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The ongoing ASUU Strike is once again a
sad reminder of government?s non-chalant
attitude to the education sector.
Government?s lip service to the
education of the Nigerian Citizenry in
recent years is alarming and the CLO
seriously frown at this calamitous
trend.
It is so bleeding obvious that
government has no honourable intentions
in so far as education is concerned.
Over the years, especially since the
introduction of the infamous Structural
Adjustment Programme (SAP), government
has drastically cut down on the funding
of the education sector. And it even
withdrew education subsidy.
As if that wasn?t enough, government
started cutting down budgetary
allocation to education. The UNICEF
stipulation that governments should
earmark at least 25% of their annual
budget to education has never been
obeyed in Nigeria.
In the last few years, government
further moved on to commercialise
education by the granting of University
licenses to Corporate Individuals and
Organisations, Churches and Religious
Bodies, leaving the public Universities
to the mercies of adverse forces. The
emerged Private Universities can only be
afforded by the superfluously rich and
government officials. Their children and
wards are either sent to these
Universities or Overseas for their
education leaving the poor to the Public
Universities. Today, University
education is beyond the reach of most
Nigerians, particularly the common man.
Even the few that have access to these
Public Universities are suffering from
intellectual malnutrition. This is due
to the fact that the quality of
education on offer is jaundiced and
below par not merely because of the low
quality of available personnel
occasioned by the high turnover of
manpower to the lucrative new Private
Universities in town, but because of a
lack of enabling environment as well as
institutional and systemic failures.
These Public Universities have virtually
become mere consulting rooms and
glorified Secondary Schools. This is one
of the major issues that ASUU is
campaigning against.
Ironically, almost all of the government
officials and rich individuals in this
nation are products of the Public
Universities they are now abandoning.
This is not fair and we condemn it in
its entirety.
At a time when governments all over the
world are thinking innovatively on how
to revamp their education sectors in
order to meet the challenges of the 21st
century, especially in the face of a
debilitating global downturn, our
government is foot-dragging and pushing
education to the backburner of crucial
national issues.
But we in the CLO are saying that enough
is enough. Our educational haemorrhage
is too profuse to ignore. Our
intellectual deficit is too large to
ignore. Our breakdown of values,
disjointed orientation, weak perception
and poor grasp of national and global
issues is too big to ignore.
Now is the time for Nigerians to wake up
from their stupor and break out of their
lethargy and say no to injustice, no to
sharp practices, no to the government
deliberate crippling of our education
sector. And now is the time to join
hands with ASUU and support the cause to
compel the government to address the
issues being raised by the Body. Indeed,
Nigerians ought to come out enmass to
protest and dramatise these shameful
issues so that government would have no
further choice than to honour the
agreements reached with ASUU; agreements
which the government is now denying.
Why do we have to do it this way? We
have to do it this way because we know
from painful experience that privilege
groups seldom give up their privileges
voluntarily unless confronted through a
dramatic non-violent direct action.
Individuals as Martin Luther King Jr.
has said, may see the moral and give up
their unjust posture; but not so with
groups. Reinhold Niebuhr rightly said
that, ?Groups tend to be more immoral.?
We submit that Nigeria can never
integrate into the global market nor
compete in the global economy if the
government doesn?t radically
revolutionised its education policy and
stop paying lip service to education.
Neither can the country meet the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or
even realise the Vision 2020 if
government continues to pussyfoot where
education is concerned.
At the GSMA Mobile World Congress in
Barcelona few months ago with a
particular focus on the recession, the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
urged governments to include investments
in a wide range of issues, including
education in economic stimulus packages
now being developed. Specifically, the
ITU said, ?Investing in high-quality
affordable information infrastructure,
education and knowledge may be the best
way to innovate out of this crisis,
especially for developing
countries?Investing in broader access to
knowledge becomes even more important
during times of crisis, rather than less
so.?
It is our advice and clarion call to
government to toe the path of honour and
meet its responsibilities, obligations
and commitments to ASUU rather than wait
for Nigerians to run out of their
patience before it act.
Comrade Eneruvie
Enakoko
Chairman
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Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO),
Lagos 13, Soji Adepegba Close, Off
Allen Ave, Ikeja/Lagos. Tel:
234-1-08033188864, 4939324-5, 7746694.
Fax: 01-4939324, P.O Box 53328, Ikoyi,
Lagos. Email:
clolagosnigeria@gmail.com,
clolagos@yahoo.com, Website:
www.clo-ng.org
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