ARCN feud: Stakeholders decry centralized Agricultural Research Institutes

There seems to be no end to argument between the management of Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria (ARCN) and its local workers’ union who have insisted that the directive from the office of the Head of service of the federation concerning three directors who have exhausted their eight year term must be carried just as stakeholders have condemned any move that will put annual budget allocations of about 25 research institutes in the sector under the same organization.

Food Farm News investigation revealed that the directive of the Head of Service to the management of the ARCN under the leadership of Prof. B.Y Abubakar since last year is yet to be executed and this has resulted to feud and cold war between the management and the workers ‘union who have promised to down tools in case the instruction is not followed.

It was gathered that the ARCN management has embarked on an intensive move to upturn the act guiding the operation of the organization in a selfish way and to the detriment of the other growing officers in the system as they wanted services of the retiring directors to be determined with same age limit of 65 like what is operational in the Research Institutes thereby relegating the civil service rule of sixty years retirement to the background. 

In the letter sent through the office of the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina by the head of service dated 29^th January, 2015 responding to the earlier demand of ARCN tilted “Request for clarification on the retirement age of technical director in the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria: Request for reconsideration” and signed by  Mr. Kehinde Adeyemi, it was stated that “ Research Council of Nigeria is a regulatory and policy coordinating body for Agricultural Research Institutes owned by the Federal Government. Its role is similar to those of the National Universities Commission (NUC) which is the regulatory body for universities, but whose staff retires at 35 years of service or 60 years of age. The rationale provided by the council is insufficient to establish and classify the council as a research organization. Accordingly the staff of the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria is not eligible to retire at sixty five (65) years of age”

Meanwhile the union workers under the aegis of Joint Action Committee in the ARCN chapter have vowed that they will not allow the management to carry out their plan of ensuring the elongation of the directors that are affected with the directive from the office of the Head of service of the federation saying all of them should relinquish their office for the up growing officers of the organization.

In a communiqué issued at the end of their meeting with Executive Secretary of the council, the workers were asking that all staffs that are above the age of 60 years and those who have spent 35 years should go in accordance to the directive of the office of the Head of service of the federation.

Finding revealed that the ARCN management is working at converting the three retiring directors’ appointment into contract job for another tenure which the union is frantically kicking against as a source informed us that the fear of who will fill the capability gap of these outgoing technical staffs is the bane of the decline to workers’ demand.

It was stated by the union that ARCN board had approved the contract appointment of these three technical directors who are main subjects of the sent circular thereby demanding that all the official properties of the office in their possession must be immediately withdrawn.

Meanwhile our finding also revealed that all the budgetary allocation of all the Agricultural Research Institutes in the country may soon be centralized under the ARCN as underground effort is ongoing to achieve this.

Although many stakeholders have raised alarm of what damage such action could cause the research development in the country saying it is going to be total distraction as much of the time of the Executive Directors of these Institutes will be spent in the ARCN all in the name of waiting to collect allocations.

Many under anonymity said that Nigerian University Commission (NUC) has been playing the role of ARCN over all the country’s universities without necessarily demanding for centralized budgetary allocation of these citadels saying this move will bring catastrophic to agricultural research development just as many other people acknowledged the proactiveness of the present leadership of the council.