The National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, speaks with TUNBOSUN OGUNDARE on the state of nation, public universities, ASUU’s next line of action over contentious issues with the Federal Government, among other issues.

What is your assessment of the Nigeria state in the last one year?

The situation in Nigeria is clear to everyone, no matter who you or and where you live. Except those in the corridors of political power who have access to free money, the majority of Nigerians, whether in the public or private sector, are feeling the heat. The ordinary man on the street, it is only God who knows how they are coping, because the costs of goods and services are extremely high. Worse still, they are increasing each day. For example, four pieces of tomato now cost N1,000 or more in the market. A bag of 50kg rice is now eighty-something thousand naira. Transporting from one place to another is at a very high cost. Things are terrible, and I don’t know how Nigerians are going to survive the hardship. The government has to do something urgently to rescue the situation. People are really suffering. Things are hard. I think that summarises Nigeria as of today.

But some people believe that the government is trying, especially in the area of infrastructure. They say that there is the need for Nigerians to be patient. What is your take on that?

Infrastructure development is good but only after the major needs of man would have been met. If you build roads or flyovers, people have to be alive to use them. So, the priority should be how people will be able to feed, to clothe and get other basic needs before thinking of infrastructures. Even though it is not the government that will feed or clothe people, it is the government that will provide the enabling environment and make the right policies that will help the system to work. The masses must be able to breathe.

What I have found out is that we like deceiving ourselves and pretending as if everything is well even though it’s glaring that things are not well. So, to my understanding, people must be alive to use infrastructures. The minimum wage of more than half of Nigeria’s working population is still N30,000 at the moment. What are the things such an amount can buy in the market? Is it rice or yam or garri or what? No food is common again in Nigeria. One tuber of yam that is not that big is now more than N3,000. A loaf of bread that a family of four can consume once now costs about N2,000. So, people have to be alive first for them to use infrastructures. That is just where we are.

But what do you think brought us to this point?

What brought us to this mess is just one statement by the president that ‘fuel subsidy gone’. In this country, you have to take time to announce policy statements. For example, in those days, like the 70s, 80s and 90s, government used to take time before making major policy decisions. They set up commissions to look at the policy proposals and examine the positive and negative effects of such and then make valuable recommendations before such proposals became laws, even during the military days.  That was why we had various  Commissions such as the Elliot Commission and all that. You have to bring together intellectuals and industry experts to examine policy proposals and ensure that the decisions to be taken would be to the benefit of all, especially the masses. That was the way things were done before. But what do we have in the last one year of the current administration?  It is to the contrary.

We saw that the President just said the fuel subsidy was gone and that was the origin of our current economic crisis as a country. If we had put Nigerian intellectuals and industry experts together, fuel subsidy may still have gone but with a way out to mitigate the effect. But how can somebody just wake up in the name of assuming power to make a major economic policy without prior planning on the implementation. We in the academia didn’t even believe that there was any fuel subsidy in the country. To us, it is a deceit, because in a country like Nigeria, one of the major producers of crude oil globally, we shouldn’t be talking of subsidy. Even if there was subsidy then and now there’s no subsidy again in the last one year, where is the money accruable to the government from the savings for not paying the subsidy again? We should have established many modular refineries that will sell fuel at a price fixed by Nigeria and not by international bodies, because that is one of their tools, to devalue our Naira. We make major decisions without proper planning.

In a country where normal things are done, you plan very well first before you make decisions that will affect the generality of people. This is the only country in the world where ordinary citizens, in addition to paying high electricity tariffs, will still generate about 70 percent of their electricity consumption from fuel. Every home sustains itself with a generator. Every business is also doing the same. This is also the only country where ordinary citizens cater for his or her own water supply. When I was growing up, you would see public water taps running on the streets and even in the villages. Can we boast of such today? Every family now provides for its own water. Is that the way to run a country? Those are the problems we have in the system today.

How do you explain what a government should do?

Government is about people, to make people happy by allowing them to live a quality and decent life. We are not created by God to suffer. Government is the custodian of public wealth and should therefore use the resources to make the system work for every citizen and not for only a few. Government should make policies that will impact people positively and not put them in hardship.

Now as we are talking, most Nigerians are in abject poverty. People are hungry and angry. Many students from poor homes are dropping out of schools and so on and so forth. So, it is a terrible situation we find ourselves, as a country.

Now let’s talk about university education, your primary constituency. What is the state of things in Nigeria’s public universities?

There is nothing significant that has taken place. To me, what I’m seeing is like there are deliberate efforts by the political class to destroy our public universities completely. This is because there is absolutely nothing different from what these universities have been in recent years, except that things are even getting worse. We came up as a union with many ideas that could help change the system for the better, but the political class is not interested in them. Our universities are still poorly funded. They said they had removed university lecturers from IPPIS as a payment platform. That was in January but up to today, they are still paying us using IPPIS and so forth. The money assigned by the last administration for revitalisation, which is to develop our universities, has not been released.

