ASUU, paradigm shift and Mr. Keynes, By Taiwo Owoeye

Mr. Keynes smashes conventional wisdom

When the First World War ended, the Allied Forces decided to hold a post war conference to discuss the terms of a Peace Treaty in what would become The Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. The objective of the conference was clear: How the vanquished Germany will pay heavy reparations for losing the war to the Allied Forces.

The renowned economist, John Maynard Keynes, was the youngest member of the British contingent. He opposed payment of heavy reparations by the Germans, arguing that it will improvise them and create the conditions for the next war. Keynes argued instead that Germany and other nations devastated by the war should be helped to rebuild their economies because the only way to avoid the next war is to spread prosperity in Europe.

His radical idea was rejected and when he got back to London he resigned from his job at the British Treasury and wrote a minority report which was published in 1919 as a book titled ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’. By the late 1930s, everything Keynes predicted had happened and Germany started the Second World War in 1939.

By the time the war ended in 1945, Keynes’ radical idea had become conventional wisdom. His thesis that post-war reconstruction is both the responsibilities of the victor and the vanquished led to the established of multilateral organisations like the World Bank, the IMF, among others, by the World powers and the Marshall Plan by the United States.

In this essay, I will argue that the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, the trade union of university teachers in Nigeria, whose members are currently on its 16th strike action since 1999, according to data analysis by some national newspapers, needs a radical approach that will overturn some of the conventional wisdom that are at the foundation of its struggles.

ASUU and the Narratives of the Struggles

ASUU’s long term struggles against the deteriorating condition of university system in Nigeria are based on a number of conventional wisdom. The first is that the only language the government understands is strike and that these strikes have achieved considerable success in the past.

Second, the Nigerian state can afford to subsidy university education for all, if not for corruption. This belief is also shared by majority of Nigerians who always argue that most of the past and current Nigerian leaders and elites enjoyed free university education and want to unfairly deny the present generation the same privilege.

Third, ASUU is fighting for the masses against the Nigerian government who want to price university education beyond the reach of the poor by re-introducing huge tuition in public universities.

Fourth, the main reason Nigerian elites send their children to foreign universities is because they have not invested appropriately in Nigerian universities.

Fifth, ASUU members are victims of dictatorial management and governing councils of Nigerian universities. Sixth, the dilapidated state of infrastructure including hostels in Nigerian universities is caused by poor investment by government.

Seventh, the Nigerian government, through its actions and inactions, have failed to respect university autonomy. These seven points may not have totally captured the convectional arguments guiding ASUU struggles but they provide considerable insight into how the union has come to regard itself as the protector of the university system from a government that has failed to live up to its responsibilities.

A Counter Argument

I will now take the aforementioned arguments one after the other and provide counter arguments. The idea that strike is the only effective weapon for getting government attention is flawed because it has become a solution that is more damaging than the problem.

A recent analysis shows that ASUU has been on strike for almost five years in the past 20 years and this does not include local strikes by individual universities. More damaging is the fact that the union has popularised strike within the university system so much that at least three other unions within the system have turned strike into their main job. The stability of academic calendar is the most important consideration for parents and students when choosing universities.

The empirical support for that lies in over-subscription of University of Ilorin during the two decades it opted out of ASUU strikes. The general opinion that the Nigerian government can and should subsidize university for all is not completely true. While this argument may be true in the 50s and 60s when the fraction of population attending university was minimal and the 1970s when Nigeria became oil-rich overnight, it was the wrong argument starting from the late 1980s as the population of undergraduates increased and the Nigerian state came under financial difficulties, as a result of falling oil prices.

However, a more compelling argument against heavy subsidize of university education is that governments all over the world rarely subsidize university education uniformly for successive generations of undergraduates.Most undergraduates in Nigerian universities from the 1950s to 1990s were first generations undergraduates. It makes perfect sense to subsidy their education, if the government has the resources.

