LABOUR-NIGERIA: Striking Lecturers Demand Salary Increment

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, May 11 2001 (IPS) - Striking University lecturers in Nigeria have refused to return to teach unless their demand for salary increment is resolved.

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), which called the strike about a month ago, is demanding that a junior lecturer’s basic salary start from 633,500 naira to 724,000 naira (about 7,240 and 6,335 dollars) per annum, besides housing, and other, allowances.

A senior lecturer, the Union says, should earn a basic salary of between 2,250,067 and 2,903,312 (22,000 dollars and 29,000 dollars) annually.

The union is also demanding that the government allocates 10 U.S. cents from every barrel of crude oil sold each day to the country’s 50 universities and colleges under a fund to be called “petroleum fund”.

Nigeria, a member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), exports more than two million barrels of crude oil per day.

The union is also demanding that a selected number of properties in Lagos and Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, be allocated to the universities and colleges to enhance self- sufficiency.

Currently, the minimum wage of a university lecturer 9,000 naira (about 90 dollars) is not enough to feed a family of six for a week.

To survive, most teachers resort to other jobs after work. Others have left the country for greener pastures in the United States, Canada or Europe.

The university lecturers are not the only workers who believe that the gains of multiparty democracy, introduced in 1999 after years of military rule, has not been felt by ordinary Nigerians.

Labour leaders say promises made by President Olusegun Obasanjo during last year’s May Day celebration had largely remained unfulfilled a year after.

The workers had expected that Obasanjo would announce a 25-per cent salary increment he had promised to implement on May 1. Instead, the workers left the celebration disappointed, having failed to persuade Obasanjo to reconsider his decision to privatise Nigeria’s loss-making public corporations.

In his speech to the nation on May 1, Obasanjo vowed not to go back on the sales of ailing government parastatals. “Privatisation will check fraud, laziness and wanton destruction of government corporations,” he said.

Funmi Komolafe, a labour analyst, says “we expect that a democratic government should know what the people want because the people voted for them based on promises but a good number of the promises have not been fulfilled”.

According to her, Nigerians “want regular electricity, water, good road for transporting their goods, as well as good education for their children and health services”.

Komolafe says President Obasanjo “seems to have lost focus on the economy which is already running out of control”.

“We have lost this president to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank. He is telling the people to wait until next year before they start reaping the dividends of democracy,” she says.

Although the government has taken the lecturers’ case to the Industrial Arbitration Panel (IAP), set up to settle disputes between workers and government, full academic work is yet to start.

Prospect of an early end to the four-week industrial action has further diminished as the ASUU leaders have rejected an order by the IAP to call off the strike.

Dipo Fashina, ASUU National Chairperson, said this week that the IAP’s directive, to call off the strike, “is unlawful and illegal”.

“We never appeared before the panel,” he said. “I have never been summoned by IAP. I only heard of its order.”