Nigeria: The Dangers of Bad Education

If, since January, ordinary Nigerians have been facing a double crisis – of the threat of religious violence and an increase in fuel costs – Nigerian university students have been suffering from a triple crisis.

From December 4 to February 1, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) held a strike that shut down the nation’s universities and sent thousands of students home without having completed last year’s exams and courses. ASUU has now suspended the strike, but the longstanding tensions between the union and the Nigerian government are far from resolved.

The union demonstrated against the government’s perceived failure to deliver promises made in 2009. The issues at stake include university funding, retirement ages, and legal statutes governing national entrance examinations. But the conflict extends beyond these details. The 2009 agreement was itself a review of an earlier compact from 2001, and ASUU has regularly held strikes since the 1980s.

Broader grievances

The ASUU frames this enduring conflict within a broad and harsh critique of the federal government. A union statement on the current strike deplores what it calls “the rot and decay that are eating deep into the very fabric of our Universities, the underfunding cancer that is fast eroding the quality of our graduates and threatening the very essence of university education in our country”. The government, the statement continues, “cannot fulfil any promise. This is a government that does not respect agreements. This is a government that has completely misplaced her priorities and lost direction.”

Given that the ASUU views the government in this light, it is not difficult to see why union members participate in other strikes and protests organised by civil society. In the current intensely politicised atmosphere, civil society groups like ASUU see their own struggles as relevant to, and part of, the struggles of other groups, and of ordinary people.

The politicisation of higher education in Nigeria therefore matters not just to academic communities but to Nigerian society as a whole. University staff and students were on the front lines of January’s protests over the removal of an important fuel subsidy. And these groups will likely play a key role in any future agitation over the subsidy controversy and the larger grievances articulated by the “Occupy Nigeria” movement.

Help or hindrance?

The ASUU has much support, but the union also has its critics. For some students and for many opinion leaders, the recurring strikes have reduced sympathy for ASUU and engendered cynicism about its members’ motives. Business Day opines, "Both the actors on the federal government side and the ASUU side have no genuine stake in the progress of Nigerian public universities”, continuing, the “ASUU wants to hold on to the independence and non-accountability of its members, and also wants the government to oblige the funding requests without accountability in return, while the federal government actually wants quality education on the cheap”.

ASUU’s critics argue that the strikes waste students’ time and add to the crisis in Nigerian higher education. One law professor bemoans the impact on teachers as well, writing, “Protracted strikes have forced the most gifted and talented teachers to flee our universities”.

Cynicism about the union has bred pessimism about the future of higher education in Nigeria and, in turn, about the future of Nigeria itself. In Nigeria, as in many other societies, tremendous hopes exist regarding the supposedly transformative potential of education for society and its problems. An editorial in 2009 urged a resolution of that year’s conflict between ASUU and the government because “only a world-class university system, as brain-box, can help Nigeria think her way out of her present man-made potential of failed-state, to realise her natural potential of great nation”.

Bad education

If high hopes like these are dashed – and if the quality of universities declines, strikes and disputes swallow up too much time, students lose faith in the system, or if graduates fail to find work – the resulting disappointment could be, and arguably already is, bitter.

In 2011, governments from Tunisia to the United States received dramatic lessons concerning the political dangers represented by jobless university graduates and by university students who feel their society offers them little. With crises continuing both inside and outside the Nigerian university, the country’s students – and the union whose decisions shape students’ lives – are important constituencies to watch.

The lecturers and professors of ASUU are heading back to the classroom at the moment and a return to normality on Nigerian campuses could help reduce the political temperature of the country. But the political nerves the strikes have touched remain raw.

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