By OLUMUYIWA RUNSEWE

T’omode ba ngegi ninu Igbo, awon agbalagba lomo bi to ma wo si  —Ebenezer Obey in the 60s

A RECENT  masterpiece of an article  was vintage Dr. Mike Omolayole. It was titled “ASUU Strike: Doing the right things the right way.” If you have never heard of Dr. Mike Omolayole or met him, or read his many writings and immense contributions to the development of home-grown management in Nigeria, or worse still, never listened to any of his lectures, walai, I sympathise with you! He is one of the select few that God Almighty so enhanced with Solomonic  wisdom with which to positively impact on nation-building in Nigeria. I was fortunate to have been inspired and mentored by him at Lever Brothers, 34 years ago. He was then the executive chairman and the boss of the boss of my immediate boss, in a complex but functional organizational structure that was typically Unilever.

The main thrust of that article was to express his concern as an elder-statesman over the perennial and unnecessary conflicts and combats which the Federal Government on one hand and ASUU on the other always defiantly plunge into, very much to the embarrassment of all stakeholders: Parents, students, donors and, in fact, well-meaning Nigerians all over the world. Omolayole’s article can be summarized as follows: “ASUU/FG face-off has been occurring and recurring since the time of General Gowon in government.

By now, we ought to have got a systematic approach to the handling of such a sensitive issue as teachers (primary, secondary and tertiary) strikes. Certainly, prevention is better than cure” In fact, in the next decade, efforts should be geared maximally towards prevention of disputes. All hands should be on deck by all the stakeholders in the sector in seeing that disputes are prevented by setting up the mechanism for it.
“In the relationship between the FG and ASUU, the FG all too often confuses its role as a state authority with that of an employer. As a state authority, it is assumed it can do no wrong willfully. Hence it does whatever it pleases, expecting absolute compliance and obedience without complaint.

When a government, therefore, negotiates with its employees, wearing a state authority toga, it leads to a high-profile, big stick, no soft-talk approach to industrial relations. Unfortunately ASSU (defiantly) meets the state authority approach with a ‘fight-to-finish.’ It is erroneous and dangerous for state governments to conveniently keep quiet in any FG/ASUU face-off in the mistaken belief that they could always disown any arrangement between FG and federal universities, if the financial commitments resulting therefrom would not be comfortable for them to bear.

The best approach is for each employer (federal or state) to decide how far it can go in terms of financial matters. The easiest way would have been to have negotiations at various levels. By this I mean, negotiations should be at the national level, for the federal universities while the state universities may come together under the aegis of a federation of state university level with ASUU. This could be even be done at the zonal level because ASUU is organized at zonal and national levels.”

Omolayole insists, with all the confidence and authority of his bountiful and long and rewarding experience in personnel management, that “if the above advice is followed, a lot of order will be brought into a gloomy industrial relations practice in the educational sector which at best (seems to be) confusing to the operators themselves, and, at worst,  it is totally chaotic and unproductive.” If you have been captivated and impressed by what you have read so far, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Just come along with me on a visit to the oracular mind of this living legend of management. To some extent, the two warring sides have listened to the words of wisdom from Dr. Omolayole and ASUU have called off their strike action. But embedded in this FG-ASUU settlement is a “collateral damage” already foreseen by Dr. Omolayole. What he foresaw is best captured by that evergreen song of Ebenezer Obey in the 60s: Tomode ban gegi ninu Igbo, awon agbalagba lo mo bi to ma wo si!! (when young people are felling trees in the bush, the wise and the elderly already know in advance, into which direction the tree would fall).

“In all the above scenarios, something is coming to light which is unwholesome, very unhealthy and most unprofessional. The ongoing negotiations will produce a result likely to be unacceptable to ASUU, worst still, it will be totally unfavourable to the other staff unions of the universities, in particular SSANU. In my opinion, ASUU is the most assertive and probably the strongest financially and most cohesive. So, in the current negotiations, it is calling all the shots. Yet the Federal Government says it is negotiating with all the three unions.

