By Taiwo Otitolaye.
As a friend to the Academic Staff Union of Universities for over three (3) decades, I am inclined to set up a search party to look for the “missing” ASUU.
This search for ASUU is urgent and important. As our Minister for Education is looking for ASUU
penultimate day, I wasn’t sure of what the Minister was getting at when he asked a question of the whereabouts of ASUU.
It couldn’t make sense at first until he went further.
According to him, “ASUU, unfortunately, they have gone on strike and I am looking for them because all the issues are being addressed.”
One could take the Minister for a mid-day dramatist rehearsing for an award winning play to be staged at a village agora.
Conservatively, I have been part of the ASUU struggles for the past three (3) decades. In 1996, at UNILORIN ASUU FAMILY DAY, I remember that I recited a poem during a stakeholders’ gathering to sensitize the general public on the failure of the Nigerian state to honour a 1992 agreement.
This same agreement has been renegotiated, over and over again, without responsive actions by the government.
This deceits by successive governments, is cacophonous to the needs and pathway to national development.
Only retrogressive, kleptomaniac and recycled leadership that relegates the educational system of a country to a No-Value-Sector.
This recurring discordancy, have grossly eroded the gains of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Unfortunately, those who destroyed these foundations have found themselves up the ladder again, to further decimated it.
Nigerians across board, are astonishing, over the years, instead of joining voices to call political leadership to order in fixing the rot, majority thinks it’s better to beg ASUU not to use strike as a legitimate tool for DEMAND ACCOUNTABILITY.
The citizenry majorly, have relapsed back to a fault in the Advocacy for overhauling the most important Sector-education.
Adamu Adamu must be a village jester who found himself in the position of the education Minister. He has robustly demonstrated his incompetency in this capacity given the way he has handled the crisis over time.
ASUU have conspicuously and willingly made itself available to the public glare, so visible, for a serious Public Officer to know the issues at hand.
Like the poem of C.P Cavity “Waiting For The Barbarians.” ASUU have been to the frontiers, it has been to the National Assembly Chambers, it has been to the Presidency, it has severally presented the issues of disputes beneficial to all, to the PEOPLE’S PARLIAMENT; it’s for the people to either bury their destiny and that of generations to come, or fulfill it.
The search party must be for the leadership of Nigeria, their collaborators; and for the docile citizenry that have slumbered for ages.
In Solidarity with ASUU
