According to Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the country's military regime period was more understanding of lecturers' predicament than the current civilian administration.
On Thursday in Abuja, he made this statement at the unveiling of 50 tertiary textbooks written by Nigerian authors and sponsored by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund).
“Thank you very much for this honourable minister and all of us who are present here today. I want to thank my colleagues for raising the issues and I think it is very important. I will just say a little thing about what is TETFUND and how did it originate?”
“In 1992, the union was on strike and negotiating how we use to do then a few years ago with Obafemi and co, and when we finished, the government said how can we fund it and we said challenge us, we will tell you how to fund this agreement. And they challenged ASUU, it didn’t take 3 days and we came up with the idea of TETFUND, which was accepted by the government than the military. I have seen that the military is even more sympathetic… Then TETFUND came into place. The decree was signed in 1993. ASUU had to go on strike the third time to ensure that the TETFUND board is funded and the money was released.”
On the ‘no work no pay’ policy of the Federal Government against striking lecturers which has resulted in eight months of unpaid salaries, Osodeke called on Nigerians to increase pressure on the government to save tertiary education from collapse.
While describing TETFund as a brainchild of the union, he commended the agency for transforming the nation’s higher education sector.
The ASUU president called for an increase of education tax from the current 2.5 per cent to 10 per cent to enable TETFund to mobilise more funds to totally address challenges confronting the sector.
While decrying the poor attitude of some big companies and wealthy Nigerians on the payment of education tax, Osodeke said there is a need to reposition and expand the education tax net to bring about more resources for tertiary education institutions.
Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, who unveiled the 50 new textbooks said the publications would end the dominance of foreign academic materials in the nation’s educational institutions.
Adamu who was represented by the Minister of State for Education, Goodluck Nanah Opiah, said over time, Nigeria’s tertiary education institutions became dependent on books published outside the country with the attendant consequences of the herculean processes and unfavourable foreign exchange rate.
“It is equally worrisome that the quality of most academic publications in our country leaves much to be desired. It is therefore expected that nourishing the culture of quality authorship and the production of indigenous books will not only ensure the availability of relevant books in the diverse subject areas taking cognizance of our local environment and sensitivities but will also safeguard national pride and reduce the demand for foreign exchange.”
The minister also urged TETFund and the academia to go beyond publishing in the English Language to promote authorship in local languages in line with the recently approved National Language Policy.
In his remark, the Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arc Sonny Echono, said the fund has set a minimum target of 50 textbooks per year while assuring that the newly published books would be distributed to tertiary institutions’ libraries at no cost.
“All the books we have published so far, the initial publications are going to be distributed to the libraries of our tertiary institutions free of charge. It is the subsequent publications that students will be buying or other researchers will buy,” he said.