It has been far from a smooth ride for the Nigerian university students and their academic staff for a couple of months now due the marathon strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). The strike has shaped up to be a ridiculous one that ever happened to our universities (six months old). And this week has put forward the semblance of this current administration to the famous Don Jazzy’s song SHAKITI BOBO as it failed to come to terms with the union.
Whisper it quietly but the union was right all along. At least when it came to one of their striking reason; revitalization of the universities. An inorganic chemistry professor dragged a colleague of mine for more than 10 minutes during our SIWES presentation. Reason? He made mention that spectrophotometer detects the colour of water. “There is no such spectrophotometer,” argued the professor. This is because he has never seen one in the university laboratory, probably. The argument was later settled. By who? Laboratory technician, who came across one in a particular company during an IT supervision. Talk about NMR machine, we have only one in the country (in Ahmadu Bello University, ABU, Zaria). This, and a wealth of other reasons, has exposed the uselessness of our universities and the need to recalibrate them.
Meanwhile, the tongue-lashing of some state universities and the jarring reply to the federal government on the backlog of salaries by the chairman of ASUU has outlined the fault-lines in the union’s struggle and the glaring need for pertinent media and resourceful public relations.
The union is showing no signs of cracking under the federal government’s tactic of ‘no work no pay’ and that’s commendable. But that’s enough to send the alarm bells ringing, that this current crop of leaders and retrogression are five and six. They exploit every avenue to render our institutions valueless.
The stalemate in the meetings has, by and large, exposed the lack of wherewithal from the education and labour minister who was somewhat culpable in the concession of the marathon strike.
If ASUU were to call off the strike today, without coming to terms with the federal government, it would be like holding up their hands to the federal government and the emotion-driven students saying, ‘you were right’.
At some point the blame game between the two parties stops being admirable and starts to look reckless. May God come our way.
Mubarak Shu’aib,
Hardawa, Misau local government area,
Bauchi state
[email protected]
