Disturbed by the multiplicity of strikes by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and their counterpart in the polytechnics, among others in the nation’s education sector, the Trade Union Congress (TUC), on Tuesday urged the Federal Government to implement agreements reached with the teachers to save it from collapse
ASUU declared an indefinite strike action since Wednesday July 3, 2013, over government’s persistent refusal to fully implement the joint agreement signed since 2009.
The Labour Center in a statement signed by its President General, Comrade Bobboi Bala Kaigama and Secretary General, Comrade Musa Lawal, called on President Goodluck Jonathan not to rely solely on reports from members of in his cabinet, as they may never tell him the truth about the agreement reached with the teachers. They stressed that as a concerned stakeholder with interest in the development of the country, TUC will not watch haplessly while strikes cripple the education sector.
The union called “on Federal Government to implement the agreement reached with the Varsity, Poly teachers to save the nation’s education sector from collapse because it is instructive that this strike has been brewing for four years, being a fall-out of the Federal Government’s non-implementation of some key clauses in its memorandum of understanding that it entered into with the lecturers in 2009, notable amongst the said clauses is that dealing with the “Academic Earned Allowance (AEA)” which the Federal Government agreed to be paying the lecturers.
“The fact that ASUU strike is coming on the heels of several industrial actions already racking the education sector such as the strike action of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and particularly the nationwide strike of the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) and the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Polytechnics (SSANIP) which has lasted for more than 50 days now shows that there is nowhere else to lay the blame for the perennial strike disrupting academic activities in the education sector except at the doorsteps of the government”, it added
Continuing, the TUC noted that “no reasonable person can blame University lecturers for again embarking on strike, having tried severally and unsuccessfully to get the Government to fulfill its promises under the agreement, since 2009, the Union has embarked on series of actions including dialogues and occasional strikes none of which have succeeded in convincing the government to meet its demands.”
According to the Labour Center, the dangers in the ongoing strike is not far from the fact that the “cumulative result would amount to the standard of education slumping further, greater percentage of graduates are half-baked and unemployable, and the socio-economic prospects of the country become dimmer than ever before.
“Indeed the country simply suffers on all platforms because no nation does better than the level of education of its people would permit. Yet these students are the leaders of tomorrow”, it however said.
