By Peace O. Aboje
THE President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Professor Emmanuel Osedeke, has stated that the union is willing to call-off its seven-month-old strike if the government is willing to negotiate and come to a reasonable agreement.
Prof Osedeke said the union needs to have something concrete to in order to alter its current position of indefinite strike.
The ASUU President stated this in his address at a National Town Hall Meeting on Tertiary Education in Nigeria, tagged: “The Locked Gates of our Citadels” held in Olaitan Oyerinde Hall, Paschal Bafyau Labour House, Central Business District, Abuja.
Osedeke expressed bitterness at the state of Nigerian universities as he defended ASUU’s stance in continuing with the strike to ensure that its demands on revitalization fund, Earn Academic Allowance, proliferation of universities, renegotiation of agreement, amongst others are achieved.
He said the strike is for the betterment of the nation as ASUU does not want to produce quacks and cracks into the society.
“We’ll be committing suicide when we walk into any Nigerian hospital in the next few years if we don’t do anything,” Osedeke says, adding, “and so the union is looking at having a university system where adequate equipment would be made available and the ratio of lecturer to student is 1-5 as against the 1-30/50 we have now.”
He lamented government’s lack of priority on education which he said is bleeding the country financially to the tune of 1.6 trillion naira annually being tuition fees going to other countries against the 1.3 trillion the union has been demanding for, for the past six years.
He said Nigeria has about 98 public universities and 111 private universities but with 95% of Nigerians in public universities. In his words, “a university is a place where students come from every quarter for every kind of knowledge, a place where inquiry is pushed forward and we’re trying to kill that in our universities.”
The ASUU president said following an agreement in 2014, the government agreed to pay within a space of six years. “They paid only for the first year, and only 50 million has been released since 2015. The union is also putting up a bill that’ll make it more difficult to start university, so the ones we already have would properly be maintained,” he said.
Osedeke said he got a court summon yesterday, reiterating that suing the union is not the best way to resolve issues in contest. If lecturers are forced back into classrooms, it’ll be to the detriment of the students and the nation at large.
Comrade Vivian Bellow, the convener of the Save-Public-Education-Campaign, Nigeria, expressed bitterness on the strike, saying there is need to declare a state of emergency in education sector in Nigeria.
Bellow pleaded with the government and ASUU to resolve the industrial dispute for the sake of students and the growth of the country.
She stated that her organization will write to the Federal Ministry of Education as observers and play their own role to see that issues are resolved, and strike called off.
A participant at the town hall meeting, Comrade Drew Povey, urged the union and citizens to utilise other means of getting the government to come to terms with ASUU since the strike is not yielding positive results.
While making reference to the students protests in Kaduna State and other states, Comrade Povey called on students to take it upon themselves and see that the issues are resolved for their own good as ASUU is fighting for a just cause.
