STRIKE: ASUU demands N200m from the Nigerian Government to return back to class.
Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), has insisted that the Nigerian government has shown no willingness to address the ongoing ASUU strike, which has caused Nigerian students at public tertiary institutions to return home.
He claimed that the government allocated $4 trillion to solve the issue of fuel subsidies while ignoring concerns related to her university education.
Prof. Osodoke claims that even if the government removed only N200 billion from the N4 trillion budget for subsidies, it would still have N3.8 trillion to solve the issues that the university is facing at this point.
Speaking with Channels Tv and monitored by Digital Information Network, Osodoke urged the Nigerian government to focus on education instead of fuel subsidies, a problem that he believes the Nigerian academians at colleges can solve.
He suggested that the government deduct N200 million from the N4 trillion it has set aside for fuel subsidies in order to help Nigerian universities address their infrastructural shortfall.
He believes that Nigeria’s academians can supply all of the solutions required to help the country grow, and he has urged the government to challenge Nigerian university professors and academians to provide solutions to the country’s plaguing challenges.
He claimed that it took only three months for a Nigerian university to build the University Transparent and Accountability Solution (UTAS), which outperformed the foreign Integrated Payroll Personnel Information System by 97.3 percent (IPPIS).
He noted that while large sums of money were spent on IPPIS, those funds might have been used to help Nigerian universities, and he challenged the government to always target Nigerian universities with finding answers to current challenges Nigerian universities are facing now.
He said the Nigerian university can build a refinery in three years as part of a plan to rid the country of subsidy losses.
