Adeleke Alade
The leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students has vowed to ground activities at international airports across the country to protest against the ongoing strike embarked on by the Academic Staff Union of Universities.
The Chairman, NANS National Task Force on ‘End ASUU Strike Now,’ Ojo Raymond Olumide, who spoke in Akure, decried the attitude of the federal government towards the striking lecturers as well as education as a whole.
He said that “the four-day shutdown of busy highways and expressways had been a success, hence the move to disrupt international travels in order for the bourgeois and the government to feel the pains they had subjected students to in the past seven months.
According to him, the students were already tired of pleading with both parties over the need to end the strike.
“The President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration must settle all outstanding arrears and the lecturers’ salaries”, Olumide said, adding that the airports that would be occupied will remain closed until the strike is called off.
“We shall begin another round of protest next week by storming the airspaces on Monday, 19th September 2022 to #OccupyTheAirports. We want to let the world know about the pains and anguish students are going through.
“Nigerian students whose parents create the commonwealth cannot continue to be suffering at home alongside our lecturers while the few who gain from our sweats and blood have their kids abroad jollying and flexing.
“We will, by this statement, not beg again. We shall be mobilizing all students to shut down the country. No Education! No Movement!”
Olumide who berated the Minister of Works, Babatunde Raji Fashola, over his purported comment on the barricade of federal roads by the students, said that the strike had continued to linger due to the absence of children of the political class in public universities.
Passing a vote of No Confidence on both Ministers of Labour and Education, they called on the Presidency to pay all outstanding arrears and salaries of the lecturers.
