Notwithstanding the new, unfortunate twist added to the protracted strike action embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) by the Federal Government’s recent ultimatum for the lecturers to resume  this week, many well-meaning Nigerians have come to the conclusion that it is time to end the strike.

It is difficult to justify a strike that has gone on for over five months with the attendant shutdown of university education with such derivatives, though trivial, of idle female students making babies. Only God knows what mischief their male counterparts, forced off the campuses and sentenced to protracted playtime, have been up to.
Granted that the unfortunate and tragic death of former ASUU president, Professor Festus Iyayi, added another dimension to the long impasse, still, it would appear that some factions of the ASUU leadership have held on to this sad incident to find another justification for prolonging the shutdown.
Indeed, it can be argued that the more the shutdown lingers, the more there will be events which will provide justification to lengthen the unusually long strike.
It is also a bit unclear why after the local unions voted in favour of discontinuing the strike – the majority of them did so – the national executive, in what would appear to be a contradiction of the democratic process, opted to continue the strike and even gave new conditions for ending it.  This may be why some member unions such as Ebonyi State University, Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, Ondo State and Enugu State University have already reopened their campuses in violation of the order by ASUU.  Similarly, at the University of Lagos, a faction of the local union openly criticised the manner in which ASUU NEC is handling the crisis, going so far as to describe it as immature.
This apart, the pro-chancellors of the universities in their wisdom have already ordered the campuses to reopen as a way of beginning what will be a long and tedious process of returning to normalcy. And for that matter, nothing stops negotiations from continuing while lectures are going on. For no matter how long the strike gets, the resolution will still be at the negotiating table. It is therefore unwise if not counterproductive for the union to plunge the nation into a fresh round of closure, especially after the President Goodluck Jonathan gave guarantees and made overtures with the aim of ending the crisis.
To be sure, we do not excuse the government from meeting its obligations to ASUU and the Nigerian people. We are surprised that in the early days of the shutdown, government sidestepped it and even issued threats instead of coming clean by facing the issues raised by ASUU head on. But once government changed its posture and entered into serious negotiations, it would have made sense for ASUU members to change gear in the larger interest of their students and the nation.
The current fracture within ASUU over the undue prolongation of the strike can only get worse and a wise general faced with rebellion in the ranks and growing desertion of troops will discern correctly that it is time to retreat. Indeed, it would appear that the collective wisdom of the rank and file of ASUU is not being brought to bear on this situation, resulting in a circumstance where a militant and possibly wrongheaded minority is ramming decisions down the throats of other members.
Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world where striking workers, after an extended abstention from work, still come back to demand their pay. This is another manifestation of the national cake sharing syndrome or ‘take the money and run’ mentality which disregards the overall health of the system or the prospects of its survival. In many countries around the globe, abstention from work would be taken to mean resignation.
Unfortunately, the nation’s leaders, because of what will appear to be their own attitude towards public resources, have not been able to enforce discipline in many aspects of the national life, with the result that workers go on strike at a drop of the hat and yet come around to pontificate on why they should be thanked and paid for being absent from work.
In this circumstance, it is difficult to differentiate patriotic commitment to one’s calling from a spreading culture of delinquency and truancy in which workers stay ostentatiously off work under the guise of struggling for the survival of the system while in fact they are chipping away at the very foundations of that system. In other words, there must be a trade-off between the long term and the short term. If the system is destroyed in the short term, then there is no long term to salvage.
The strike has gone on long enough. It is time for the lecturers to go back to class.