Dare Babalola
Christopher Piwuna, the President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has disclosed that the Federal Government took its members for granted for too long, noting that lecturers gave the government enough time to meet its demands.
Piwuna who spoke on Wednesday when he appeared as a guest on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief stressed that lecturers of public universities had made sacrifices and deserved their entitlements.
He lamented, “We’ve been on this for such a long time, and we have, in our view, always demonstrated patience, understanding, and have adopted dialogue to try to address these issues.
“Since democracy started in 1999 to now, people are quick to say that ASUU has been on strike and schools have been closed, and you wonder what the government thinks about these actions.”
In addition, the union said it engaged the administration of President Bola Tinubu, but claimed that the response of the government was extremely slow.
“When this government came into power two and a half years or so ago, we had engaged them. This is the second Minister of Education since the advent of this administration; we engaged Prof. Tahir Mamman; we have engaged the current minister, Dr. Tunji Alausa, over these issues.
“And it appears as if the machines of the government work extremely slowly, and we have had that over and over again,” the ASUU president said.
“And we say to ourselves, ‘Why can’t you make it more efficient, why can’t you make the government more responsive to these issues?’
“But we think that we have demonstrated enough patience; we’ve kept the schools open. And let me just make this point: the government has tried to keep the schools open,” he added.
Recall that members of the union on Tuesday embarked on a nationwide protest to highlight what they described as the Federal Government’s persistent neglect of its long-standing demands.
