By Ray Ekpu
Going through the newspapers last week it seemed as though the Nigerian world was crashing, ready to come down and bury all of us. And it is not as if we are strangers to bad news; we experience it every day, every week and when a new piece of bad news comes it is easy for people to say nonchalantly “what is new?” But last week took the trophy. It was like the coming of the apocalypse, an Armageddon, some kind of tsunami.
Let
us pigeonhole the news into three sectors. First, the national strike by ASUU
was joined last week by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and its affiliates.
The strike had gone on for about six months without the government being able
to resolve it.
How can any government worth the name allow its tertiary institutions to be shut for nearly one semester? It has never happened in this country before. And the amazing thing is that as NLC threatened to join the strike in sympathy, President Muhammadu Buhari, as evidence of taking action, commanded the Minister of Education, Mr Adamu Adamu, to end the strike within two weeks. I am sure that the minister who knows that resolving it is a matter of forking out a lot of cash, and he doesn’t mint money, must have laughed haughtily at the impossible directive.
