The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, at its 19th National Delegates Conference held in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State delivered a damning verdict on the present administration led by Muhammadu Buhari.
The Union said that Nigerians were yet to experience anything good from the change mantra upon which the administration came on board adding that the administration has failed the people.
While addressing the conference, the President of ASUU, Nasir Isa said that the President was in a “half-hearted” fight against corruption, adding that the poor in the country keep 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.”
He continued that: “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,”
Mr. Isa further stated that: “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,”
He maintained that “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’,”