Richard Odu
When Dr.
Tony Eyang the, eloquent and vivacious academician was elected Chairman of the
Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) – University of Calabar Chapter sometime ago, one thing that was uppermost in his mind was
to ensure that “the University is centrally placed as a knowledge incubation
and knowledge generation centre for the good of society”. But by the time he
sat down to business he quickly and painfully realized that he has got a lot of
work to do.
At the moment, one of his greatest tasks is to ensure that he regained
the trust of his union members on a number of issues especially making the
union the watch-dog that it ought to be; according to a member of ASUU who
spoke to sophiaedumagazine.com on the condition of anonymity. ASUU, according to him “has lost its verve, The
Union for some time now no longer represents the interest of its members. This he
revealed has even reflected on the attendance during congresses and it is not too
good for the interests of the members”.
But according to Dr. Eyang, the most
fundamental objective of ASUU should be the ‘interest of the University system,
the good of the workers in the system as well as the good of the country’. While
maintaining that “the welfare of workers cannot be divorced from the welfare of
the system itself, he stressed that If the system is not strong or if the
welfare of the workers is not catered for, there is sure to be problems in such a system because
people will look for all sorts of ways to circumvent the law to seek personal
advantage as that is one of the things that is happening in the University
system today.
However, although change is afoot especially
in the areas of strengthening the mechanisms of the union in chiding erring
lecturers, which has enhanced the confidence of students in the face of ostensible
strain in student/lecturer relationship, more still need to be done to
reinvigorate assurances that the Union is truly an arbiter in a citadel that
has experienced some social downturn of events lately.
In this interview
with sophiaedumagazine.com, the
Lecturer of English & Literary Studies admitted that the task is onerous but
he is determined to make appreciable inroads. Read on…
Q: As the Chairman of ASUU, University of
Calabar. What are the challenges you met on ground and what are your efforts in
tackling them?
For me, ASUU
as a union should consider that the important thing as its object is firstly to
ensure it is interested in the good of the university system, the good of the
workers in the university system and most importantly, the good of the country.
You see this thing we’ve been talking about brain drain and all of that…you
schooled here; you must have heard of Prof Ayanadele. He was going around the
world shopping for lecturers. He went to the best Universities in the
Americans, Australia, all parts of the world shopping for them, looking for the
best. Professor Richard Sule that we went and buried in Akure two weeks now was
got from a University in the United States; Professor Ayandele himself as the
Vice Chancellor went and interviewed him and persuaded him. But you see, if you
check the number of academics that are there including scientists, it will make
us realize that the ultimate goals of economic transformation, scientific
transformation and so on in the next fifty years and beyond lie in a sound
University system. So the University is supposed to be centrally placed as knowledge
incubation, a knowledge generation centre for the good of society. But that’s
not been the case because of brain drain. Not just only because of brain drain
but because the working condition for teaching and learning are not just there.
You are lucky that you’ve come today and met electricity; we would have been
battling with paper here to fan ourselves because of the heat.
So what I
met as a challenge and what of cause will remain as a challenge is how every
University administration will prioritize the provision of facilities for
enhanced teaching, learning and researching. That’s it! As a body we have been
able to secure a few things like some projects through TETFUND, I wouldn’t say
it’s something that is my own achievement, I will rather look at it as the
achievement of ASUU not my own personal achievements as the chairman. Also, I
would want to be able to make the University begin the construction of a block
of offices and have some blocks of classrooms by next semester and then have
the libraries equipped. Those are the things that I consider as eh…Challenges
for the union. But in terms of you know…sanity within, we have a very strong
ethics and disciplinary committee and what we do is to feed the University with
information so as to address issues of misconduct and corruption in the system.
All these ones have to be taken care of; it’s not by piecemeal thing. So things
like eh building a secretariat which we
are about to start are not what I consider as success , what I will rather
consider as success is when we are able to draw government’s attention,
administration’s attention to the urgency of providing facilities for enhanced
teaching and learning for us to do the business that we have come here to do;
for there to be light especially given that we have the capacity to do that for
ourselves since we cannot get enough from the national grid, let us generate
from the local grid so as to provide conditions for effective teaching and
learning. And of course, I said
something about the welfare of workers. You see, the welfare of workers cannot
be divorced from the welfare of the system itself. If the system is not strong
or if the welfare of the workers is not catered for, you are sure to have some
problems in such a system because people will look for all sorts of ways in
order to circumvent the law to seek personal advantage as that is one of the
things that is happening in the University system. That’s not to say that
welfare alone can take care of all these problems, but it is one way that you
can take care of all these problems. So if I as chairman can work in consonance
or in collaboration with other chairmen, if I can mobilize the entire
membership of the union to articulate this position, to draw governments
attention, to draw administration’s attention to the urgency of these things. I want to do this before the end of my tenure.
Q: It was alleged sometime ago that a
lecturer sexually assaulted a female student in the Faculty of Law. What was
the Union’s /School authority’s reaction to this allegation and what step has
been taken to forestall a recurrence?
I am told
that the matter is being investigated. It is now a legal issue as it has been
taken to court of Law. I am even told that the ICPC is even involved in the case. Since it is now a legal matter I
think I don’t have much to say, I will also want to add here that the lecturer
in question has been suspended in order to give way for a thorough
investigation to be carried out on the matter.
In cases
like this so many things are involved. Ehm… they will want to assume that every
lecturer is responsible, that every worker in the University should be
responsible even the students should be responsible, that’s the assumption, but
it turns out that you have a few bad people in the system that can do things
that gives a strong impression and perception that the entire place is corrupt.
Because as you are here for instance, you’ll meet bad people, lecturers, you’ll
begin to think that this place is foul and messy. So that’s the kind of
situation that we’re into.
The University
also has a role to play here, sometimes there is too much politics; ‘this
person comes from my place’ and a complaint is reported and not taken up the
way it should be taken. What we do is
report some of our members to the authorities apart from taking them through our
own disciplinary procedures; but of course you know that the Union is not an
alternative administration, so what the Union does is to suspend or expel you
from being a member of the Union, the rest is for the University to ehh... So
we’ve had cases and complaints and we’ve investigated them in our own way, but
this very one you are talking about did not even come to the union. It is bad
that it happened, but it is good that at least it is raising awareness and
consciousness of the fact of harassment; but of course while we can easily say
that eh.. Females have been victims, we cannot also rule out the fact that
sometimes they do have a part to play. But I do not think we should blame the
youths. We have looked at these things in terms of power relations; and looking
at it in terms of power relations I will not want to blame the women; we look
at it strictly in terms of power relations; a lecturer encounters a student,
whether it is a student he teaches directly or not, the issue of power relation
comes in, so whatever thing that is inappropriate that happens, I think a
lecturer should take responsibility.
As a Union
that our position. There is …but you know laws are made tough not just by ways
of having them in books but in way of strictly applying them no matter whose ox
is gored, that’s my believe, that’s what we impress in ASUU. The awareness has
been heightened but can it be heightened more than this I say ‘yes’. And we do
that in ASUU by talking to our members during congresses on the need for us to
continue to realize that we as intellectual arbiters are models and of course
one should ask for instance, ‘if you come into this kind of inappropriate
relationship particularly, what is the effect…
Bookagewise ©2016
No comments:
Post a Comment