By Farooq Kperogi
It used to be that whatever you thought of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), you couldn’t help but concede that it was, for the most part, led by people who were principled, who cherished probity, who weren’t mercenary, who were actuated by higher ideals, and who chafed at fraud.
As people who read me know, Professor Attahiru Jega, probably the most famous president ASUU has had in my lifetime, was my mentor at Bayero University, Kano. And, as my friend Professor Moses Ochonu will testify, as undergraduates, we supported ASUU strikes in the early to mid-1990s—against our own interests—because we were inspired by the sincerity and moral clarity of the leadership of ASUU.
ASUU managed to cultivate the image of an admirable oasis in Nigeria’s desert of moral putrefaction. Although ASUU’s reputational capital has diminished considerably in the public imagination because of the mind-numbing creativity deficit and mechanical sameness of its strategies for engaging with the government, its reluctance to be part of the conversation for instructional accountability among its members, and what appears to be its penchant for providing cover for its erring members, many of us still respect it as a force for good in the Nigerian university system.
Then comes FUTO ASUU, which has chosen to make itself a shameless accessory to manifestly crying intellectual fraud in its own university. A serving minister who isn’t and was never employed by FUTO, who can’t legally take a new job, who ATBU, his former university, didn’t find worthy to promote to a Senior Lecturer, who lied about being an Associate Professor at a Saudi university when he was actually an assistant professor there, whose scholarly and pedagogical records are both too thin and too dodgy to be even an associate professor was fraudulently “promointed” (i.e., promoted and or appointed because FUTO has no earthly clue what the heck they did!) to a fraudfessorship in an unprecedented violation of age-old conventions. And what did FUTO ASUU do? It stamped its intellectual imprimatur on the fraud!
FUTO ASUU empaneled a bunch of unprincipled characters to “investigate” Pantami’s professorial fraud. Instead of actually investigating the fraud, the panel members probably just blabbered and drank cheap ogogoro in the misery of their offices and rubber-stamped a self-evident intellectual misconduct.
Now, if it is two-bit, mercenary, anti-intellectual thugs like FUTO ASUU members who now constitute the core of ASUU, the union doesn’t deserve the support of any person who cherishes decency.
Incidentally, an ASUU member by the name of Sunday Adole Jonah of the Department of Physics, Federal University of Technology, Minna, sent me a half-joking, half-serious email on November 4 that reads in part, “No doubt about it, you don patapata be public-opinion influencer. If no be you, government for no agree to pay ASUU one kobo more and ASUU for dey strike by now.”
He was talking about my September 25, 2021 column titled “Adamu Adamu, ASUU Must Not Strike Again!” where I used my familiarity with Malam Adamu Adamu to passionately plead that the government not allow ASUU to go on another strike. Of course, Professor Jonah was exaggerating. I am not nearly that important. And this is no false modesty. I think it was just a coincidence that the government’s positive response to ASUU’s demands, which I didn’t know about, came after my column.
But on the off chance that my intervention even remotely had anything to do with it, I’d want to deploy it to also plead with the national ASUU to probe its FUTO branch.
There’s a lot of unbearably malodorous ethical stench wafting through the air of FUTO, and FUTO ASUU is now at the center of the rot that’s causing this. If the national body still gives a thought to its image and needs ethical allies outside its fold, it must intervene. Now, let FUTO sue me! I’m begging and waiting.