By Emegwoako C. Paschal
On Tuesday, October 4, President Muhammadu Buhari accused the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) of being complicit in widespread corruption in the education industry. He claimed that this corruption undermines the federal government’s investment in education.
According to Buhari, ongoing union strikes gave the appearance that the government was underfunding education.
Speaking at the fourth National Summit on Reducing Corruption in the Public Sector, Buhari claimed that government investment in the field had been severely damaged by corruption at all levels of education, from elementary to tertiary.
The federal government had just officially registered two new university-based unions, the Congress of Nigerian University Academics (CONUA) and the National Association of Medical and Dental Academics (NAMDA).
Senator Chris Ngige, the minister of labor and employment, asserted that CONUA, and NAMDA, would help liberalize the academic sector and give university employees more freedom.
But Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, the president of ASUU, has referred to the newly registered associations a meaningless group of dissidents, whose exorbitant ambitions fueled the labor minister’s hubris.
Ngige, according to Osodeke, was only acting frantically about information that he alone knew.
Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, Speaker of the House of Representatives, met with Buhari yesterday (October 4th) in an effort to end the ongoing ASUU strike.
Contrary to popular belief, academic unions were just as complicit in the systemic corruption in the education sector, according to Buhari, who spoke at the conference, corruption in the education sector hindered national efforts to build the necessary social capital for socio-economic development, while also acknowledging that no country can advance without making adequate and sensible investments in education.
The summit on public sector corruption, themed – “Corruption and the Education Sector”, was organized with the support of the MacArthur Foundation by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), in collaboration with the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF) and the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB).
