… condemns incessant ASUU strike
The APGA flag bearer for Njikoka Federal House of Representatives in the 2023 Election, Hon Sir Pete Ibida has opined that the monetary policy being contemplated by the federal government limiting daily cash withdrawals is too stringent and impracticable.
Speaking recently during an exclusive interview with Angel Network News ANN at his country home in Nimo, Sir Ibida blamed the free fall of the naira to the poor attitude of the Federal government towards education that led to the mass movement of students to foreign schools for Nigeria’s depleting foreign reserves due to its earnings not matching its expenditure.
Ibida therefore charged the federal government to give education its pride of place in the national budget.
In his words; “Premium attention must be given to lecturers. Give them grants for research. Equip our laboratories and ensure that our institutions have all it takes to provide hands on education for the students.”
Ibida however advised the lecturers to learn to be more patient with the government and desist from shutting down the system given that such practice has eroded the value of education in Nigeria in no small way.
Ibida observed that the incessant strike action by the ASUU has made the Nigerian educational system a laughing stock in the global village and has made parents and students alike disillusioned with the system which has led to the massive exportation of our best brains for educational pursuit abroad with its resultant strain on our foreign reserves.
The federal lawmaker hopeful proposed the relative independence of the universities while ensuring “they set up machineries that will remediate the rut in our academic system.”
“We need to sanitize the system. The system is so rotten and so devastated and we are playing to the gallery over it. Nigerian academic system is not to be trusted anymore and many parents have now sent their wards to other countries including nearby Ghana. The federal government needs to give the universities relative independence while they also set up machineries that would check the excesses and rut in our university system.
“On the other hand, the monetary system being adopted by the CBN is good intentioned but too stringent. If we want to borrow policies from other systems, we need to borrow polices that are practicable.
“We cannot make a policy you cannot apply. Let us tread pragmatically as a government and stop throwing policies to the public without recourse to the realities on ground,” he said.
