The Academic Staff Union of Universities has cried out over the Federal Government’s failure to release the sum of N1.3tr meant for the revitalisation of the nation’s universities.
The Federal Government agreed to release the amount meant for the institutions over a period of five years, with the first disbursement being N200bn in 2013, while N220b was agreed to be released in each of the four remaining years. The agreement led to ASUU’s suspension of its last strike in December 2013.
Chairman of the University of Ibadan chapter of the union, Prof. Segun Ajiboye, made the disclosure in Ibadan during the University of Ibadan 63rd Post-Graduate School Interdisciplinary Discourse, held on Saturday.
Ajiboye said,“An expression of the lack of integrity is failure to keep a promise made in public. For example, the Federal Government has failed to release the promised sum of N1.3tr National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy’s intervention fund beyond the 200bn released for 2013. Since the release of the first batch of the money, no money was released in 2014 while a quarter of 2015 has passed with nothing from the government.”
He added that the lack of integrity on the part of the government and its officials led to the 19 strikes which the union had embarked upon between 1992 and 2013.
National President of ASUU, Dr. Nasir Fagge, who was represented at the event by his deputy, Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi, said that the major reason for going on frequent strike in 21 years was because government failed to honour the agreements it freely signed with the union.
Comparing university community to a microcosm of the larger Nigerian society, Fagge said that poor government policies were responsible for Nigerian universities’ graduation of poor leaders who lacked empathy and connection with current realities due to the irrelevant curriculum they were made to study. Fagge spoke on the topic, ‘ASUU struggles and the revitilisation of public university education in Nigeria’.
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