ASUU strike unnecessary, says JAMB registrar

Registrar, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Professor Ishaq Oloyede, on Friday described the ongoing strike action by members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) as unnecessary.

Oloyede noted this when he presented multi-billion naira medical equipment to the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (UITH) for improved health care services in Nigeria.

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The programme was in collaboration with a United States based agency, Project Cure.

According to him, incessant strikes in the nation’s tertiary institution was capable of causing irreparable damage on the students and the nation.

He said, “While acknowledging that the primary responsibility of reasonable (even if not adequate) funding of public health and education institutions lies on the proprietors, the government, I call on the employers, university-based labour unions to appreciate the irreparable damage of incessant strikes on not just the students but the country at large.”

He said the intervention of JAMB in the area of health care delivery was to support government’s efforts to addressing the huge medical infrastructural gap.

JAMB, he noted, would continue to prune down its expenses to free up resources to support the tertiary health and educational institutions in the country.

Others health facilities that also benefited from the intervention were University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, Yusuf Maitama Sule University Teaching Hospital, Kano, and nine others from across the six geopolitical zones in the country.

“If the people, who had paid the N100m to buy nomination and expression of interest for the presidential election had done that for the nation’s health interventions, many people would have been praying for them. I don’t know who would be praying for them now,” Oloyede added.