The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), on Tuesday, reacted to President Muhammadu Buhari’s comments regarding the strike carried out by the union.
Buhari, on Monday via a statement signed by his special adviser on media and publicity, Garba Shehu, called on ASUU to call off the strike.
The president said that “enough is enough” while hoping that the union “will sympathise with the people on the prolonged strike.”
In response, ASUU said enough can’t be enough “until the president moves to reposition the decaying public university education in the country.”
The union accused Mr Buhari of not acting presidentially by addressing the issues that led to the strike.
The response was contained in a statement by the Lagos zone of the union and signed by its coordinator, Adelaja Odukoya.
The statement read in part: “For the records Mr President, enough will not be enough in the struggle to reposition the public university education in Nigeria under this present administration and beyond as long as the Nigerian public universities are reduced to glorified secondary schools for the production of poor quality and globally uncompetitive, rejected and unemployable graduates; Nigerian academics remain one of the poorest paid scholars not only in Africa but the world; our universities are unattractive to students and scholars from across the globe; universities in the countries are made constituency projects and mushroomed for political exigencies; Nigerian universities, no thanks to IPPIS are run as government parastatals; Nigerian universities are seen as profit- centres where government and its functionaries can obtain money to fund its excessive gastronomical greed.”
Also, the chairperson of ASUU, Federal University of Minna, Dr. Gbolahan Bolarin, accused the president of playing psychological games by involving the future generation in his statement.
“Firstly, Mr President was very vocal about the ASUU struggle some years back before becoming the President and one would have expected him to know about the struggle more than some people but unfortunately, his statement yesterday suggested otherwise. I won’t blame the president that much, I can only say that his handlers are his enemies because if the president was properly briefed about the matter, he wouldn’t have made that statement.
“Again, the president said enough is enough, what is actually enough? Was he talking about the attitude of his appointees to direct order, as evident in the directive he gave on February 1, 2022, and was not executed for over two months? Was he tired of going through reports on assignments given to different agencies? These are more of his faults and not that of the Union.
“The president was trying so hard to play a psychological game by bringing students (next generation) into the statement forgetting that the lecturers like any other common Nigerian have their kids and wards in public universities but his kids are/were not/never in public universities.”
Speaking further in the statement, the ASUU chairperson cautioned the presidential spokesperson and other government officials against making issues of ASUU political.
