The aggrieved members in trying to convince the recipients of their petition that Comrade Oyelekan was actually out to violate the union’s statutes, sketched out portions of the union’s constitution they believe Comrade Oyelekan is breaching in his plot to get for himself a fourth tenure in office.
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According to victims, the extortion scheme, which commenced on March 30, 2020 when the lockdown kicked off, was initially thought to be the usual opportunistic instinct associated with the police. However, it quickly transformed into a well-oiled revenue drive from which the police are raking in huge income on daily and weekly basis from their men enforcing the government-imposed restrictions.
“We in NASU see the decision to implement the Report as a licence and cover to carry out retrenchment in some sections of the public service and this is not acceptable to the Union. The policy direction, which is ill-timed is another attempt by the advisers and drivers of the policy to pitch the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari against workers and their unions. It is going to bring about job losses and poverty and this is not the time to throw people into the over-saturated unemployment market,” NASU stated emphatically.”
According to the union, “the methodology to be applied for the intervention must not be business-as-usual. For, there have been two previous such financial interventions in the aviation sector in recent memory, both of which left much to be desired. In those instances, airlines like Arik Air, Kabo Air (defunct), Air Nigeria (defunct), and many others collected billions of naira supposedly for capital injection into their businesses but were diverted to personal usages, and callously leaving the airlines to bleed to death. The promoters of these airlines then ran away with bloated personal bank accounts and they are walking free till today. Therefore, if the same methodology as before were to be used, then we fear that the same undesirable result will accrue.”
The fact that the overlapping generations of the ruling class in Nigeria have had to fight ASUU should tell people that it is the same people who have been running our affairs; they are the same interests, if not directly the same people, that have been running our affairs; people who just want to take us to Washington and hand our fortune over to them.
If I can go back to this issue of corruption; you see, people who have cornered so much public money for themselves have reproduced themselves such that if you jailed somebody who was a governor, there are so many other people that he has put money in their hands to continue this agenda of stealing. So it doesn’t change anything fundamentally because they country belongs to them, and all of that.
The leaders have come from the military and they came along with what someone has called residual militarism and messianic arrogance to the exercise of power. It is a very destructive attitude that tolerates no argument or any kind of asserting individual or collective identity. In all cases, you must beg them to get whatever you want or you risk conquest. That’s what unites Obasanjo and Buhari in terms of attitude to ASUU. IBB is not much different but he is more mellowed or smarter in terms of when to stop.
While it is understandable for Nigeria, less scientifically and technologically endowed, poorly motivated healthcare manpower, with an equally decayed health infrastructure to be overawed by Covid-19; the prevailing circumstances around which the war against the infection is organised appear not only unserious but markedly flawed.
There is no modern society in which everybody employs herself or himself. Ordinary people have internalised this and they are saying it! The victims have imbibed the ideology of their exploiters, the ideology of their class enemies – the explanations and ideas, the ideology that oppresses them, and imprisoned them at the level where they are; that’s the point that I am making.
“As people are locked down in their homes waiting for good news, the battle is on in the labs of the ‘scientific world’, where eggheads, including our brethren who had been chased away by poor working conditions, are also locked down in the search for a potent portion, called vaccine, that will bind Covid-19.”