Guardian Nigeria
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), has raised the alarm that education is dying in Nigeria as “academics have become the endangered species in Nigeria’s existential space”.
Zonal Coordinator, Benin Zone of ASUU Prof. Monday Igbafen, stated this, yesterday, at a press conference in Abraka, Delta State, while alerting critical stakeholders about government’s recklessness over the union’s issues. He said education has been in doldrums because of governments’ actions and inactions, and called on stakeholders to prevail on governments to do the needful.
While lamenting the infrastructural decay, poor funding, proliferation of universities in Nigeria, Igbafen said: “ASUU was irked by the obvious lack of sincerity on the part of governments to address critical issues, which have worsened the living and working conditions of academic staff in public universities over the years”.
The failure of governments to address the myriad of challenges and worsening living and working conditions in Nigeria public universities is a direct invitation to crisis.
“The crisis is eminent, if this and other unresolved sundry issues are not urgently and reasonably addressed by government,” he said. On the issue of proliferation of universities, he said it was one of the issues that precipitated the 2022 prolonged strike action by the union but regretted that governments still established many Universities without serious consideration for their adequate funding, describing it as a nebulous thinking which is inimical to the growth and pursuit of education.
He also said that in 2020, the ASUU-FGN Memorandum of Action stressed the need to review the Nigeria University Commission (NUC) Act to empower it to arrest the reckless proliferation of universities by Federal and States governments without adequate budgetary provision to fund them.
The reckless establishment of universities by politicians, most of which are seen as constituency projects, has put much pressure on the intervention funds provided by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund(TETFund). He urged the governments to halt the proliferation of universities but fund the existing ones to enable them compete with Ivory Towers in other parts of the world.
Igbafen, who was accompanied by chairman, ASUU UNIBEB, Dr. Ray Chikogu, newly elected ASUU DELSU, Dr. Paul Opone, and others, posited that until the right things were done, ASUU would continue to confront the Federal Government to think out of the box to end all issues, which include the absence of governing councils in federal and states universities.
