ASUU Urged To Honour Iyayi By Calling Off Strike
Lagos State House of Assembly has appealed to the striking Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to consider putting immediate end to the over four-month old strike to honour Professor Festus Iyayi, who died in a ghastly motor accident on the Lokoja-Abuja road on Tuesday.
Iyayi, who was a former president of ASUU, was on his way to Kano with other eggheads to attend the enlarged National Executive Committee meeting of the union when the convoy of the Kogi State governor, Captain Idris Wada (retd), rammed into the vehicle he was travelling in.
He died instantly while others sustained various degree of injuries and are currently receiving treatments in the hospital. Chairman, Committee on Information, Strategy, Security and Publicity, Honourable Segun Olulade, made the position of the assembly known in a statement issued on Thursday, saying that “since Iyayi was on a mission for a peaceful resolution to end the strike, the union should consider ending the strike in honour of their late comrade.
“The nation is currently undergoing too much travails under the present Federal Government as a result of neglect on basic infrastructure such as road that claimed the life of such a literary icon,” the assembly said, declaring that the Okene-Lokoja road was a death trap that had claimed thousands of Nigerians before the ugly incident.
The assembly cautioned against reckless driving of convoys on the entourage of most state governors and politicians, and urged them to be modest in the use of convoy like the Lagos State governor, Mr Babatunde Fashola.
The assembly, therefore, appealed to the union to consider the plights of Nigerian students and the need to restore education to its lost glory by ending the strike to save the education sector.
The assembly expressed the fear that “the circumstance that led to Iyayi’s death, if care is not taken, could take a new dimension of agitation and spur reflex actions from the aggrieved lecturers, thereby extending further the strike that is already close to being called off as of the time of Iyayi’s death.”
