ASUU Strike: NASU Lauds Jonathan Over Initiative

The general secretary of the Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU) Peters Adeyemi has lauded President Goodluck Jonathan for his initiative to invite the unionists for dialogue over the ongoing crisis but said his intervention should have come before the situation degenerated.

  He said owing to ill advice and laxity characterizing those in government, Nigerians and students have been made to suffer untold hardship.

 This, he said contributes to the low rating of Nigerian universities in the international community.
 Adeyemi stated this in Abuja on Tuesday, at the inauguration of a network for Non-Academic, Academic and Research Workers Unions, covering Nigeria and other African nations.

 He said,” I am happy that the President has taken up the challenge with ASUU and I think that the guys in ASUU are also patriotic people, I am sure this meeting that Mr President has held with them would yield the desired result, I also think that the problem has been mismanaged.

“Mismanaged in the sense that those critical elements in government have not properly advised Mr President on this matter, because you find that if at the end of the day, it is the personal intervention of the President that would solve this problem then why did we wait till we have lost considerable time.

“I think that there is this thing that has become part of governance, people don’t do what they are supposed to do in good time.

“They allow for things to happen and allow us to go through pains, things that ordinarily would have been done to prevent unions from going on strike, people treat them with levity and they go about running helta skater when this things happen.

“I want to commend Mr President for his courage to call this meeting”.
He also criticised the privatisation of public universities and institutions in the country, saying rather than correct the ills associated with education such privatisation compounds the problem.

  “You find that most of our institutions now are becoming private, you cannot regulate anything there, and you cannot determine even the salaries and condition of service of workers in these private institutions.
“When as a government you cannot determine the pay and the entitlements of workers in certain establishment you have no basis of measuring the output of these workers so you cannot say then that the standard of the education in our private tertiary institution is better than the standard of education in public institutions.