Striking South East lecturers
On Monday September 6, 2010, the striking lecturers of state-owned universities in the South East geopolitical zone donned full academic regalia and staged a protest march in Enugu, the political capital of the defunct Eastern Region, over the failure of governments in the zone to implement the Federal Government/Academic Staff Union of Universities (FG/ASUU) pact reached last year after a prolonged national strike.
Just as was the case in the Awka edition of the protests days earlier, the police cracked down, this time with fierce dogs, to prevent the hundreds of university teachers drawn from all parts of the zone from completing their planned march. The six-week old strike has continued to attract attention, as officials of the teachers unions of state-owned universities in Rivers, Cross River and Akwa Ibom joined their colleagues in solidarity.
On July 22, 2010 after a meeting of the South East chapter of ASUU at the Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umuahia, the Union ordered its members to proceed on the strike action until the state governments in the zone agree to implement the pact aimed at raising infrastructural standards and enforcing the new pay structure that ASUU and the Federal Government endorsed. Since the strike started, the state governors have not shown the slightest inclination to engage the teachers. All that they have kept saying is that they do not have the resources to implement the package.
The lecturers find it difficult to believe that a zone that pioneered the founding of the first indigenous university (University of Nigeria, Nsukka) as well as the first state-owned university (Enugu State University) before other parts of the country followed suit, is now about the only zone where, not a single state government has given the required attention to the rapidly falling standards of facilities in tertiary educational institutions.
This strike is another setback to a zone of the country that has, for decades, suffered a high level of male school dropout. In 2009 lecturers nationwide embarked on a strike that lasted between June 22 and October 9. The disruption, once again, of the academic calendar in the embattled zone has added to the myriads of problems that students in that part of the country routinely go through.
It is true that states in the South East receive some of the smallest amounts of federally allocated revenue every month, even though Imo and Abia States are oil-producing. The case of Abia State is worsened by the fact that it is debt-riddled. But they are not the only states in Nigeria that face the problem of paucity of funds.
The issue of funds availability is mainly a function of the level of priority a government places on education and other such critical social services. Bearing in mind that human capacity development is crucial to any rapidly modernising society, we call on the state governments to sit together with the lecturers and find an amicable and lasting solution to the problems besetting education in the zone.
This is election time. It is also the time that people should take politicians to task over their preparedness to tackle the important challenges of development. But unfortunately, neither the politicians nor the electorate are prepared to engage each other in this regard. As a result, politicians that have nothing to offer in terms of ideas are elected and re-elected into office.
This is the time for the people to address their minds to the quality of office seekers, bearing in mind that only those with the competence and ideas to squeeze water out of the rock should be entrusted with the onerous task of managing financially impecunious entities.
The ball is really in the court of the governors of the South East. It will be a shame if they embark on the forthcoming electioneering campaigns with the lecturers still striking and millions of students still wasting away at home.
