The Pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organization, Afenifere, has described the strike embarked on by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) since February as very unfortunate.
Afenifere said that the strike should not have occurred in the first place had the Federal Government shown that it sincerely wanted the impasse to be amicably resolved.
The ASUU had, on Monday, extended its six-month-old strike indefinitely, following the failure to reach a compromise with the Federal Government.
National Publicity of the organization, Mr. Jare Ajayi, who spoke on the development, said that the strike by ASUU was very unfortunate from the very beginning.
He urged the Federal Government to use the looted funds from the suspended Accountant-General of the Federation and the ones dubbed as ‘Abacha loots’ to take care of the infrastructural and logistics deficits in universities as being demanded by the union.
Ajayi said: “We implore the Federal Government to use the looted funds from the suspended Accountant-General of the Federation and those dubbed as ‘Abacha loots’ to take care of the infrastructural and logistics deficits in the universities as being demanded by ASUU.”
He further said that going by the way things were currently, many would be condemning ASUU for continuing with the strike, adding that the union might indeed be described as a saboteur and insensitive to the plight of students and parents.
He, however, said that doing so would be in conformity with the attitude of many Nigerians who often blamed “the weak or victim when a powerful element uses his might to oppress the weak.”
Afenifere spokesman, however, faulted ASUU for its failure to properly articulate its position in a manner that the public would fully understand, saying: “As things are now, ASUU would be condemned whereas the government is the agent provocateur given the fact that there is hardly any major agreement it reached with Nigerians and major public-oriented organizations in the country that it fulfilled satisfactorily.
“It was always quick to react when and where the interests of the political class were at stake. But when it comes to matters affecting the average person in the country, the government always behaves as if it did not derive its mandate from the people.”