By 1990s, however, the children of these first generations started attending universities as second generation and by the 2020s the third generation became undergraduates. This implication of this is that household share of the cost of training these successive generations of undergraduates will increase with the number of generations that attend university within that household. This is why highly educated households prefer private and foreign universities for their wards even when the cost seems too high. This argument even holds for tax-driven high income economies where tertiary education has been free for successive generations.

This is because average tax paid by households will progressively increase inter-generationally meaning older graduates within each household still pay for educating new undergraduate but through taxes.

As for ASUU framing its struggle as a fight against pricing university education out of the reach of the poor, a cost-sharing, efficiently-run, stable university system is better for the poor than a strike-prone unstable system as I will explain later.

The argument that the Nigerian elites send their kids to foreign universities because they have underinvested in public universities side-stepped a bigger problem. The growing population of Nigerian students in sub-standard private universities in poorer African countries, especially in the West African countries of Ghana, Togo, Benin and even Niger Republic, are a source of huge loss of resources for Nigerian universities and that should worry ASUU than elites sending their kids to foreign universities for two reasons.
First, converting a very few of our public universities into elite schools and charging discriminatory prices according to income levels could have encouraged some of our elites to educate their wards at home.

Second, the resources lost by Nigerian universities because of this practice is minimal because elites are few. What should worry ASUU is the enormous resources lost to poorer West African countries through dollar-denominated expenditures by average income households who sent their kids to sub-standard private universities in these countries because incessant strikes by ASUU.

For example, a 2016 survey by NOI, finds that Ghana is fourth behind UK, United States and Malaysia as top destination for Nigerians who want to study abroad. In the same survey, 60 percent of respondents list incessant strikes by trade unions in Nigerian universities and unstable academic calendar ahead of poor facilities as the reasons for their preference for foreign university education. This means academic instability caused by ASUU incessant strikes overshadows poor funding by government as the main reason for seeking university education abroad.

Another narrative is that ASUU members are victims of a dictatorial Governing Council and power hungry management of Nigerian university system. This narrative is puzzling because the university system is run by two complementary entities: the Senate and the Governing Council. The former is dominated 100% by academicians; while the latter is dominated 60% to 70% by retired or serving academicians.

This is also applicable to university management, led by the Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice Chancellors. The puzzle here is why playing the victim if you have this enormous power? This poser is open to diverse interpretations.

Also, pictures could evoke emotions and this is the case when the pictures of dilapidated hostels in Nigerian universities are posted with their sub-human conditions. The natural suspect is poor funding by government. While this may be true of other infrastructure within the universities; it is not for hostels.

This is because these hostels were built and allocated to students for free when the population was only 10 per cent of what it is today and as this population expanded in the 1980s, the best option could have been to charge fees that can cover the cost of sustaining them instead of charging next to nothing. There was supposed to be a transition from free hostel accommodation to a commercialised model as student population increases. Charging students below the maintenance cost of these hostels creates two problems.

First, it resulted in congestion within the system, leading to dilapidation of these facilities. Second, it raises the price of the alternative-private hostel- beyond the reach of average students. An optimal solution is to charge students fees that can cover the cost of maintaining these hostels. The wrong approach is to wipe up emotions.

The final narrative is the demand for university autonomy by ASUU. This is similar to the’ we are victims narrative’. The autonomy is there for the academicians to exercise since they dominate both the Governing Council and the Senate. Why demanding for what you have? The answer might be the failure of ASUU to realise that Nigerian university system is no longer sustainable under heavy subsidize regime.

The Road to Damascus: ASUU Needs a Radical Approach and Here Are Some Suggestions

These radical suggestions are direct opposite of what ASUU struggles have been all about for more than three decades.

First, ASUU should have a second thought on incessant strike as an option. It has become more of a problem than a solution. It may have been a good option during the first 10 years of the current three decades’ struggle considering the successes it has achieved- TETFUND, enhanced welfare, NEEDS Assessment, among others. It has however started exhibiting diminishing returns in the last 10 years and has led to proliferations of chaos within the system by other unions who lacked the intellectual capability of ASUU.

