By Kunle Somorin
President Goodluck Jonathan was upbeat on Monday. After inaugurating the diversionary Femi Okunrounmu panel which was a political necessity, he received former ‘militicians’ (apologies to Prof Attahiru Jega) who brought him the good news of a proposed centenary village, an ultra modern city within the nation’s capital to cater for the elite.
From newspaper reports, the President said the new city dwellers will have centralized infrastructures. “People living there will not need to drill borehole or get personal cylinder for gas, and the management of solid waste and other environmental issues will be centralized”. It is estimated to cost N3.2 trillion. This is a big dream.
Flashback to August 13, the co-ordinating Minister of the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said government could not pay the N87 billion extra allowance being demanded by ASUU. Her reason: “The government has no resources to meet the demand.” That’s coldness tardy, politically incorrect and callous.
No nation becomes great by sending her young nationals idle for months and expects that those who live in such habitations for the affluent will have peace.
Today Nigerian students in public universities have been at home for over a hundred days. It appears the federal government has no redeeming feature for that sector of the economy which is envisioned to drive a knowledge-driven nation to accomplish the set target of Vision 20:2020.
The 2009 agreement, which was entered into at the instance of the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, after he decried the state of the universities, was conceived in the context of making the varsities respond effectively to the challenges of vision 20:2020.
Perhaps, it is a veiled acceptance that the government has been merely day-dreaming. The issues that are at the heart of these protracted crisis are not intractable for a serious government. We should also remind the government’s minister for Labour, Emeka Nwogu that productivity does not take in an environment that is tainted with injustice. He wants ASUU to come back and re-negotiate because the 2009 agreement was entered into by a ‘previous administration’. Someone should tell the lawyer that government is a continuum.
After meeting for three years (2006-2009), it was a re-negotiation committee that had representatives of the government, Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the Universities Commission, NUC, that on October 21, 2009, voluntarily signed a pact with the terms and conditions binding on the parties. They were nine items. Government has honoured only three. Going back is sheer blackmail because welfare was catered for to the detriment of research, capacity building and real-life-touching infrastructural and sustainable university system.
The drafters of the agreement are not dunces; they itemized likely sources of funds. They agreed that a minimum of 26 per cent of the annual budget of federal and state governments be allocated to education, which shall be progressively reviewed in line with Vision 20:2020, with at least 50 per cent of the 26 per cent channeled to the universities. It was also recommended that education be put on the ‘first charge’ by the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission.
In accordance with Section 164(1) of the 1999 Constitution, the parties further agreed to restructure the governance and leadership structure in the universities; amend the NUC Act of 2004, the Education (National Minimum Standards and Establishment of Institution) Act, 2004, as well as the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board, JAMB Act of 2004. Now the NUC boss, Julius Okojie, is playing the ostrich. Is education management now space science that all the professors and PhDs in the country now run helter-skelter?
Okojie has been vice chancellor of two universities previously and knows that he had more ways of sourcing linkages for Bell’s University, owned by former President Olusegun Obasanjo than when he was at the University of Agric, Abeokuta. It is unfair to keep other people’s children at home and take yours through private universities in Nigeria or Ivy League ones abroad. Nemesis has a way of evening scores on the side of the masses.
Whatever Jonathan and his team foist on the nation today will boomerang tomorrow. A look at the mystic of the conundrum of the fate of a ‘second death’ through the last Thursday’s air mishap conveying a former minister of aviation and late former governor of Ondo State, Dr Olusegn Agagu whose middle name is Kokumo (he defies death) should be a lesson that whatever you sow, you will reap.
I refer the President to the poetry of John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, the iconoclastic Ijaw-born poet lines in ‘The Casualties’ and Abiku.’ If the schools are churning out half-baked products, those who supervise the descent to decadence of the educational system will share in the collateral damage and they are as guilty as victims of undertakers’ indiscretion. How else do you extrapolate what Agagu did in the aviation sector under his watch now that he also fell to this institutional maladministration that was at the height under his watch in the aviation ministry and as member of the federal executive council?
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