Former minister of education, Dr Oby Ezekwesili, says the solutions recommended by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to the Federal Government in resolving the issues raised by the union are unrealistic.
This comes a day before the government held the third reconciliation meeting with the leadership of the union since ASUU commenced a nationwide strike.
ASUU has been on strike since August 14, over unpaid arrears and demands for improved infrastructure in government universities across the country.
A reconciliation meeting with the government on August 17 had failed to resolve the dispute, though fresh undisclosed offers were made to the lecturers.
Another reconciliation meeting held on August 29 also ended in deadlock, as they insisted on seeing the government act on their demands.
Ezekwesili, who appeared on Wednesday during a special programme on Channels Television, said the solutions proposed by ASUU in addressing its demands were unreasonable, considering Nigeria’s present economic state.
“I think that the issues that ASUU raises concerning improving the university system are very germane to what you need to discuss in an economy and society like ours. I find the solutions, however, rather unrealistic,” she said.
“The reason that I maintained that the solutions proposed by ASUU are unrealistic is because I do not think that we have had the kind of conversations that would enable us to solve structural problems in a structural way.”
– Key Issues To Tackle –
On her experience as an education minister, she said conversations between ASUU and the government had completely broken down by the time she was appointed in 2006.
She, however, said, “One of the first priorities that I gave to myself, even though it was hardly a year before government was going come to an end, was a to work with ASUU in a strong partnership to really get a good grasp in an analytical and empirically driven manner, the issues we needed to tackle.”
“And some of these issues were clearly not just funding issues, the funding is the tail end of the story. The key issues that you needed to deal with; you needed to discuss issues of governance and structure of the university system in the country in terms of partnership, in terms of participation in the tertiary education in the country.”
Ezekwesili further highlighted the role of each stakeholder in the sector including the government, in order to develop Nigeria’s tertiary education system.
She said, “We needed to look at the issues of faculty, key to the performance of any university system is academic distinction and scholarship, as well as academic research.”
“We needed to get a grasp of what kind of quality of faculty did you need in an emerging economic environment, in order to enable the kind of learning outcomes that would make the product of education relevant to the widest society especially the economy.”
The former minister also stressed the need to invest in technology and infrastructure in the universities, noting that it would go long way in improving the tertiary education system.
“You needed to look at the deployment of technology, you needed to look at the physical infrastructure in the university system; you needed to look at issues of resource accountability and performance, and many other issues that are important.
“In looking at all of that, you will be guided by a lot in terms of benchmarking, in terms of analytical comparabilities, and you also need to understand that the conversation with ASUU has always been on the basis of a unionised approach,” she said.
CHANNELS TV
