20th September, 2022
By Cecilia Ologunagba
Former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Lamido Sanusi, has urged the Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to resolve the lingering crisis between them.
Sanusi stated this during an interview in New York on the sidelines of the three-day Transforming Education Summit.
According to Sanusi, the ASUU strike could be addressed through dialogue, noting that the union needed to know that the longer it stayed out of school, the more the students would suffer for it.
Teachers are human beings; we are in a country with a high level of inflation, and salaries don’t take teachers anywhere. Teaching is a profession that needs to be valued from lowest to highest.
“Our education employees are staff of the health establishment too. What we don’t know is that we have lost so many academics.”
“Many people who go abroad to do PhDs don’t come back. Many medical doctors working in Nigeria have gone abroad,’’ he said.
The former CBN boss, who was the 14th Emir of Kano, said the brain drain had impacted negatively on the economy.
“It is a crisis because we need the doctors in Nigeria, we need the teachers in Nigeria because we have invested so much in training them.
“Both sides (ASUU and Federal Government) have a stake in sitting down and have a dialogue, making compromises, I believe it can be resolved in good faith,’’ he said.
Sanusi also urged the government to invest in education to encourage teachers to be at their best, adding that teachers were once highly respected in society in time past, adding that “but now people underrate the value of education.
“What is happening now is that we have people who have moved into an authority and who do not value education as the society is so much materialistic.
“It is all about money now and teachers are looked down upon because they don’t have money.
“Most of these teachers have the option to do other courses but they chose to educate our children and contribute to our society.
“So, we need to look at our value system and go back to our traditional value system of respecting teachers and if we treat them with respect, we will get a lot from them,’’ he said.
ASUU on Feb. 14 embarked on a strike to press home some demands including calls for the government to implement the Memorandum of Action (MoA) signed in December 2020 on funding for the revitalisation of the public universities.
Other demands are Earned Academic Allowances, renegotiation of the 2009 agreement and the deployment of the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), among others.
NAN