In the period of my longish absence from this homestead christened Facebook, something epochal happened. A virus descended from the Chinese Wuhan heights and spread itself regally around China and the rest of the world, killing and traumatizing the human race. From there it made straight for the Romance countries where it dealt innocent Italy a lethal blow with reverberations enveloping Spain and France. Then it turned on God’s Own Country, where it turned Trump into a physician who kept announcing prescription after prescription and assured that the virus would be over by Easter and Americans would celebrate their 2020 Easter in peace and free of coronavirus. Till date, however, the world including the powerful USA, is still grappling with this strange visitor from the Wuhan heights.
Till date, too, the coronavirus, covid-19 for short, has continued to reveal and galvanize a million matters. First, it exposed and differentiated countries that had been genuinely committed to the development of their health and education sectors from those that had not. While Britain and Cuba, for instance, stood out, a bit of ill-preparedness and the politicization of everything caught up with majority of the world’s countries, including the omnipotent Trump’s country. In this and other western countries, the pandemic further brought to the limelight the underlying inequalities that have existed among the population such that the Blacks, a minority group in most of the western countries, reported a far higher percentage of casualties than any other group because of their living with most of the covid-19-vulnerable pre-existing conditions. Next, it showed also that wealth and influence and positions in society were no armour against death as both the high and the low responded to the covid-19’s threnodic trumpet, whether in Trump’s America or in Buhari’s no-hurry Nigeria. Indeed, in Nigeria, the pandemic thoughtfully illustrated its class-blindness by its removal with surgical precision of a central figure in the government of the day, perhaps as a first warning that it wasn’t here for a joke. This certainly jolted both the high and the low of our land into the reality that the otherwise orphan health and education sectors mattered more than money and oil and mansions and banks. Indeed, the virus drew the often blocked ears of leaders to the fact that these were indeed the most crucial sectors of a nation’s existence.
Another long-lasting discovery from the covid-19 outbreak is that the distance between science and art isn’t as wide as we had always been made to believe. Indeed, as far as this pandemic is concerned, much of the attempts to arrest its spread and venom has had a tinge of guess work with traditional healers often putting themselves forward with suggestions of remedies. As scientists and other health researchers groped in the dark for a cure, accusations and counter-accusations and conspiracy theories went haywire among the high of our world, and the billionaire, Bill Gates and his vaccines, became highly loathed suspects in some places with the Bill Gates-directed punches occasionally reaching America’s final word on pandemics, Dr Anthony Fauci.
While this pandemic galvanized interest in education and the health sectors globally, in Nigeria, the season has been one of pathological hate and disdain for anything cerebral with the peak of this venom being directed at Nigeria’s university lecturers. Luckily for education’s mate in deliberate neglect, the health sector, the death of one prominent Nigerian and the circumstantial de-winging of the high of the land by a global lockdown compelled the government to make some ad hoc arrangements towards improving the sector within the country. But, unlike the health sector, education - which in other countries was given equal priority attention in view of the importance and urgency of research - was made a primary target of a localized national epidemic produced in a laboratory jointly run by the ministers of finance and labour. The laboratory itself is located in the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, and its technical name is known as the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS). As if this national virus were meant to avenge the failure of covid-19 to target only the poor and vulnerable, the local epidemic has a specific target, especially the nation’s coterie of teachers and researchers who come under the name of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). In a moment when all kinds of incentives were being provided researchers in other parts of the world to enable them to contribute to the finding of a cure for the coronavirus, the Nigerian lecturers were denied such incentives. Not only were they also denied the palliatives that the government announced for the citizens, they were also vengefully denied even their salaries for months, and even when the President, Mohammadu Buhari, finally asked that the lecturers be paid their salaries unconditionally, the producer of lethal vaccines in the ministry of finance poisoned the salaries with the IPPIS vaccine, and released them in punitive fragments to the academics even in a moment such as this when death seems to be enveloping the whole world.
