If ASUU Were Elsewhere By Abba Hikima

If the ongoing ASUU strike were in saner climes where people set others up to flaunt their rights so they could go to court and claim damages, the strike would have been a chance for thousands of Nigeria students to become millionaires.

Every time ASUU strike spans months, the students apart being subjected to unscheduled idleness also get exposed to several forms of agonies ranging from emotional instability to getting missed out in professional postgraduate programs, recruitment exercise and the mandatory national youth service. Simply because students are not issued with their results on time. Nigeria universities do not operate a uniform academic timetable and so whenever there is a strike and some universities are closed out, students from other universities will be due and ready. This creates an unnecessarily artificial inequality among natural mates. This is how activities which ordinarily do not have any bearing with ASUU or its strike get impaired while total strikes linger.

For instance, if I am planning to go to the Nigerian Law School this year and I secured an application form based on an awaiting result I am entitled to be issued by my university and ASUU declared a total strike which ends up hampering the process and causing me emotional and financial distress, I should ordinarily be able to take legal action against ASUU or the university in question for any of the remedies of restitution, specific performance or damages. But I cannot because strike actions are also legal and justified by law.

But this position is not sacrosanct because not all strikes are lawful. Many, including this one are apparently unlawful and consequently the protections and immunities given to strikers by law cannot be pleaded in any civil or criminal suit that might have arisen from injuries suffered by victims of the strike. It is not enough a defense that the Federal government failed to honour their own side of the bargain in any of the several MoUs signed with ASUU. It is a settled tradition both in law and morality that “injuries are not removed with injuries”.
Sections 23 and 43 of the Trade Unions Act (TUA) exonerate unions and unionist from all kinds of civil or criminal liabilities which they could have been exposed to as a result of industrial actions thereby entrenching their right and immunity while industrial actions subsist.

But all rights come with duties, and so the same piece of legislation (TUA) from sections 4 to 9 also imposes on striking unions and unionists the duty to comply with some nonnegotiable conditions before their industrial actions could become truly lawful. This demands among other things that trade unions like ASUU give the Federal Government through the Minister of labour, a fourteen-day notice of a looming strike after the expiration of which they must also resort to arbitration tribunal for conciliation and serve notice of failure of these prerequisites before finally embarking on a strike. The idea behind these statutory contemplations apparently is so that the wider populace and the policy makers are given a notice to brace up for a looming strike and give responsible policy makers like Adamu Adamu who publicly and honourably admitted that “the Government has failed to live up to its promises” the chance to show some act of responsibility.

It is obvious that ASUU did not comply with all of these statutory requirements and so the industrial action they resolved to embark on is unlawful and could gives anyone who suffers any special damage a good cause of action in the courts for damages. In Nigeria sadly, legal battle is the last thing any short-tempered person wants to fight. If it were elsewhere, it would have thought ASUU a great deal of lesson by defeaning her ears of multi million Naira suits thereby imposing some level of decorum in the system.

It is unfortunate that in 2017, we still have ASUU strike impairing students’ dreams. It is regrettable that Nigerians are going to Ghana and Benin and elsewhere in Africa in pursuit of better academic atmosphere.

Lastly, I strongly urge Mal. Adamu Adamu to especially put his theories into practice to immediately truncate this strike before it gets out of hand.