ASUU Crisis - Senator Links Lecturers Strike to Jumbo Pay - Wants Public Officials Salaries Cut By Half The Vice Chairman of the Senate Committee on Education, Sola Adeyeye, has called for the salaries of elected public office holders to be immediately cut by half. The Senator said the unreasonabe demands by striking Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, may have been fuelled by resentment at the obscene privileges Nigerian politicians enjoy. In an article he wrote in response to the spokesperson of ASUU, Olusegun Ajiboye, who accused him of insensitivity over the rot in the nations education system, Mr. Adeyeye suggested the National Assembly appropriates at least 26 percent of Nigerias yearly expenditure to education alone. He added that for a national redemption programme in education, all imports should attract a mandatory education tax of one percent, beginning from January 1, 2014 till December 31, 2018, and that all workers in Nigeria must contribute 5 percent of their income as education taxes. Embezzling any amount of these revenues targeted for education should be taken as an act of treason. This should attract the most severe penalty such as impeachment, imprisonment and perhaps death penalty, Mr. Adeyeye said. Reacting to Mr. Ajiboyes claim that Mr. Adeyeye, who was a Professor of Molecular Biology at the Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, had enjoyed a much better remuneration as a professor in the United States, the Senator said that ASUUs demand that its members be paid Excessive Workload Allowance was improper. He added that it was only in Nigeria that academics demand overtime allowances under such a euphemism. Such a demand would seem incongruous across the world, he said. He also clarified that the benefits he enjoyed as a professor in the United States were flexible and insisted that he had been in the forefront of the call for better funding for education in the senate contrary to what Mr. Ajiboye would want Nigerians believe. Mr. Ajiboye had also alleged that the Senator was doing nothing to resolve the on-going strike of the union because his immediate family are not in Nigeria, with all his children schooling and living abroad, using the millions of public funds being earned by their father in Nigeria to live large abroad. The Senator denied that his childrens school fees abroad were paid with public fund. According to him, his children were academically gifted children and enjoyed full scholarship for their university education. He also noted that by the time he returned to Nigeria in 2002 to seek elective position in the Senate, all his children had graduated from university. While decrying the decaying state of education in the country, he observed that ASUU rather than look for solutions was also a part of the problem. He then challenged Mr Ajiboye to a primetime television debate over the issues
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 16:39:44 +0000
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