ASUU Strike: If Only they Consider Education to be as Important as Elections

ASUU Strike: If Only they Consider Education to be as Important as Elections

By Abdelghaffar Amoka

INFOMEDIA – Nigeria spent 108.8 billion naira to conduct the 2015 general elections according to the Report of the 2015 General Elections. And 189 billion naira was presented by President Buhari for the conduct of the 2019 general election and got approved by National Assembly but no enough money to properly fund education.

The same government that splashed 189 billion naira to conduct a “free, fair and credible” election, a few days exercise, last year can only afford 20 billion naira as “a commitment” for the revitalization of all the public universities for quality education in Nigeria. Quite interesting!

For the past 6 years, there is no enough fund for the 1.1 trillion naira revitalization fund for public universities they happily established and still establishing more, and no enough fund to pay the 7 years accumulated legitimate earned academic allowance (EAA).

For the past 11 years, Lecturers have being on the same salary scale, and they have tactically avoided the renegotiation for over 8 years. That is their level of commitment to education!

Instead of declaring a state of emergency in education as recommended by the Minister of Education, Mall Adamu Adamu in 2017, and discussing the rebuilding of the education sector for national development, they are preoccupied with the inconsequential IPPIS that will further strangulate the university system. What a shame!

Surprisingly, the tagged “selfish and corrupt ASUU” have been begging Buhari’s Government, a government that is supposedly fighting corruption to send Visitation Panels to the universities but they are still reluctant. They are treating the Visitation Panel as doing ASUU a favour.

This government intends to fight corruption in the federal universities with IPPIS but reluctant to send Visitation Panels to the same Universities to check corruption and the excesses of the management staff. Does that make any sense?

If they had given education at all levels the priority they gave to elections (a few days exercise), Nigerian public schools would have being so sound and there would not have being any reason to send their kids to schools abroad.

Abdelghaffar Amoka is a lecturer in the Department of Physics, ABU Zaria