NAPENews Magazine September 2022 Edition

Nigerian Geoscience Education: The impact
of ASUU Strikes and Data Accessibility for
Research and Development
A common feature in the Nigerian Universities' ecosystem are recurring strike actions by the Academic Staff Union of Universities
(ASUU) and the challenge of access to data for geoscience students to carry out research.
ASUU strikes date back to 1973 under the umbrella of the Nigerian Association of University Teachers (NAUT) (Figure 1). The
formation of ASUU from NAUT five years later (in 1978), still didn't bring a halt to the strike actions as the newly created union also
embarked on a nationwide strike in 1980.
As a result of the strike action in 1988 by the union to obtain fair wages and university autonomy, ASUU was proscribed on 7th of
August 1988 with all of its property seized. It was allowed to resume in 1990, but was banned after another strike action on 23rd of
August 1992.
All of these were resolved on 3rd of September 1992, when an agreement that met several of the union's demands including the right
of workers to collective bargaining was reached.
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Some students on graduation and after completing the
mandatory national youth service scheme ended up not
meeting prospective employers' entry age criterion.
Possibility of some students engaging in delinquent
activities by being idle during the period of the strike
action.
Risk of loss of life or injury in the course of violence that
may ensue during protests for or against the strike
actions by students or during the intervention of security
agencies.
Another common challenge faced by geoscience students in
Nigerian universities is the bottleneck faced with accessing
industry data to aid academic research or unavailability of these
data, which may sometimes result in the data not being
accessible to students for the intended research purpose.
The importance or relevance of geoscientific data for research
by geoscience students cannot be overemphasized. In addition
to the conventional studies and interpretation of specific regions
of the earth that can be carried out with this dataset, they can
also be applied in training, machine learning/artificial
intelligence algorithms or models for improvement of these
models, hence, resulting in the advancement of geoscience
studies in Nigeria.
Figure 1. Calendar of ASUU strikes since inception till 2020.
The various strike actions embarked on by the union have been
due to the Federal Government's refusal to uphold their part of
the agreement reached and signed by both parties. This has left
students of the concerned universities on the receiving end of
the tussle between the federal government and ASUU,
resulting in and not limited to these;
Ÿ Period of hiatus in the schools' calendar until the strikes
were called off.
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Extension of years of study for students.
For oil and gas industry related data (which has the most
structured data repository in the country), the issue lies with the
processes involved in making these data available to the
students; whereas, other geoscience related fields (such as
hydrogeology, geochemistry, petrology, marine geology, etc.)
suffer from lack of a structured data repository to make these
data available for geoscience studies and advancement.
Hence, it is important that structured data repositories in the
various fields of geoscience are put in place, as well as debottle
necking the process of making these data available to students
and academics for research and development purpose.
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