A chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Professor Haruna Yerima, has urged President Bola Tinubu to resolve the outstanding issues with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), and not allow it to dent the good image his administration.
He advised President Tinubu to avoid the pitfalls that marred the administrations of his predecessors that culminated into long strikes that grounded the public universities.
Professor Yerima made the appeal on Sunday in a statement he released in Abuja.
ASUU has embarked on a two-week warning strike last week over the federal government’s alleged refusal to honour the agreements it signed with the lecturers.
The union said Nigerian university lecturers are the poorest in Africa, earning far less than their colleagues in smaller economies like Zimbabwe, Ghana, Uganda, among others.
Professor Yerima, who was a House of Representatives member, said, “Mr President, as a realist, you are fully aware of the infrastructural decay in our public universities. The student-teacher and infrastructure ratio is not encouraging. These are facts. This is what ASUU is fighting for.”
He said the economic reforms undertaking by President Tinubu is faring its toll on the university teachers. “What professors in Nigerian universities earn monthly is peanut compared to their work-load. The salary can’t pay their basic utilities let alone schools fees, medicals, among others,” he said.
The don urged the president to “understand that majority of his support base are the youth- who are supposedly in the universities. It is beholden on Mr President not to toy with the future of the youth by allowing the strike to fester.”
“Don’t repeat the mistakes made by late President Muhammadu Buhari who recorded the second longest ASUU strike in Nigerian history. It is possible to address all the reasonable agreements reached with ASUU once and for all. You have the capacity and wherewithal to do just that,” the professor said.
Mr Yerima said, “other laudable polices such as making Nigeria become a trillion dollar economy can’t be achieved with an uneducated youth that constitutes the working population. Nigerians have tremendous confidence in you to resolve the ASUU age-long debacle and we are sure you will not fail them.”
