- What does ASUU, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, in its present anti-Integrated Personnel Payment Information System (IPPIS) campaign, reminds Hardball of the tortoise in that Yoruba folktale?
What does ASUU, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, in its present anti-Integrated Personnel Payment Information System (IPPIS) campaign, reminds Hardball of the tortoise in that Yoruba folktale?
The tortoise, crafty and haughty, had declared he had every gumption warehoused in an exclusive gourd. Meaning? He had acquired the patent over even the most routine of thinking! Still, just a mere palm wine tapper it was, that told the tortoise, it was hare-brained climbing a tree with a calabash — the same vital warehouse! — dangling on your chest, instead of nestling on your back.
It is the Yoruba ultimate putdown for being clever by half!
Yet, being clever by half was all ASUU manifested in its spirited crusade to reject the IPPIS October-end deadline, for its members to get registered or get chucked out of the pay system.
ASUU started the battle with scholarly exceptionalism, claiming though the IPPIS might be good enough for other sectors of Federal Government workers, it certainly was not robust enough to cater for Nigerian dons, doing yeoman’s work, in the university system. It had pushed a similar pitch against the Treasury Single Account (TSA), aimed at halting the multiplicity of public accounts that bred so much sleaze.
But the anti-IPPIS pitch hardly washed, reportedly with a good number of its own members; and certainly not with what appeared the general majority out there.
Then, ASUU tried what appeared as legalistic subterfuge, still based on nothing more than conceit: the Federal Government didn’t employ lecturers. Only the university councils did. But rid of its sweet sugar-coating, the lecturer-employees were pushing their democratic, if not divine, right to dictating how the employer must pay them!
When the pushing was about morphing into shoving, ASUU got into its default bully setting — threatening to go on strike to push its latest crusade. It didn’t matter that it didn’t even manage to convince a substantial number, if not the majority, of its members why the strike was necessary, or why even the members should not fill the IPPIS form, beyond the fact that it is union “order from above”.
Right now, the October window and deadline have closed; and many who have obeyed the ASUU directive risk their salaries being stopped. ASUU itself, seeing little or no support for its hare-brained strike threat, has soft-pedalled. It’s a most humbling juncture for ASUU. But it is one that the dons union must learn from.
Hardball just hopes the temporary ouster from the payroll won’t lead to extensive anguish to innocent academics, who obeyed the ASUU directive, not because they agreed with its reasons but because of their solidarity with their union.
But how would Fela, the Abami Eda himself, no friend of the establishment to be sure, have reacted to ASUU’s self-inflicted predicament? He probably would have cleared his throat, a savagely pun ASUU as “aasuu” (Yoruba for the pidgin street lingo, e go tire), and break into a long hearty guffaw!
“Aasuu” — ASUU go tire for this one! It is fitting desert for being clever by half!
