[OPINION] Education Policy And ASUU Strike

There seems to be no end to the ongoing strike by Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU. And the major reason why the government shows very little interest in putting an end to the strike is because most public officers don’t have their children in Nigerian universities. They have amassed enough public funds for their wards to study abroad.

Last year, Senator Basheer Garba Mohammed proposed a bill that children of public office holders should be restricted from schooling abroad, except for specialized programmes or courses not offered in the nation’s educational institutions but very little has been said about that bill since then.

If that bill had been passed, ASUU strike would probably have been a thing of the past. And our self-seeking, self-centred public office holders won’t allow their kids sleep at home all day as they will prevent ASUU from going on strike.

Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala, Minister of Finance, tongue-in-cheek, claimed that the Federal Government could not afford ASUU’s demand for N92bn, although ASUU said that claim is false because it demanded for N87b. But N92bn is not too much for any country to spend on education. Rather, our public office holders concern themselves with sucking the country of every kobo they can lay their hands on while jeopardizing the future of the country.

Rather than vote billions of dollars on education, our backward public office holders pursue very frivolous matters, like the First Lady, Patience Jonathan wanting to build a N4 billion ‘First Lady’s Mission Building’ as a centre for her meetings with other African First Ladies in a country with high poverty rate and low human development index.

President Goodluck Jonathan also lavishes public funds on very frivolous matters while education, health and security beg for attention. Jonathan got the Federal Executive Council of to approve N2.2bn banquet hall for Aso Villa. This huge amount of money could have been channelled into areas more beneficial to the ordinary people, especially the millions of unemployed graduates roaming the streets.

Education has been identified as the solution to poverty but Nigeria’s public office holders are more concerned with amassing wealth for themselves while poverty is king in Nigeria with over 70 per cent of the citizens living from hand to mouth.

An estimated 11 million Nigerian children of school age are out of school and about 7.5 million are girls. Nigeria, as ASUU insists, should take education seriously or else its continued neglect, which is a potential time bomb, could engender crisis of catastrophic proportions.