The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has once more expressed dissatisfaction with the recently announced composition of the governing council members for the nation’s federal universities, claiming that the list’s makeup is worse than the previous one.
Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, national president of ASUU, made the statement over the weekend in a special interview with the Nigerian Tribune.
He hinged his argument on the premise that most people on the list are “retired politicians” and not technocrats.
“Go and look at the list again, you will see that most of them are retired politicians. They are honorable this and honorable that. What does that tell us?
“That is how terrible the thing has become. And we can’t run our universities like this if we truly want genuine development to take place,” he said.
He said ASUU’s initial concern regarding the university governing councils, however, was not even about the quality of the personalities on the previous list, which was made public last month and then subsequently reevaluated to make room for the current list.
Osodeke said, rather, it was about the fact that it was entirely unlawful for the Federal Government to form new councils when the previous ones, which it had dissolved more than ten months ago, had not yet finished their tenure in accordance with the University Act, which had originally established them.
The union claimed that if Nigeria really wanted high-quality education that would actually lead to economic development, the Federal Government should not have created new councils but rather should have called them back to finish their terms.
