By our reporter
Governor David Umahi of Ebonyi State has called on Stakeholders in the Education Sector to rally round to ensure timely end to the lingering ASUU strike for the sake of the future of the Nation.
Umahi who made the call when he received a delegation of the Board of Trustees of the Nigeria Police Trust Fund led by Chief Ben Akabueze in Abakaliki urged the negotiating parties to show understanding to resolve the impasse and reopen universities
He said ASUU and the Federal Government should be ready to meet each other halfway so that the strike can be called off while the implementation will take a gradual process.
According to him "Our basic problem in this country remains security, health and education. Let me say a little about education, which is in our public domain and which the ASUU strike is and I think that our education system is not being properly educated".
“University education is not for everybody and that is the truth. The basic education every country strives to attain is secondary school and vocational schools. These are the basic schools and when you have these qualifications, you will be able to use them either to start up something or to be able to use it to be employed and while you are in employment, if you don’t have the mercy you will be able to aspire to university education.
“There is a need to review our educational system, it mustn’t be for everybody. I am not ashamed that I have a first degree and my Deputy is a Ph.D holder, it doesn’t matter. It is what you bring on board. So, I cannot see how we cannot sit down with our ASUU leaders and iron out this problem about the ASUU strike.
“I have gone through social media, read newspapers, how students got into trouble just by sitting at home or engaging in means of keeping themselves busy instead of being in schools. There is no way the country will go and borrow N1.1trillion to meet ASUU’s demand, it’s quite unreasonable. Are their demands genuine? Yes, but we can start little by little.
“There must be a commitment on the side of both parties, that look, ASUU is not asking this to take to their houses so to say, they are asking it for our children to better the infrastructure, to better the lecturers and the students. Yes, but we can start with a fraction of that and then have a programme that will run on the platform of sincerity to address all the lots.
“But let me also say that most of the time, our people have a low appetite for maintenance of public works. No matter how much you deploy to these universities, unless the users, the industry, and the regulators, unless they begin to treat public infrastructure as their own in the various universities, it will continue to go bad no matter how much the federal government deploys it.
“So, it is important for ASUU to show some understanding and for those who are negotiating on the side of the government to also show some understanding. Let’s meet ourselves halfway and then open the schools to save the fate of our children”, he stated.
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