While reacting to the incessant strikes by ASUU since its inception, the League of Imams and Alfas in Ogun State have openly lamented that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has gone on strike for a cumulative period of 52 months since 1999 and they called for a reasonable solution to their incessant strikes.
This, the Islamic clerics analysed had amounted to a total of two years and four months altogether.
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They also opined that the incessant strike action in universities had turned Nigerian youths into unskilled and lazy individuals, wasting their fruitful years at home when they ought to have graduated.
In a statement jointly signed by their President-General and the Secretary-General, Dhikrullahi Afe-Babalola and Tajudeen Mustapha, the Islamic leaders maintained that the ASUU industrial actions had occurred 16 times since the return of democracy, calling on the government to address the situation once and for all.
They begged the government at all levels to rebuild the nation’s university system by honouring all contractual agreements without further delay.
“From 1999 till date, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) had gone on strike 16 times which had covered a period of fifty two months,” they said.
Aside from the academic union, they noted that activities in public universities had also been disrupted by strike actions embarked upon by other unions at various times.
While warning that the nation would remain a failed state should there be no deliberate commitments by the government to resolve the many problems confronting it, the clerics condemned the spate of killings and kidnapping in Nigeria.
In another report, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) had on Thursday announced that it has concluded plans to hold a one–day national protest to force the Federal Government to meet the demands of the striking university-based unions.
The congress pointed out that reports from a meeting of its Central Working Committee showed a painful lack of progress in the negotiation with the leadership of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities, Non-Academic Staff Union of Universities, and National Association of Academic Technologists.
The President of NLC, Ayuba Wabba, made this known while speaking in Abuja during the opening of the National Executive Council meeting of the Congress.
