ASUU STRIKE: 'Begging Is Not The Solution' - Union Replies Lawmakers

post by Bamigbade Afeez Adekunle on 25 October, 2013

Education

University lecturers yesterday replied to Senate President David Mark’s comments on the 2009 agreement, which they are asking the Federal Government to implement.
Mark had said that the government officials who signed the agreement “did not know their right from their left” and that the ASUU officials who negotiated exploited their ignorance.
The National treasurer of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Dr. Demola Aremu said President Goodluck Jonathan was among those who signed the agreement 2009.

According to Aremu, it took ASUU and the Federal Government team, led by Mr Gamaliel Onosode, three years to arrive at the agreement, so the team knew what they were going into, adding that it is pretentious for any top government functionary to claim that the government negotiating team did not understand fully what they signed with the teachers.

He said ASUU went to the negotiation with a 300-page charter, which was reduced to a 60-page agreement after the union shifted so much ground on many of its demands and Jonathan, who was then the Vice President, asked the government to sign the agreement after thoroughly going through it for six months.

Aremu explained that the Federal Government also came up with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the implementation of the agreement in January last year. He asked: “So, if anyone assumes that they didn’t know what they were doing in 2009, did they also not know what they were doing in 2012?”

The union therefore called on the lawmakers and Nigerians to beg the President to implement the agreement as begging will not end the crisis.

“Begging will not bring any solution. Nigerians should rather beg government to face this agreement squarely and implement it. That is where our future lies,” Aremu said, adding that senators could also cut their allowances and contribute them to education for the benefit of all citizens.

Also speaking on the issue, the chairman of ASUU, University of Ibadan (UI) chapter, Dr Olusegun Ajiboye, Mark’s statement that ASUU will lose public sympathy, if it does not call off its strike, as “a careless talk” because, according to him, the Senate has already lost its credibility among Nigerians over its huge allowances and its perpetual anti-masses stance as opposed to the progressives in the House of Representatives.

He also lashed out at the Vice Chairman of the Senate Committee on Education, Prof. Sola Adeyeye, over his comments on why a professor will demand payment to supervise postgraduate students, saying people, such as Adeyeye, ought to keep quiet when education is being discussed as “his immediate family members are not in Nigeria with all his children schooling and living abroad, using the millions of public funds being earned by their father in Nigeria to live large abroad.