ASUU’s Demand for Professors’ Retirement Age to be Extended to 70 years
This news was reported on This Day Newspaper, Thursday 22 October 2009. I pondered on this request from ASUU which has been assented to the Mr. President, and wonder if this request will not do more harm than do any good.
Won’t extending professors’ retirement age to 70 years;
1. Create a clog in the system i.e. a situation whereby a senior lecturer finds it difficult to get promoted to the position of an associate Professor and an associate professor to the position of a professor because the old professors are still in office and so there is no space to move forward to when promotion is due.
2. Frustrate the dreams of upcoming youths who wish to go into the lecturing career? The fact that the old professors are still in office may create no space for them to fill thus making qualification for employment as lecturers unreasonable.
3. Create a situation where an old professor who justly or unjustly feels the young lecturers are not as sound as there were when they were in their positions makes it extremely difficult for senior lecturers to ascend to the position of professors.
4. Besides can old brains be as attuned to change and development as new fresh brains will be?
5. When professors hold on tightly to their seats and refuse to leave at age 65, what happens to the teeming Nigerian youths in the labour market in search of paid employment at a period where increase in the Nigerian population is not at all friendly with the pace of economic development. Won’t youths be more encouraged to indulge in criminal activities?
Hmm… retirement! What a monster! Public servants dread it so much that some reduce their age at the time of employment. The government try working round this deception, by not using age alone to determine when to retirement but also the number of years spent in service. Then the judiciary said no government can dictate to them, when to retire and so they increased the retirement age of justices of the Nigerian Supreme Court to 70 (according to the tribune newspaper of 5th March 2009, there is another agitation for the retirement age of justices of the supreme court to step up to 80 years). This in other words means that the justices of the Supreme Court are to remain in office for life, considering the life span of an average Nigerian man. Now professors are also asking for an extension in their retirement age from 65years to 70years. Their long years of research could not search out the antidote for killing the retirement monster that makes every Nigerian man to crinkle. O God help us!
