As the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, strike enters the third week, undergraduates in public universities are lamenting their fate. This happened just as the meeting between ASUU and the Federal Government held on Thursday ended in deadlock.

The Chairman of the Federal Government/Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) 2009 Agreement Renegotiation Committee, Wale Babalakin, has explained areas where his committee disagrees with striking university lecturers.

UNDERGRADUATES across universities in the country have condemned the never-ending strikes by their lecturers under the auspices of Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, saying it not only dislocates the academic calendar and causes brain drain in the institutions, it is also gradually killing the university system.

THE on-going strike by the academic staff of public universities is obviously an indication that  the recurring face-off between the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU and Federal Government is not likely to end any time soon. ASUU, through its national president, Abiodun Ogunyemi,  said it embarked on the strike, which has again thrown the Nigerian university system into another round of crisis, to protest poor funding of universities in the country and the refusal of government to honour an agreement it entered into with the union through the signing of a memorandum of understanding, MoU, in 2017.

The Federal Government negotiating team has appealed to the striking Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, to return to the negotiating table, while denying that it has proposed the imposition of N350,000 and N500,000 as tuition fees to be paid per annum by undergraduates.

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) chapters of the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU) and Bauchi State University, Gadau, had decried the detention of ATBU chapter Chairman, Dr Adamu Babayo, by the Department of State Services (DSS).

The National Union of Nigerian Students,  NUNS, has sided the ongoing ASUU strike, saying that’s the only action the Federal Government respects.

LIKE a thief in the night, the news of an indefinite, total, and comprehensive strike declared by the Academic Staff Union of Universities , ASUU, broke into various homes on Sunday November 4, 2018. The National Executive Council of the Union which held at the Federal University of Technology, Akure had unanimously expressed collective disappointment at the ‘Government  of Change’ that no substantial progress has been made on the issues of the implementation of 2009 FGN/ASUU agreements, Memorandum of Understanding (MoU; 2012 and 2013) and Memorandum of Action (MoA, 2017) and the truncation of the renegotiation of the union’s agreements. The goal of the strike is to compel government to address the funding for revitalisation of Public Universities based on the FGN-ASUU MoU of 2012, 2013 and the MoA of 2017.

FOR the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU and other unions in the Nigerian tertiary education system, strikes have become almost annual rituals and culture since the end of the 1970s. Everybody who has gone through our public-funded university system suffered varying degrees of academic disruptions that negatively affected life during and after school.

A member of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Mr Setonji David, on Tuesday urged the Federal Government to change the habit of paying lip service to the education sector, in the interest of national growth and development.