Bauchi ASUU accuses education minister of aggression

Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in Bauchi State has accused the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, of leading a gang of ministers to fight them over the ongoing national strike.

The lecturers made the allegation in a press conference at the ASUU Secretariat in the University of Jos (UNIJOS) yesterday.
Coordinator of ASUU Bauchi zone, Prof. Lawan Abubakar, who addressed the press on behalf of his colleagues, said: “Adamu leads his colleagues like Chris Ngige, Isa Pantami and Zainab Ahmad to misrepresent facts and mislead the good people of Nigeria against ASUU.”

Describing the antics of the minister as unfortunate, Abubakar said: “It is the highest level of unpatriotic disservice a minister would do to his nation, particularly a sector like education, which is the backbone of any country’s development. If this is the way to end ASUU strike, the Bauchi zone is taking exception to it and assuring Adamu that he is wrong; he has rather succeeded in undermining the future of Nigerian youths and Nigeria.

“If it would take him six months to only come up with this deceit as a solution to the strike, we then have the right to ask whether he really has a brain in his skull. It has now come to bare that the minister had, all along, been deceiving everybody since 2017, as far as ASUU’s agitations in the tenure of this government are concerned.”

According to him, the Federal Government, through Adamu, did not approach ASUU with any reasonable and acceptable solution to the issues in contention that led to the current strike, adding that “the miserable and insulting awards of the government” were rejected by the union.

“So, the minister’s claim that ASUU has accepted the offers from government was a blatant lie aimed at scuttling what the Prof. Nimi Briggs presidential committee sought to resolve, thereby undermining the sincerity of the committee in resolving the issues,” he said.

“That we gave him the condition of payment of our withheld salaries before the strike would be called off was, also, another cynical falsehood. It is worthy to note that the same Adamu has spent most of his tenure in office shuttling between Nigeria and Europe on medical tourism over his health and at the same time collecting his salary for those periods that he has been away from work. Is that not hypocrisy unbecoming of a serving minister to turn round and accuse ASUU of not working during strike despite the research and community service which they are currently engaged in while on strike, which are the core mandates of the terms of our engagement?” the union stated.

The zone, therefore, called on students, parents, civil society organisations and the general public to continue to understand and join hands with ASUU in the struggle for the emancipation of the Nigerian public university system by insisting that government has the resources and should commit such resources to adequately fund public university education.

It added: “If the immediate pass Accountant-General of the Federation, Ahmed Idris, alone can steal over N170 billion, we don’t know yet how much others have stolen.”