More damaging, it has created a university system that has been defined by instability thereby stunting its capability to fit into a global knowledge space that defines university system.

For example, a recent article in the influential weekly London-based Newspaper, The Economist, cites a study that evaluates African focused research in economics discipline. The study finds that 65 per cent of African focused research in the top four journals in economics concentrates on just 5 African countries, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Ugandan and Malawi.

That Ghana came third in the list and Nigeria does not appear is no accidental. The university systems in these two West African nations have followed different trajectories in the last two decades. Nigerian university system has been defined by instability, while Ghana has developed a stable university system that fits into a global community of academic system. Every summer the campuses of Ghanaian leading universities are populated by students and faculty members of leading Western universities doing field work and auditing courses on Africa focused research, while Nigerian universities are battling ASUU strike.

Also, ASUU is through its incessant strikes unwittingly undermining one of the best benefits of its struggles, government sponsored post-graduate trainings of young scholars abroad. These young scholars after been exposed to a better organised university system abroad became frustrated when they got back to Nigeria to confront an unstable system dominated by activists who think the only way to reform the system is to close it down. Most of the beneficiaries of this scheme promptly returned abroad defeating the very essence of this laudable intervention.

Secondly, ASUU should lead the agitation for the re-introduction of tuition in federal universities and the formalisation of the process in state universities. Re-introduction is the better word here because Nigerian universities actually charged tuition in the 50s and 60s, and formalisation because most state universities are charging tuition now but are too timid to admit it. Yet, as stated earlier in this article, it is not sustainable to subsidise university education uniformly for successive generation of undergraduates.

Beyond this however, charging tuition to complement government subsidy has some advantages. It drives efficiency, improves transparency and accountability and makes both faculty members and administrators more competent as they respond to a competitive market for students.

More importantly, this will drive the deregulation of the salary structure using a set of criteria and shield it in some ways from inflationary shocks since tuition will complement government subsidy.

Thirdly, ASUU should embrace and drive the categorisation of universities in Nigeria. This is very important for two reasons. One, the optimal policy is to subsidize university education for the poor and allow the rich to pay for it and this is only possible when the system is categorised and then price discriminately. Two, social mobility is easier for the poor with elites universities than it is with mediocre universities.

The categorisation will have two extremes and a few categories in between. At the high end extreme will be research universities with equal fractions of post-graduate and under-graduate students. Undergraduate students will come from three sources, high income households, highly educated households and exceptionally brilliant students from very poor households. The first two groups will pay a substantial share of tuition, while government will pay a smaller fraction. The third group shall be financed by scholarship and will have only 10 percent of the slot. The Senate of each university will use some criteria, for example type of secondary attended and parents’ income to select indigent students.

The post-graduate intakes shall be financed by a range of sources- foreign grants, National Research Fund, other universities, households and the state. This is similar to the model used by the globally acclaimed Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), arguably the world’s best elite’ university system outside the Western world. At the lower end extreme, shall be low cost universities with only undergraduate students in a narrow and similar course of studies.

This will help in reducing personnel cost and these universities shall cut cost by deploying cheap, affordable and effective technology, have large classes with relatively high student-staff ratio and low ratio of administrative staff to academic staff. They shall also rely on some levels of government subsidy because the focus will be on poor households. This model may look elitist but University of Ibadan has a secondary school system- International School and Abadinna School- which appropriates this model.

Fourthly, ASUU should start a process of de-radicalisation among its members. The rise of activism within Nigerian universities has created a cohort of academicians whose intellectual career is defined by the struggle. The word de-radicalisation may sound outrageous but it has a basis. For instance when some young academicians, probably born in the 1990s, are shown a 25Kobo meal ticket which covered a highly subsidized 3-course lunch in a first generation university in 1982, it creates resentment against the Nigerian state who, in their opinion, has denied them this same privilege.

