Strike: APC berates FG’s strategy to ‘blackmail’ ASUU
October 17, 2013by Our correspondent
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The All Progressives Congress has described as “a cheap and ludicrous strategy” the plan by the Federal Government to use market women, religious leaders and even students to put pressure on the Academic Staff Union of Universities to call off its strike.
The party noted that plan is being hatched “without resolving the issues that caused the strike in the first instance.”
In a statement in Lagos on Thursday by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party said the strike, which is now in its fourth month, would have ended by now if the Federal Government had pursued its negotiations with ASUU “with half the energy it has been using to rally various groups to protest against the union.”
It described as “particularly ridiculous the crowd-for-hire protest in Abuja on Monday by the so-called National Market Women Association, in which their leader vowed to chase lecturers out of Nigeria” and replace them with “jobless Nigerians.”
APC said, “This infantile statement by the leader of the apparently misguided market women is the most irresponsible statement that anyone has made on the long-drawn ASUU strike, and it is a shame that the government is the instigator of such nonsense.
“While indeed there are millions of jobless Nigerians, is it just any jobless Nigerian who can be a university teacher? How does President Goodluck Jonathan, himself a former university teacher, feel about those apparently hired by his administration treating university teachers with so much disrespect? Even if the government succeeds in forcing the lecturers back to the classroom, can it force them to teach effectively?”[i][/i]

Let them continue to rent crowds to protest. If they like let them use whoever they can use, to protest against ASUU. We shall soon know the owner of the farm between the animal and the trap.