Date: Thursday 15th, September, 2022
TIME: 10am
VENUE:Olaitan OyerindeHall, Pascal Bafyau Building, Labour House , CBD, Abuja.
THEME; The Locked Gates Of Our Citadels – A National Emergency.
RSVP:
Comrade Vivian Bellowu.
Convener.
The National Town Hall is being organized as part of activities and efforts to build synergy with stakeholders to finding lasting solution to the crisis of Education in Nigeria. We also conceive to offer opportunity for leaders like you and the public to examine some of the issues and chart way forward at this critical time in the Nation’s educational history.
Nigeria’s Higher Education Sector is in crossroads; poor and inadequate budgetary provision has combined with crippling industrial actions by trade unions in the sector, particularly the academic ones to bring the Nation’s once fledging citadels to its knees, leaving it barely a shadow of itself.
Only recently, the National Universities Commission, NUC announced that there are only a hundred thousand academic staff attending to millions of students in the Nation’s Universities, revealing an appalling students-lecturers ratio that embarrassingly contrasts with those of other climes.
This is nosurprising, the sector has continued to loose the bulk of its fine-bred who exit the Nation’s citadel en mass to other countries with conducive working conditions and remunerations.
For well over six months since February of this year, the Nation’s Universities have been under lock and keys in strike action that is said to have government’s reluctance to implement its 2009 Agreement with the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, at its root cause.
What started out in February as a merely 4 weeks warning strike, soon dovetailed into several extensions and finally in a most alarming and worrisome dimension, saw the Academic Union on the 29th of August, 2022 declare a full-blown indefinite strike throwing whatever flicker of hope of return to classrooms by the mass of Nigerian children and (and indeed their parents) to tatters. Simply put, the situation plunged from bad to worse.
The THM is collaboratively being organized by the SAVE-PUBLIC EDUCATION-CAMPAIGN and the Workers and Youth Solidarity Network (NYSN) within the framework of its Educational Advocacy that intervenes in the area of governance accountability and educational Rights of the Citizenry.
