President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Prof Biodun Ogunyemi, has said the union is losing its members to private universities due to the inability of Federal Government to meet its demands.
Ogunyemi, who spoke while featuring on a television programme in Abuja, on Thursday stated that the government cannot threaten the university lecturers with court action.
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He expressed;
Talking about options, whether they want to go to court and intimidate the union to surrender. You don’t do that with scholars, no country has ever survived it because we have options too.
We talk about brain-drain now, I can tell you authoritatively that within the last two months, 25 scholars in the North-East have been harvested by this university in Yola. We know the owner. That is how it is happening, the private universities are poaching the public universities now because they can only thrive when the public universities crumble.
ASUU President noted;
We are also aware that some few months back, Ethiopia came to Nigeria, and harvested as many as 200 professors and they are still looking for more. I don’t know if the government wants their appointees to start teaching the students. Of course, many of them don’t have their children in public universities, that is why they cannot feel it. Our scholars are our national assets and we should not allow them to be decimated.
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Speaking further, Ogunyemi said the union would resist any attempt by Federal Government to elongate the process of the integrity test being conducted on the software of the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) proposed by the union.
He expressed that contrary to a statement credited to the Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige, on Tuesday, the integrity test being conducted on UTAS would take one week if the government “is conscientious about the process”.
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ASUU is currently on strike in protest against the Federal Government’s Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) used in settling workers salaries by FG and instead, developed UTAS which is currently undergoing test-run by NITDA.
