By Gami Tadanyigbe
Noble Youths Mass Support Association (NYMSA), an NGO, have called on the Federal Government to convene Education Confab to proffer adequate solution and help resolve the lingering Universities workers strike.
The National Coordinator of the group Mr. Godwin Onmonya, who made the call in an interview with the media in Abuja, said the strike was having negative impact on students and appealed for speedy resolution.
According to him, the ongoing strike embarked upon by ASUU brings it to six months the students will stay at home over the failure of government and the union to reach a workable agreements.
The union through its President, Mr Emmanuel Osodeke had embarked on a nationwide warning strike from Feb. 14 to press home its demands, stressing that the action would continue until their demands were met.
The lecturers’ are demanding funding of the Revitalisation of Public Universities, Earned Academic Allowances, University Transparency Accountability Solution (UTAS) and promotion arrears.
Others are the renegotiation of the 2009 ASUU-FG Agreement and the inconsistency in Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System.
“Our youths in public universities are losing their most active and creative years, while their parents are undergoing a painful agony of witnessing their children and resources waste away.
“We make this call in the overriding interest of our nation, but more particularly for the huge number of students, parents, academic and non- teaching staff in public universities across the country.
“Sadly, the children of most top government officials attend private universities or study abroad; they do not feel the distress and torment of the ordinary parents.
“We also want to call for a law mandating State actors their nuclear families to attend only Nigerian institutions while in office.
“In addition, the government is also wasting our national resources because by the end of the strike, all academic staff and non-teaching staff would still receive their salaries,” he said. (NAN)