Thus far, there have been treacherous celebrations of mediocrity and gleeful laughter only from those public functionaries producing and administering this lethal vaccine. The other day the minister of labour, for instance, was reported to have said lecturers were playing ludo instead of being in the laboratories finding the cure for covid-19. If the man actually said so, then it’s the peak of tragedy. For one, it is usually mentioned that the minister of labour is a medical doctor; if it is so, is his ministry a women labour room where he is operating as a medical doctor? Secondly, he was once reported to have said he saw nothing wrong with the brain drain of medical doctors from the country. Would he still say so now given the reality of the covid-19 pandemic which exposed the ill-preparedness of our health sector for any emergency? Should he not by now be ashamed of himself for displaying such ignorance of the need for more health personnel in his own country where he is supposed to be practicing medicine? Is he not at all aware of the feats Nigerian-trained doctors are recording in research-friendlier and more conducive environments even during this outbreak of coronavirus? Nigeria is potentially one of the richest nations on earth in terms of human resources, but its problem is the absence of political will by our politicians and technocrats to accept Nigeria as their home, to believe in the country, and to defeat that foolish thought that what they steal today can fortify them and their children against the vagaries and vicissitudes of tomorrow. Finally, he has “instructed” ASUU to end the strike as a condition for resuming negotiations. The minister should know that even in a moment of war, talks still go on at the negotiation table. It would not be different from ASUU’s current strike and the re-negotiation.
The other gladiator in the fight against the Nigerian University system is the Accountant-General of the federation, whose recent pronouncements reveal either a pathological hatred for lecturers or crass incompetence and ignorance, or both. If, for example, he has argued that agreements duly and mutually signed between unions and the Federal Government regarding salaries and allowances are not recognised for payment purposes, is he then going to ask the lecturers both those dead and alive to refund all such payments to them from, say 1992, when the Union worked out the current agreement with the Government of General Ibrahim Babangida, till date? That should be the most “accountable way” to go. Does he know when the government began collecting the Education Tax Fund (ETF), now Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND), which was a product of the 1992 agreement and when the law formally establishing the Fund was made? He brought out as a cheap propaganda weapon the questionable information that over 1000 lecturers failed the BVN test; does this figure include lecturers in the seven universities who received nothing at all from his anti-ASUU laboratory called IPPIS? If not, how can he lay claim to any modicum of competence when his very “competent” office can fail the test of preparing the salaries of lecturers in seven whole federal universities? How does he explain the afflictions on members of sister unions whose earnings have been most callously vandalized month after month by his office; indeed, whose salaries have been on a progressive decline since the poor workers received the lethal IPPIS vaccine in February? Three very important questions the Accountant-General and the staff of his laboratory have ignored are: 1. If it’s possible to migrate staff to the IPPIS vaccine template without their involvement as the laboratory did ASUU members, why did the staff of the laboratory waste millions of Nigeria’s money running around each of the nation’s federal universities for weeks in the name of “capturing” the details of the staff for the IPPIS vaccine platform? 2. If it’s possible for anyone’s name to be conscripted to that template without involving the “beneficiary” physically, what guarantee is there that the staff of the IPPIS laboratory cannot migrate a ghost worker to the template, as they did some deceased academics? 3. If such a great national office entrusted with disbursement of payments to the entire nation can commit the blunder of scandalously omitting the entire staff of seven universities and so thoughtlessly and dubiously or unprofessionally mutilate beyond recognition the figures for the salaries of all categories of the staff of other universities, how can such an office lay claim to any degree of competence or confidence? It is only in this brand of Nigeria that the fate of the nation’s entire education system can be placed on such questionable palms, and the citizenry would be at peace.
I don’t know how old the Accountant-General is, especially given the present scenario in the country in which qualification, experience, general soundness of mind, and calm and collected thinking no longer matter in the appointment of persons to offices. If he were anything near 40 years of age, I would be very surprised that he doesn’t really know the history of the group he’s targeting for the deadly IPPIS vaccine. If he had been more conscious of his environment and history, he would have known that he is up against a group with a Spartan spirit, not because they have access to vaccines of mass deprivation such as he has, but because they think and research and argue among themselves in order to distill for themselves the right path to follow. That the lecturers stood their grounds against submitting their BVN even when he had deployed the weapon of hunger against them in a perilous moment such as this should have taught him the lesson that the group can drag the battle against him for many seasons. This, then, is the other pandemic, the more merciless one designed by the Nigerian government and forced into the bodies of lecturers by the ministries of labour and finance, in a laboratory located in the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, and named IPPIS. The deadly and obnoxious IPPIS vaccine is, hence, the Vaccine of Mass Destruction of Lecturers (VMDL) targeted at the Nigerian University System, with other non-teaching members of staff suffering collateral damage. But this weapon will fail, just as others before it had done. Those Nigerian children whose parents can’t afford to send them abroad, too, must have a good education here, just as lecturers here, too, must earn a living wage. It is our right, not a privilege. And this will not wait until another species of pandemic locks the world down with our leaders de-winged before we embark on a fire brigade approach, as it is currently the case with the health sector.
Joseph A. Ushie
University of Uyo.