Our renegotiation agreement that ended and was due since 2021 has not been implemented up to today. They don’t bother about renegotiation again. They are not interested. Rather they are busy proliferating universities and polytechnics all over the country. They are establishing new ones without having concrete budget plans for them to thrive. Every National Assembly member, for example, wants to have a university sited in his or her village even though the ones on the ground are being starved of funds. They have turned the establishment of universities to constituency projects. The situation is terrible. I don’t really know what is happening and why our political leaders think in this manner. The leaders just have to change this mindset and practice. Of what value, in the real sense of it, are these new universities to us as a nation? Well, they are doing this because they know their own children will not attend these universities and polytechnics they are establishing here and there. And that is the home truth. Their children are attending some of the best universities in the world.

We have some states that have two universities today. The state governments are the worse for it. They create universities anyhow without funding them. And what are they doing this for? Even if you ask those who established them, they will not be able to give a convincing reason. They are created for political reason. But we must know and understand that things will not work in this way. We have told the political leaders this uncountable times in the past and now we are reminding them that they should change their tactics; that our education sector cannot move forward if we continue in this way.

But the government has always given access expansion as the reason for establishing more universities. How do you react to that?

That is a wrong perspective. You have to create access to quality education. It is not the number of universities on ground that matters but the quality of service they are to render. So, access is not about how many universities there are in the country but the quality of service they render even if they are few in number. As a government, you have to consider who are teachers to teach in those new universities? Where will they come from? Where will the other workers also come from? How much do you want to pay them? What facilities are on ground? Those are the indices that matter and not about having a large number of universities that lack basic needs.

Today, we all know that lecturers and many other workers are leaving the country for greener pastures abroad. What are those things that are driving them away? Those are the things the government should look into and address in order to retain them, rather than asking them not to leave while the system is getting worse. For example, before the University of Ibadan was established, there was the Elliot Commission. The commission looked into where the university would be sited and where they would recruit the lecturers from and so forth. So, establishing new universities or polytechnics is beyond somebody just waking up one day and saying we have passed a bill establishing this university in this particular village and that stands. That is not proper. Things won’t work that way, except we want to continue to deceive ourselves.

How about your demands from the Federal Government? Has the government answered you?

We have communicated several times to the government and its agents in writing and none of them deemed fit to reply let alone address our concerns. We addressed press conferences and appealed to them to address our issues, yet nothing happened from their end. They ignored us completely. It seems they are not interested in moving public university education forward. Our concern is not about ASUU and its members alone but about our public universities in general. If not for ASUU’s struggle, we may not have public universities again in Nigeria. You see what happened to our public primary and secondary schools which many of us were proud to attend those days. Are they attractive again to anybody? That is what the leaders want to do to our public universities, too. As a union, we won’t allow it.

Could you mention the names of those you addressed your letters to?

Why not? We wrote directly to President Bola Tinubu in July last year, we heard nothing from him. He did not reply. We wrote to the Senate President, Senator Godswill Akpabio, in May with no reply. We also wrote to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Tajudeen Abass and the Minister of Education, Professor Mamman Tahir, also in May, yet no reply. We addressed the public and the press to reach them, yet there was no response. They all ignored us. But all we know is that as a union, we have tried our best and also been patient enough and that the Nigerian people should not blame us that ASUU doesn’t know more than strike. That has never been the case with ASUU. We have used all options and taken the right steps to reach them to address our concerns, but they don’t seem to be interested.

It is only that we just want to satisfy them and the Nigerian public. And they should not allow us to get to the point we cannot be patient again and then react.

React in what way and what is your immediate plan now?

What we have resolved to do now is to send an open letter to President Tinubu. The public will have access to the letter. We will do that a couple of days from now and we will give him about three weeks to respond to our concern. The outcome of the letter will determine the next action that the union will take. And by then, the Nigerian public would have known that ASUU had tried its best and been patient enough

But the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) is currently talking with the Federal Government about a new minimum wage. Won’t that address ASUU’s concerns?

ASUU is an affiliate of NLC and whatever they ask us to do we do in the interest of Nigeria’s general workers. And for now, we are watching them.

New and modified governing council lists for federal universities have been released. What is your assessment of the lists?

The composition of the new list is even worse than the previous one. Go and look at the list again: the majority of the council members are retired politicians. What you see is honourable, honourable, honourable. What does that tell us? That is how terrible the thing has become. We can’t run our universities like this. It will not work. We don’t need to play partisan politics again with our universities if we truly want to move forward as a country.\