By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye
I have always had this lingering suspicion that apart from representing the deep-seated contempt that has come to define government’s attitude to the welfare of public sector workers, its shoddy, often, disdainful, treatment of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and its demands for improved working conditions might have been carefully conceived as a long term project to continue provoking ASUU to embark on industrial actions until it fatally hurts its case before Nigerians.
The expectation, it would seem, is that as students continue to spend several months at home due to prolonged strikes, which might sometimes lengthen the duration of their academic programmes, parents and other stakeholders who bear the brunt of these constant disruptions will gradually review their sympathy for the teachers and begin to confront them as the problem instead of the government whose continuous reneging on agreements it freely entered into with ASUU created the mess in the first place.
