Ekiti State Governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi has called on the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to shelve the seven months ongoing industrial action in the best interest of the students.
Fayemi stressed the need for urgent and holistic engagement between Federal Government and the leadership of ASUU in order to bring an end to the current impasse.
The governor made this appeal in Ado-Ekiti while playing host to members of the Board of Trustees of the Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Foundation, led by its Chairman and former Governor of Niger State, Dr Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu, in his office.
He urged the academic union to look at the hardship the students and their parents are going through in view of the strike that has kept the students at home for over seven months.
“We need to get to a point of convergence with ASUU, but I also think ASUU should begin to look at this from the position of their importance. It is the students of the ordinary Nigerians who attend the local universities. So, even if it is for the sake of ordinary Nigerians who have children in these universities and cannot afford to send their children to private universities or abroad.
“Whatever the areas are, we would like to engage them, not as Federal Government but as concerned parties at the level of government who feel that we can still work out an arrangement in which you don’t completely dictate to your employer how he pays your salaries.
“If agreement has been entered into and if it is not going to be honoured, you owe a duty to urge other party to review it consensually and then come up with something that is mutually acceptable to both sides.
Speaking further, Fayemi who posited that education remained the greatest antidote to poverty, said education should be refocused at the national level due to its importance to national development.
“Education in Nigeria should be treated nationally. It requires a national approach; it cannot just be isolated state by state, and particularly for regulatory purpose, in terms of standard of the curriculum and in terms of supervisory engagement. We really need to do things that will make us appear as if cherish the importance of education in the lives of our citizens”, he noted.
Earlier, Dr Babangida Aliyu had told the Governor that the Foundation was established as an instrument for the promotion of the ideals of Sir Ahmadu Bello and to promote the development of Northern Nigeria which prompted the foundation to commission a research in support of efforts to improve education in the region.
The former Governor berated the high level of out-of-school children in the North and posited that the problem of education in the North requires a national approach.
He, therefore, called on the Governor in his capacity as the Chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum to spearhead the formation of an endowment fund to revamp education in the North, believing that the effort would go a long way to bridge the divide and erase some acrimonious feelings.