From Ifeoma Ejiofor
The Peter Obi Support Network (POSN) has frowned at reports that the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu has been holding meetings with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) over the union’s protracted industrial action.
The support group in a statement from the stable of Mr Adegbite Adekunle, its Deputy Director of Communications said the purported meeting by Tinubu with ASUU to end the strike which has lasted for many months was a mere shallow electioneering campaign stunt by the scandal-prone APC candidate.
The support group counselled Tinubu that he should be holding meetings with President Muhamamdu Buhari to pay the lecturers so as to end the strike, and stop dramatizing with any form of meeting with the ASUU.
They added, “Nigerian universities have been on lockdown for more down two years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Nigerians are afraid that their students will continue the stay-at-home pandemic unless the ruling party is kicked out of government”, POSN lamented.
“With this development, the All Progressives Congress further establishes that it does not view anything as sacred in its quest to retain power, including, the endangerment of the academic future of our youths and trammelling the professional potentials of our scholars’, POSN stated.
POSN wondered where Tinubu had been all this while that the strike lasted. What has he and all the APC honchos said or done ever since, until now.
The support group therefore called on all forward looking/thinking Nigerians to reject all the geriatrics who are parading political messiahs, whose children are in schools overseas.
The statement rrads, “The Peter Obi Support Network frowns at reports emanating from the campaign office of the presidential candidate of the All-Progressives Congress, to the effect that the Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been holding meetings with the Academic Staff Union of Universities, towards ending the union’s protracted industrial action.
The POSN views this development as a confirmation that the ASUU strike may have been deliberately designed to create a good campaign platform for its controversy ridden presidential candidate, who has obviously found it difficult to take off on his presidential bid.
With this development, the All Progressives Congress further establishes that it does not view anything as sacred in its quest to retain power, including, the endangerment of the academic future of our youths and trammelling the professional potentials of our scholars.
Asiwaju Bola Tinubu should be holding meetings with President Muhamamdu Buhari to end the lecturer’s strike and not with the ASUU.
Nigerian universities have been on lockdown for more down two years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nigerians fear that their students will continue the stay-at-home pandemic unless the ruling party is kicked out of government.
We suspect that President Muhammadu Buhari has set up the stalemate in negotiations between the ASUU and the Federal Government and would quickly clear the hurdle following Tinubu’s stage-managed intervention, to cast him (Tinubu) as a good negotiator and problem solver, which will confer some advantage to him in the campaign trail.
We advise the leadership of the Academic Staff Union of Universities not to allow itself to be used as political mercenaries by the APC, by refusing to attend any further meetings or allow the APC presidential candidate to broker any kind of truce between the union and the Federal Government.
The ASUU leadership should continue its negotiations with the rightful officials of the Federal Government, without the involvement of the APC presidential candidate, lest the respected Union lose its respect and credibility before Nigerians.
The POSN further advises our long-suffering Nigerian university students and other Nigerians who are victims of APC bad governance and treachery, to keep hope alive in the new Nigeria which shall be birthed with the Obi-Datti presidency in 2023.