FG, ASUU, NASU and SSANU’s Battles: The Ordeal of Students and Alumni

 FG, ASUU, NASU and SSANU’s Battles: The Ordeal of Students and Alumni

It’s been five months or so that most of the universities in Nigeria have been on total shutdown because every of the major unions that keep the institutions functioning have been on strike. The implication of this is that for almost half a year now, most students of Nigerian universities have been out of school, and this is pathetic for a country as Nigeria; it becomes even more pathetic when you realize how the government is not prioritising attending to the problems the unions are having by putting all hands on the matter. The second half of the year 2022 starts in a couple of days and it’s not even looking like it yet that the universities are resuming soon. Like play, this is looking like the 2012 and 2017 universities shutdown that took almost a year; more like this reoccurs every five years. This does not say anything good about the education system and the government at large.

Now, it’s funny that the whole universities are shut down and ASUU is the only union everyone is talking about—even though the talking is not having any productive outcome. One would think everyone would be aware by now that ASUU is only one union of the unions that keep a university functioning, and that none of them can singularly shut the university down totally. So when a university is on total shutdown, it must be known that it must be the major unions of the university are off work, and that is what is happening in Nigeria right now. People think students are the only victims of the universities’ total shutdown, but no, alumni suffer as much as the students too; final year students who recently wrote their final papers cannot be mobilized for service because no one to process their results, alumni cannot get their documents they need from their schools to move on in life because no one to produce the documents for them, everyone is stuck! I don’t know if the government sees it this way, but the country is going nowhere forward when everyone is stuck.