Buhari has failed - ASUU

 President Muhammadu Buhari received a serious bashing from the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) on his style of governance – The apex union body for Nigerian universities made this known on Friday, May 6 The Academic Staff of Union of Universities (ASUU) while holding her 19th National Delegates Conference in Uyo, the capital of Akwa Ibom state, said President Muhammadu Buhari is yet to start touching the lives of Nigerians with the mantra of ‘Change,’ which he campaigned upon to win the hearts of Nigerians during the last year elections. 

 Comrade Nasir Isa, the national president of ASUU said Buhari’s “half-hearted” fight against corruption, and that the poor was getting poorer, while “a tiny club of nouvea riche, treasury looters, phantom contractors, subsidy scammers and rent collectors are flowing in scandalous opulence and manipulating the legal structures of the state to escape. “One year after, there has been no positive change in the major indices of growth and development, be it poverty reduction, safety and security, disease control or access to basic amenities and public good.” 

 President Muhammadu Buhari The body of academic intellectuals could be thinking Buhari is doing next to nothing, but as part of his policies to cut cost, the president approved the reduction of meetings by board members of government-owned agencies, parastatals and organisations. Isa who spoke further on the economic policies of the president said it seems Nigeria is being headed towards no particular direction by the current administration. He said: “The disappointment of Nigerians stems from the fact that we have a government whose leadership promised change but which is not practising transformation (deep, fundamental change). 

“Democracy in Nigeria is still seen superficially as what leaders do for the people rather than government by the people.” The outgoing ASUU boss, who bows out as the union’s national president at the end of the congress said the present government has jettisoned a socialist welfare state prescribed by the provisions of Chapter Two of the 1999 Constitution, and embraced unfavourable policies handed down by International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. He stated further on behalf of the union: “As intellectuals, we know the Nigerian condition is a reflection of the conspiracy between African rulers and agents of Bretton Wood Institutions particularly the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB). 

“The conspiracy was consummated in the 1980s when these institutions for the protection and advancement of capitalism, came up with their ‘standard reform package’ now known as the ‘Washington consensus.’ “This package was designed for the African and other underdeveloped economies in order to perpetuate their enslavement to the capitalist world. Many of us would recall General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida’s debate on this ‘consensus’ in 1985/86. 

“Even though the Nigerian people overwhelmingly rejected the IMF/WB loan, the Babangida Government still went ahead to implement the key neoliberal prescriptions of devaluation of the Naira and trade liberalisation.

 “President Olusegun Obasanjo and his successors from 1999 have unabashedly intensified the implementation of this package through criminal privatisation and commercialisation of public assets, in faithful surrender to the Washington ‘consensus.’ “In all of these, the Nigerian ruling class is unmindful of stiff resistance by the labour movement, civil society groups, the media and other progressive forces in the country. This is much unlike what obtains in other climes such as the Asian Tigers (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea) who got industrialised without surrendering their economies to the prowling reach of local and foreign marketers of the ‘Washington consensus’.”