ASUU STRIKE: US-based scholar blasts education, communication ministers
The impending Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) industrial action should not be allowed to take place and every right thing should be done to prevent it.
US-based Nigerian scholar, Professor Far
ooq Kperogi, said the strike “will maim the dreams, hopes, and aspirations of our young people…”
ASUU was on strike for 10 months in 2020, until it was later suspended in December that year, after reaching an agreement with federal government.
Since then, however, the union has been accusing the government of not keeping to her promises, hence, the growing fear of another strike from the university dons.
Kperogi said in a Facebook post on Friday that Nigeria’s education minister, Adamu Adamu “is sitting pretty in his easy chair as if nothing is going badly amiss?”
He also blasted communications and digital economy minister, Isa Ali Pantami who he accused of loving “the glory of academia so much that he went out of his way to beg FUTO to confer an unearned professorial title on him.”
Kperogi accused the two minsters of “pretending not to see as the university system is about to collapse completely before his eyes.”
He wrote that “Adamu Adamu and Pantami are far and away the closest ministers to Buhari. They can get the regime to meet ASUU’s demands and save what remains of our universities if they want to. Will they do this for posterity and for the future of the children of the poor who can’t send their kids to private or overseas universities?”
He said Pantami “loves the bragging rights that come with being called a “professor” but not the sacrifice it takes to save the university system whose highest titular glory he swanks.”
The professor holds the view that the federal government has not been far to the university education system in the country, saying “No rational, sensible person can defend or ignore a situation where full professors earn less than 500,000 naira (which is less than $1,000) per month!”
Even though Kperogi appears not to like the strike idea, he lends his support to ASUU’s agitations, saying “none of the demands of ASUU that I’ve read that can be called unreasonable. None.”
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