agenda, there will be no plausible explanation for failing to lift the sector. And for the President Umar Yar’Adua who is himself a former university teacher, the time to act is now. To be able to make a difference, he should creatively engage his former colleagues in a manner that would radically change the fortunes of the universities and make their programmes more responsive to the needs of the economy.
Until that is done the President’s dream of taking Nigeria to the elite club of the world’s 20 largest economies in the year 2020 would remain a tall order.
