ASUU STRIKE: Lagos APC Blames PDP-Led FG over Inability to Meet Lecturers' Demands

The All Progressives Congress, APC, the Lagos State chapter, has stated that the ongoing suppuration of the strike by members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has proven that the PDP has shown its moral and administrative bankruptcy.

The statement also said that PDP’s inability to meet the demands of the lecturers and tame the culture of perennial industrial actions has displayed that the PDP is inept and bankrupt of ideas on how to take Nigeria to the next level.

Joe Igbokwe, the Lagos State Interim Publicity Secretary of the APC, who signed the statement, also said the party decried a situation where PDP members continue to chase shadows while the nation’s educational sector continues to deteriorate under its watch.

Therefore, APC called on the PDP-led Federal Government to accede to the demands of ASUU without delay so that Nigerian students would resume their academic activities.

“We had been watching as the PDP-led Federal Government treat with unseriousness and levity the demands of ASUU, which is simply for the Federal Government to implement agreements it freely entered into in the past with ASUU. We note that with each passing day, members of the PDP seek to trivialize the demands and input ludicrous reasons for the strike, even as members of ASUU have been unwavering in their insistence that they were on strike because this same government has refrained from fulfilling its part of the agreements on how to improve the present poor standard of education in Nigeria.

The APC further stated:

“We are left to wonder why a profligate government and party would allow the ASUU strike to fester the way it is doing over the demand for better funding of Nigerian universities. But for a government and a party that subscribes to freeloading the Nigerian commonwealth for its members while vital and critical sectors suffer, we are not surprised that the members of the PDP and the Jonathan government are not really concerned that Nigerian youths have been left to waste away for months now while elephantine corruption is the order of the day in the present governance. We wonder what the demand of ASUU is to the huge tranches of our national wealth the members of the PDP and their cronies have been purloining for the past fourteen years.

“We, of Lagos APC, decry in the strongest terms, the attitude of the PDP, as a party and the PDP-led Federal Government to the ASUU strike. We see this as one of the many proofs of the incompetence of the PDP in governing Nigeria. We see this as deliberate criminal neglect of the country’s educational sector just because the members of the PDP have leveraged enough public funds and resources to send their children overseas while killing the nation’s educational sector.

We are appalled that the PDP-led Federal Government is showing less concern over the gargantuan fall in the country’s educational standard, which had been consistently proved in all international rankings of Nigerian universities. We are sad that the PDP government is not interested in resolving this crisis on the pretext that it cannot meet the demands of ASUU, which were mere parts of an agreement it signed with ASUU in the past.

“We see this as devilish and a direct assault on the future of Nigerian youths. We therefore ask the Federal Government to immediately accept the demands of ASUU and start the implementation so as to allow ASUU members to go back to work. We urge all Nigerians to compel the PDP government to stop the present neglect of the educational sector by adequately funding the sector, as contained in the demands of ASUU.”

It would be recalled that ASUU nationwide strike has commenced on July 1, 2013, and solutions on how to put an end to it have not been worked out till date.