The hope of Nigerian students to go back to school following an early resolution of the issues that forced their teachers under the aegis of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to embark on strike may be forlorn after all.
This is because the Federal Government on Tuesday expressed reservations on the content of the agreement signed by government of late President Umaru Yar’Adua with the ASUU, saying it would not subscribe to its implementation without amending the contentious issues.
Minister of Labour and Productivity, Emeka Wogu, stated government’s position at a news briefing at the end of a meeting with members of the National Working Committee (NWC) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Abuja.
The Labour Minister insisted that it was wrong for anyone to blame the Jonathan administration for the impasse.
According to him, the agreements with ASUU “predate the present administration which has found it a bit challenging to succumb to the letters of the agreement forcing it to seek renegotiation.”
Speaking on the efforts of the present administration towards resolving the crisis, he said: “We have held series of discussions with ASUU and those discussions are centered around the 2009 agreements which predate this administration, which equally has to be re-negotiated.
“The terms of that agreement have created problems not only for this administration but the former administration of President Umaru Yar’Adua.
“What we are doing now will be long standing if ASUU will give us the opportunity to continue with these negotiations that have been on-going.
“We made an offer to ASUU, it was not acceptable to them. So the right thing for everybody to do is to come back to the negotiation table,” Wogu added.
But the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) threatened to join ASUU in solidarity strike if the Federal Government fails to address the union’s demands in its ongoing struggle.
NLC President, Abdulwaheed Omar, issued the threat at the opening ceremony of the ‘2013 Rain School’ in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State capital.
“We call on the Federal Government to have meaningful dialogue with ASUU with a view to implementing the agreement.
“The state governments should equally obey the law and pay minimum wage to teachers and the local government workers as well as the 27.5 per cent teachers’ enhanced salaries.
“Should these strikes persist, workers of Nigeria will not hesitate to join them in solidarity,” he stressed.
Meanwhile, Joint Action Front (JAF) also on Tuesday in Lagos jumped into the fray between ASUU and the Federal Government, calling on Nigerians to support an imminent national protest to save public education in the country.
It reiterated that the protest was inevitable, appealing to Nigerians to see the current struggle by the ASUU “and the inconclusive struggles of other unions in the education sector as the struggle of the Nigerian oppressed masses.”
A statement jointly signed by two spokespersons, Dipo Fashina and Abiodun Aremu, said “JAF has agreed on a template for national mobilisation and urges all stakeholders in the education sector – parents, students, ASUU, ASUP, SSANIP, COESU, National Union of Teachers (NUT), Non-Academic Staff Union (NASU), Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), professionals and workers’ unions in the NLC and TUC and the oppressed masses of Nigeria to hold consultative and mobilisation meetings and rallies, in view of the programme of action to be made public in the next one week.”
It said the planned national protest is against the current trend of poor funding and neglect for public education by government at all levels, and appealed to Nigerians to see the ongoing struggle by ASUU as inevitable.
“We appeal to Nigerians to support the coming national protest to save public education from collapse.”
JAF insisted that the intervention in the crises in the education sector is part of its consistent campaign for system change and called on “Nigerians, home and abroad, to dare to struggle in order to win.”
“We use this opportunity to remind Nigerians of some of the demands by the academic unions that centre around failure by governments (federal and state) to fund facilities and infrastructure in the universities, for the revitalisation of the facilities and academic programmes; failure to implement the NEEDS Assessment Report as agreed in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on January 24, 2012 on the standardisation and effective running of the universities; and failure to pay legitimately earned allowances of the academic staff.”
Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO) branch of ASUU also spoke on Tuesday, vowing never to shift ground on the teachers’ four-week-old strike until the Federal Government meets their demand.
Chairman of the union in the school, Ikenna Nwachukwu, who addressed newsmen in Oweeri, said calling off the strike would mean a collapse of the university system in the country.
He said the union would fight to the end to reposition and revitalise the university system.
Insisting that the Federal Government should implement faithfully, the October 2009 agreement, Nwachukwu pointed out that time of negotiation was over.
“Four years after signing the agreement – 2009 to 2013 – ASUU as a responsible union employed every workable, peaceful and civilised means to make the government to fulfil their own part of the agreement but government deliberately refused to honour key areas of the agreement,” Nwachukwu said.
The ASUU boss wondered how long the nation’s public universities would continue to operate in shambles without infrastructure, laboratories and conducive academic environment, lamenting that the universities have continued to produce half baked graduates that cannot compete favourably with their counterparts in other countries.
On his part, National Treasurer of ASUU, Ademola Aremu, called on the Federal Government to declare a state of emergency in the education sector to address the rot in the system.
Aremu, the immediate past chairman of the University of Ibadan (UI) chapter of the union, noted that the attitude of the Federal Government which led to the ongoing strike was not a good lesson for the younger generations.
“It is better to close down the universities in Nigeria than to continue to produce ignorant people,” the don said, adding, “Ghana is now the home to Nigerian students and children of the elite in particular because Ghana shut down the education system for two years and now they are enjoying the gains of the struggle.
“We may have to borrow a leaf from them and put our education on sound footing to stop outsiders from making us a laughing stock.
“Nigerians pay close to N100 billion to access education in Ghana. These were the same Ghanaians that were here doing menial jobs.” he noted.
