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 nation’s education
system, Mr. Adeyeye suggested
the National Assembly
appropriates at least 26 percent
of Nigeria’s 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. Ajiboye’s 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 ASUU’s
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
children’s 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 issue.