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.”
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