President Goodluck Jonathan yesterday pleaded with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to end its four-month strike in the interest of Nigerian students. He made the appeal in Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti State, when he commissioned the College of Engineering building of the Afe Babalola University (ABUAD).
President Jonathan said, “I want to beg ASUU to reconsider its stand on the current impasse rocking our universities, which has kept students out of the universities for four months. This hard stand and protracted crisis could endanger the collective destiny of millions of the future leaders, because the future of the country should not be derailed on the altar of industrial dispute.”
According to the president, it would have been different if his administration had not listened to the union’s grievances or was not ready to honour their agreements.
“We have promised that all agreements will be honoured, so they should reconsider their stand. If the strike is borne out of genuine intention, I want to believe that ASUU has been able to prove a point by keeping students out of school for four months. And if it is borne out of other reasons, they still need to believe that no sector of the economy is operating at its best,” he said.
Describing ABUAD’s engineering college as a masterpiece and a challenge to individuals and organisations, the president urged Nigerians to join him to build a better country.
Babalola disclosed that he had invested N60billion in ABUAD to make it a global university and appealed to the federal government to support private universities to offer quality education.
The minister of Education, Mr. Nyesom Wike, thanked the president for providing an enabling environment for education to thrive in the country, saying that over 12 private universities were issued licences and nine more federal universities were established by his administration.
The president also disclosed that the Federal Ministry of Aviation would soon commence work on the proposed local airport for Ekiti, which has an allocation of N400million in the 2013 budget, even as Governor Kayode Fayemi and Chief Babalola stressed the need for the government to build an airport in the state to fast track its development.
Fayemi appealed to the president to facilitate the release of the sum of N12billion spent by the state government to renovate federal roads.
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