A chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Prof. Haruna Yerima, has urged President Bola Tinubu to resolve the outstanding issues with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and not allow them to dent his administration’s good image.
He advised President Tinubu to avoid the pitfalls that marred the administrations of his predecessors, which culminated in long strikes that grounded the public universities.
Professor Yerima appealed on Sunday in a statement he released in Abuja.
ASUU embarked on a two-week warning strike last week over the federal government’s alleged refusal to honour the agreements it signed with the lecturers.
The union said Nigerian university lecturers are the poorest in Africa, earning far less than their colleagues in smaller economies like Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Uganda.
Professor Yerima, a House of Representatives member, said, “Mr President, as a realist, you are fully aware of the infrastructural decay in our public universities. The student-teacher and infrastructure ratio is not encouraging. These are facts. This is what ASUU is fighting for.”
He said the economic reforms President Tinubu undertook were taking their toll on the university teachers.
“What professors in Nigerian universities earn monthly is peanuts compared to their workload. The salary can’t pay their basic utilities, school fees, and medicals,” he said.
The don urged the president to “understand that most of his support base are the youth, supposedly in the universities. It is incumbent on Mr President not to toy with the future of the youth by allowing the strike to fester.”
“Don’t repeat the mistakes made by the late President Muhammadu Buhari, who recorded the second-longest ASUU strike in Nigerian history. It is possible to address all the reasonable agreements reached with ASUU once and for all. You have the capacity and wherewithal to do just that,” the professor said.
Mr Yerima said, “Other laudable policies, such as making Nigeria a trillion-dollar economy, can’t be achieved with an uneducated youth constituting the working population. Nigerians have tremendous confidence in you to resolve the ASUU age-long debacle, and we are sure you will not fail them.”
