My submission is that there is so much corruption in the university system, and no responsible government can continue to throw funds into a drain pipe. As for the issue of salary increment, please forget it. If any increment is granted by government, other professional or rival unions in the public sector will follow suit and make the country ungovernable. If government accedes to such requests by a tiny segment of Nigeria's workforce, another upward spiral of inflation will be engendered that will leave the millions of workers in the informal sector worse off than they are now. It is better for us to challenge the government to make the economy more productive so that the value of the naira can be worth the paper on which it is printed.

But coming back to ASUU, do the lecturers really deserve a pay rise? I am not persuaded. Lecturing appears to be the easiest job to do in Nigeria today. Like someone once remarked, 'You can lecture (on) what you don't know but you can't teach what you don't know'. In a lesson scheduled to run for two hours, a lecturer arrives ten minutes to the end of the class, scribbles some illegible letters on the board and asks the students to go to the library. 'This is not a secondary school; I'm not supposed to spoonfeed you,' is the common response to any question from a serious student. And for the student's temerity in wasting the time of the lecturer and his colleagues, he's shouted down by the majority of the students who know they are in school to pass exams: since the teacher would definitely come a week to the exam to give 'areas of concentration, centre of gyration or centre of gravity', why waste his time with useless questions, Mr Too Know?

As for the sin of mark boosting by lecturers, this chance encounter with some students says it all. Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU) had concluded exams and students were expected to return home. A student who had stayed back on the campus in order to do the 'right thing' later returned to Lagos to visit her friend. 'I observed you left school immediately after the exams, why?' 'What should I be doing on the campus since the exams are over?' 'How naÔve you are, so you won't go and do "follow up"?' Until that day, my knowledge of 'follow up' had to do with Christian evangelical work but the phrase now means enveloping naira notes with your name and matriculation/examination number and sending it to the 'appropriate quarters'! The reader should understand here that we are not talking about isolated cases. The 'brown envelope' syndrome is pervasive all over our campuses.

Still at OOU, there are final year CESSAP Mass Communication students that are yet to see some of their first-year results due to negligence and absenteeism on the part of the lecturers. As a matter of fact, lecturers in Nigeria have turned our campuses into individual fiefdoms where they reign and rule; they have become gods that must be appeased by our youths. Lecturers enjoy near absolute freedom which you don't find in other workplaces.

I have a friend at the University of Ibadan. She's chaste, hardworking and cerebrally endowed. She's been on her Master's programme for over three years now. The supervisor is always on the road or in the air, and always too busy. What does the professor supervisor want? Money, gift, what? 'Friendship'! But she knows you're married? 'Marriage! If you're a spinster, they say that's good, if you're married, they say that's better, and if you're pregnant, then you are in the best condition!' So the situation has sunk so deep? 'Some of them even tell female students to meet them in hotels, which the students must pay for... but it happens on all campuses.' But why don't you report or get another supervisor? 'You can't be sure my brother, these people have a clique... And if you report, who are the people to sit in judgement? Their colleagues! So, I'm not bothered again because my hands are engaged anyway.'

Still at UI, my relative, then an undergraduate medical student, told me that they had written a test but a lady classmate who was not around when it was written told them pointedly that it would be cancelled. Lo and behold, it was eventually cancelled! 'From that day, I began to fear for my academic life,' he said.

But let me - in parenthesis - use this medium to warn all randy members of ASUU that a day of reckoning will come. There will arise a government (official) with a set mind to purge our campuses of all debased dons who have turned them into sex-for-marks institutions, and victimize students directly or indirectly, through their colleagues, for refusing to satisfy their lascivious thoughts. Their fate will be worse than those affected by the 'clean-up campaign' of 1975 because, apart from being dismissed with ignominy, they will be tried and sent to various jail terms.

Perhaps unknown to ASUU members, the proliferation of private varsities in the country today is a direct consequence of their endless strikes. And ASUU should live under no illusion; if the recurring industrial action persists, government may be forced to stay off completely the funding of varsities and turn them over to private hands because a situation where students will receive lectures for less than four weeks, instead of twelve to sixteen weeks, as a result of strikes, dereliction of duty and absenteeism is intolerable. ASUU sometimes claims it is fighting for the poor, but can the children of the poor afford the fees of public schools today? Because private varsities charge between N200,000 and N500,000 as school fees, public varsities are now taking their cue from them. But would private varsities have flourished if ASUU had been circumspect and had employed the weapon of strike only once in a blue moon? The beauty of power is to have it but rarely wield it! And now, the strike power has lost its potency.

As a matter of fact, this should be a period of profound stocktaking for ASUU. Thank God, UNILORIN lecturers have been reinstated; so that will no longer be part of the reasons for strike. Even at that, the pyrrhic victory of ASUU must provoke a sober reflection. Some chapters and members of ASUU are getting tired of ASUU's language of strike. Three professors were lost (by death) to the UNILORIN crisis. Another lecturer was involved in an auto-accident while running around to make court appearances, while two others were reported to have developed eye problems because of alleged lack of funds to seek early medical help. Is this not a pyrrhic victory for ASUU? Can the body afford to remain ceaselessly in the trenches?

Besides ensuring judicious use of IGRs and government funds in their various institutions, ASUU should also spend the next ten years to systematically purge itself of the alarmingly growing number of empty-brained, randy, corrupt and absentee lecturers who reap where they did not sow. Mind you, the general feeling is that they are in the majority. We are tired of the police-like self-exonerating rhetoric of 'a few bad eggs.' All the eggs except a few are bad!