That being the case, if the figures announced recently by the Minister of Education as salaries for different categories of staff in the university system are upheld, without any review, the principles of job evaluation and job classification would have been totally jettisoned. If a bursar of a university, who in my opinion, is the chief accounting officer and the registrar and secretary to Governing Council, will earn less than about 50 teaching staff in the larger universities, then there is more than something amiss. The financial and management health of a university or any large corporation or company can only be toyed with at its peril.

A word is enough for the wise.” According to Dr. Omolayole, “increasing the salaries of teaching staff  (ASUU) by 40 percent and those of non-teaching staff whatever their level or weight of responsibility, by 20 percent, will lead to incalculable damage in the educational sector within the next five to10 years. A situation where the principal officers of the universities (bursar and registrar) are relegated almost to a level of pay that is totally incommensurate with the level and the weight of their responsibilities does not augur well for good management and for the preservation of financial integrity and management competence.”

All well-meaning Nigerians should stand up in appreciative applause to the man who has seen it all in the  areas of management of men, materials and the economy at large. The ball is now in the court of the Presidency to initiate very bold steps that will provoke very urgent programmes of actions to be put in place by all stakeholders, particularly the Federal Ministry of Education, the Federal Ministry of Labour & Productivity, alumni associations of the respective institutions and, and better still, the inclusion of parents and donors, etc. Let us conclude this contribution by highlighting the major danger ahead of all of us, through a very disgusting experience I had four months ago at the palace of my long time friend, Oba Adedeji Onagoruwa, the Alaye of Odogbolu, Ogun State. It was his birthday and I decided to give him a surprise by showing up. I got to the palace that morning and met about 250 youth corps members, males and females, seated in the palace hall.

They had come on a courtesy visit to announce their arrival and the commencement of their service year.
The kabiyesi asked me to join him on the high table with Olori Ekundayo and some notable indigenes of Odogbolu. The corps members were standing up one after the other, introducing themselves, their names, their universities, states of origin and courses of study. Within 20 minutes, during which about 20 of them had stood up, I noticed a dangerous trend arising from their utterances. Most of them looked gloomy and lacking in personality, courage and confidence.

They were so unsure of their utterances that they took the easy way out by muttering their identifications in very low tones. I wasted no time in asking kabiyesi to allow me address them. “Gentleman and ladies, are you really graduates of universities? Why are you all lacking in confidence and self-assurance? Please let the rest of you stand up and introduce yourselves boldly and with a lot of confidence.”  Introductions over, it was time for cocktail and moving around by everybody and that was when I got to the big shock. About 10 of the corps members walked up to me to appreciate the brutally frank talk from me, but asked, “Daddy, where would we gather our courage and confidence from after spending two extra years for our various courses for one stupid reason or the other, especially because the Federal Government and ASUU are always at loggerheads, and, as always, ASUU would go on strikes, and we would be sent home! We are lacking in confidence and boldness because we know that after our service year, there would be no jobs for most of us. Sir, what is the essence of the confidence you were talking about?”

That message from those young     lads struck my conscience on
behalf of the larger society and I kept quiet, preffering to hide under that Fela’s song Oro se hun, oro pesije o, oro se hun (the answer I should have given them had already been swallowed by their big question). Before that Gowonic misjudgement and mispronouncement of 1974, threatening university teachers to toe the line or pack out of their residences, university campuses were hallowed grounds. University professors and lecturers were highly appreciated and respected. We do not need a clairvoyant to tell us that standards have fallen so drastically since around 1985.

What we have today are frustrated and poverty stricken teachers and lecturers, who cannot inspire their young ones because of their pitiable conditions and very poor facilities. Let us all thank Dr. Mike Omolayole for his very brilliant and brutally frank contribution on the perennial FG-ASUU combat. Let us conclude this contribution by advising this government (and subsequent governments) either at the federal or state level, to desist from the temptation of always putting on the toga of papal infallibility in their approach to major issues of governance particularly when they touch on major pressure-groups like the Nigerian Labour Congress, ASUU, NASU, SANU, medical practitioners, NBA, etc. Government should encourage friendlier and more amenable attitudes in all issues concerning  the nation.

Runsewe is based in Abuja