Daily Independent (Lagos)
Baba Negedu
6 July 2009
Kaduna — Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) at the weekend decried the indefinite strike embarked upon by members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).
The Congress stated that it has worsened the deplorable education sector and underdevelopment in the country. The NLC made the assertion in a press statement it issued in Kaduna and signed by the vice-president, Issa Aremu.
According to the union, even though it has acknowledged the recent intervention of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) on Wednesday July 1, 2009 on the ongoing negotiation between the Federal government and the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU) following the strike by ASUU, it described it as too token.
The statement read in part: "The intervention came too token and too unhelpful for the poor parents, hundreds of thousands of students and the striking academic staff as well as Nigeria as a whole. It was bad enough that ASUU had two weeks warning strike during the month of March.
"It is now even worse enough that we ever allowed warning strike to degenerate into indefinite industrial action meaning mass closure of public universities.
"At the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, the Federal government reportedly accepted three out of the four major demands by the striking lecturers namely autonomy for all the universities, increased funding and approval of 70 years as the retirement age for university lecturers. Other issues still in contention include the demand for pay increase and funding of the university.
"The lecturers' pay as well as increased funding for education are two outstanding demands that are critical to the resolution of the current crisis."
Against this backdrop, the NLC urged the Federal government to urgently demonstrate necessary sense of urgency by address those issues that led to the strike.
"Sadly, the official sense of purpose and responsibility to address the university crisis is missing. For instance, the Minister of Education, Dr. Sam Egwu, reportedly said the crisis should be resolved in "one or two weeks".
Similarly, ASUU reportedly said the indefinite strike continues. Also Minister of Information and Communications, Prof. Dora Akunyili, talked with similar ambiguity to say that the crisis "will soon be resolved in a matter of weeks", the statement further lamented.
The union further stressed: "Government officials, paid public officers from the President, Vice President to ministers and governors should not confirm the popular impression that their loud and intolerable indifference to ASUU strike and the casual manner in which the demands of ASUU are being treated is because their children are not in these schools.
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