The Presidency has been urged to intervene in the crisis bedevilling polytechnic education in the country, which has seen lecturers in the institutions across the country going on strike for the past one year.
The parliament noted on Thursday that it is now essential for the Presidency to wade in and ensure that members of the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP), who have downed tools in the last one year, go back to classrooms.
The union had been on strike following disagreements with government on welfare and other related issues, and several interventions to resolving the differences have repeatedly met brick walls.
On Thursday, a motion was moved by Ibrahim Shehu-Gusau under matters of urgent public importance, expressing concerns that the lingering strike had affected over two million Nigerian students of the institutions, who could not graduate, even as new admissions could not take place due to the time wasted.
He recalled that interventions, including that of the House Committee on Education, have been unsuccessfully, and that government had not helped matters by not releasing a white paper on report of the Presidential Visitation Panel to the Polytechnics since 2012 when it was presented.
Chairman of the Committee on Education, Aminu Suleiman, who was called upon to give update on his committee’s intervention so far by Speaker, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, described the current situation as “disturbing”, disclosing that his team met with the feuding parties about three weeks ago to resolve the burning issues with the assurances of the Federal Ministry of Education to take the resolutions reached to the Federal Executive Council (FEC).
According to him, however, the major setback at the moment was a memo raised by the National Income, Salaries and Wages Commission to the effect that some earlier concessions made by the Education Ministry were not viable, following which a committee was constituted to further review the issues.