This is very dangerous to the system because, as it has been mentioned earlier in this article, the Nigerian university system should adopt a model of cost-sharing with those who can afford it and subsidy for those who cannot. This model needs competent and efficient academicians and the young generations who will drive it in future needed de-radicalisation. More importantly they should be educated that self-regulation and competence are the basis of academic privileged. The union should start a process of educating its young members on why academic privileges’ are earned not given.

Fifthly, an interesting paradox on the rise of modern university system in the Western world, especially the United States, is the strange marriage between left-leaning liberal intellectuals who run these universities and the conservative money bags who provide the massive endowments that support them.

This paradox has a simple explanation, these left-leaning liberal intellectuals are competent and efficient to the extent that the conservative money bags who want a legacy that will outlive them through endowment in universities are confident their resources will be allocated optimally. While the same can be said of Nigerian intellectuals of the 50s and 60s, saying same for the current academicians in Nigerian is debatable. Yet, Nigerian universities need these conservative money bags to finance research.

Sixthly, public universities in Nigeria are diverging between states and federal and joining together in the struggle may be difficult. For example, the cost structure of state universities is closer to private universities than federal universities. On the average, state universities now depend on tuition for between 60 percent to 70 percent of their personnel and running cost.

These universities cannot afford to be defined by strike action unless ASUU wants them to collapse. In the ongoing strike actions most state universities are owing more than seven months salaries. The only way for these state universities to meet their obligations is to run a stable academic calendar.

Finally, ASUU should recognise that change within Nigerian university system is inevitable and it should embrace that change and take hold of the narrative. The Nigerian university system has gone through two stages, and it is approaching a third stage now.

The first stage was the efficient, subsidized and stable era of 1950s to 1980s. The system then had the best features of its British origin and Nigerian universities were like local units of a multinational company in efficiency, productivity and how they fit into global university system. The second stage was the unstable, poorly subsidised, strike –prone era of 1990s to 2010s. This stage was a direct response by the Nigerian intellectuals to their class decimation due to the economic collapse of the 1980s and 1990s and it was the appropriate and the right thing to do given the initial success of the struggle. The problem, is not knowing when to stop and embrace change. The third stage is upon the system now and it started during the second decade of this century. It is defined by cost sharing and the shift of tertiary education expenditure away from government to household and the need to categorise the system to cater for different economic classes.

The union has to embrace this change before it is too late. What Nigerian university system needs now are not activists who can disrupt the system under the guise of saving it but competent and efficient academicians and administrators who can attract resources from diverse sources and allocate them optimally.

Mandela, Mugabe and the English Premiership League

A key explanation for why Nigerian intellectuals prefer a highly subsidized university system despite mounting evidence that it is not sustainable is ideological. Nigerian intellectuals, like most intellectuals globally, are left-leaning liberals. Yet, ideological convictions can change when evidence and events require a change of strategy and the following two examples will illustrate this argument.

During the anti-colonial struggles in South Africa and Zimbabwe, most of the nationalists involved in the struggle tended toward adopting socialist ideas. Then in 1980, Zimbabwe got her independence and Mr Mugabe turned left ultimately expelling white farmers who were the bedrock of Zimbabwe economy and the economy promptly collapsed.

So, when South Africa achieved black majority rule in 1994, Mandela and the ANC elites having learnt their lessons from the failures of Zimbabwe, discarded the tendency for socialist rules. Although South Africa still face some challenges, it has not become a failure like Zimbabwe.

Prior to the 1990s, the English Premiership League was a poorly run entity with limited commercial value. Then there were suggestions that the league can learn some tricks from United States approach to sport management through the commercial success of American four major national sports- Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, National Football League and National Hockey League- and earn enormous money from television rights among others.

This approach was not popular among some people who argued that too much commercialisation will kill the joy of the game. Those who wanted to transform the game won the argument and the new format of English Premiership League started in 1993 and became a commercial success, changing the game for better for everyone.

These two examples show that ideological lock-in should be changed when it is becoming damaging to what it intends to protect. It is about time Nigerian left-leaning intellectuals embraced the reforms they have spent most of their lifetime opposing in order to transform the Nigerian university system.

• Owoeye is a Professor of Economics