Earlier in the week, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) extended its ongoing warning strike by 12 weeks. The decision was reached after a meeting of the union’s national executive council (NEC) the previous week at its University of Abuja secretariat.
A statement by ASUU’s president, Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, said the extension was to give the federal government enough time to satisfactorily resolve all the outstanding issues. We recall that the union has been on warning strike for more than three months.
The University lecturers are pressing for the release of funds for the revitalisation of universities and university workers’ earned allowances, the constitution of visitation panels for the universities, payment of shortfall in salaries of lecturers, and a stop to the use of the payment platform, Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), for payment of salaries in the universities. The union proposed the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) as a replacement for the controversial IPPIS.
Sadly also, the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) has threatened to shut down all polytechnics over failure on the part of the federal government to fulfill the agreement reached with the union in May 2021.
Briefing newsmen at Auchi Polytechnic, Auchi, Edo State, Precious Nwakodo, zonal coordinator, Zone D, which comprises of South-South and South-East, said the planned strike followed the expiration of the ultimatum given to the government to implement the Memorandum of Action it entered into with ASUP.
Nwakodo listed some of the demands to include the non-release of the N15 billion Revitalization Fund approved over a year for the sector to address infrastructural deficit as contained in the 2014 Needs Assessment Report.
In the considered opinion of this newspaper, it is time for the federal government to take some hard decisions on funding for tertiary institutions. The current funding model is unsustainable and a prescription for controversy.
As is to be expected, all public tertiary institutions are funded wholly by the federal and state governments. Currently, there are 49 federal and 54 state universities in Nigeria. Most federal universities don’t even charge tuition fees.
However, and as much as we implore the government to enhance the funding profile of tertiary institutions, it is also imperative that the management of these institutions think outside the box on creative ways of generating revenue instead of waiting for handouts from the governments and tuition fees which are never enough.
Besides, how do Ivy league universities across the world that run on independent funding raise their revenue? For instance, Harvard University relies on three main sources of revenue: education or tuition, sponsored research, and philanthropy.
Harvard had a university-wide surplus of $298 million in the fiscal year 2019, up from $196 million in 2018, according to Harvard’s annual financial report. The largest source of the university’s revenue is distributions from Harvard’s more than $40 billion endowments, about 35 percent of its total revenue. Tuition, at 22 percent of revenue, and research grants, at 17 percent, were the next-largest revenue sources.
Nigerian tertiary institutions can adopt a similar model. For instance, they can adopt the endowment model. Endowments are a major source of revenue for most tertiary institutions in the world. It is instructive to note that an endowment is money that is invested in a college or university to support its mission. Schools that receive endowments may use this money to fund research projects or to expand aid packages for eligible students. But the snag here is widespread corruption that has continued to haunt research grants in Nigerian higher institutions.
Similarly, another elephant in the room is the increment of tuition fees. This has consistently remained a source of friction between students, the universities’ administrations and the governments. The argument is that most parents may not be able to afford tertiary education for their wards if the fees are raised beyond a certain level.
We are persuaded to argue in favour of a return of the once popular students loan board which provided an option for indigent students. There is no gainsaying it that funding of the education sector has been beggarly by successive administrations. It is our view that it is time to change the narrative and improve on the situation. Having said this, it is also our opinion that the resort to strikes by the lecturers is archaic, primitive and a lazy man’s way of addressing otherwise very important issue.
Instructively, reports by an online medium, showed that Nigerian lecturers had gone on strike 15 times since 1999. The entire period they embarked on such a strike spanned over 50 months. This represents about one-fifth, or 20 percent, of the number of years since the dawn of democracy in Nigeria (1999).
This means that for every five years since 1999, Nigerian universities spent one on strike. This is unacceptable. It is common knowledge that the universities are in bad shape in several spheres. However, this malaise is not peculiar to the education system alone as virtually all sectors in the country are comatose. It’s a national emergency that must be addressed holistically.
What is required is a rethink of the funding model of the tertiary education sector as well as bringing to an end to strikes as bargaining chips.
