Notes for File
One of the ills of the President Muhammadu Buhari’s government is the appointment of square pegs in round holes. A case in point was the appointment of Dr. Chris Ngige, a medical doctor, as the Minister of Labour and Employment.
Since Ngige took charge of the ministry, he has not been able to satisfactorily resolve any single industrial dispute or labour-related crisis. Whether it was nurses, doctors, lecturers or other unions’ strikes, he has always handled them with levity.
The ongoing strike by Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has exposed his inability to solve the crisis. Since he was asked to resolve the crisis, he has turned it into a personal quarrel.
ASUU has been on strike since February 2022 to press home the demand for improved funding for universities, and a review of salaries for lecturers, among other issues. Several meetings between ASUU and the federal government have ended in deadlock.
Though Ngige is not the Minister of Education, but while many other people are trying to find a way of addressing this situation so that students can go back to school and ASUU can go back to work, the labour minister is busy creating more challenges.
First, he took the matter to the industrial court, last week, he registered and presented the certificates of registration to two unions, all in an attempt to break the rank of ASUU. If this is allowed by the government, I think this is a recipe for disaster and it may really create more problems than the ASUU crisis.
Though the bottomline is that the federal government does not have the money to yield to ASUU’s request, Ngige is not helping matters. He has turned this into a personal quarrel between him and the Minister of Education on one hand, and between himself and the striking lecturers on the other hand. Penultimate week, Ngige angrily left the meeting spearheaded by the Speaker of House of Representatives, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila in Abuja to end the crisis. Perhaps, he did not realise that Gbajabiamila was merely doing his job and that if he had resolved the crisis since it started, definitely, the speaker would not have intervened.
