“The prolonged Academic Staff Union of Universities’ strike and the non-challant attitude of the federal government towards finding lasting solution to it is a systematic agenda of the political elite to keep the youth in bondage and therefore constitute grave crime against humanity since slavery is a grave crime against humanity”.
The above picture was graphically created by a development focused Non-Governmental organization-HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS’ ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (HURIWA) which has challenged the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) and other organized civil society community to institute a global litigation at the Hague, Netherland’s-based International Crimes Court (ICC) against the Nigerian government to compel government to stop the continuous breach of the inherent fundamental human rights to education and freedom from slavery by the Nigerian State under the current dispensation.
HURIWA said denial of the constitutionally protected right to education as currently being perpetrated by the federal government by the gross and criminal failure to honor subsisting agreement with the university teachers which necessitated the incessant industrial action in public universities, amounted to mental and intellectual slavery of the Nigerian youth which should be resisted.
In a statement condemning the failure of the federal government to enforce the body of agreements reached since three years ago with the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU), HURIWA urged the Students Union platform to stop fraternizing with reactionary forces in the various levels of government but should instead join their teachers in the struggle to free Nigeria’s public educational sector from State-sponsored slavery.
HURIWA however urged ASUU to work out other more effective international campaign mechanism to force the Nigerian government to fund the education sector better rather than the haste to always proceed on industrial action resulting in the closure of public universities incessantly which adversely affects the academic well-being of students especially those of them from poor homes.
The Rights group charged the university teachers union [ASUU] to make good its threat to publish the list of all children of the current political class who are schooling in some of the best educational faculties in major Universities abroad so as to expose the institutionalized hypocrisy at play in the refusal of the Federal Government to adequately fund public schools in Nigeria.
In the media statement endorsed jointly by the National Coordinator Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko and the National Media Affairs Director Miss. Zainab Yusuf, HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS’ ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (HURIWA) urged the Nigerian students to seek effective remedy from the global crimes court.
Basing her logic on Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of HUMAN RIGHTS which provides that “no one shall be held in slavery or servitude”, HURIWA compared total closure of public educational institutions through government’s lack of patriotic commitment, to modern day slavery.
HURIWA further stated thus; “the Nigerian state must be compelled by all legal means to stop forthwith the relentless attack against the fundamental human rights of the Nigerian Younger persons to qualitative education because a child denied of the basic right to qualitative education cannot be fit and proper to compete favourably with her/his peers in the globalized village whereby knowledge has become the best way of self actualization and wealth creation”.
HURIWA recalls that the salient aspects of the body of the FG/ASUU agreement of 2009 being breached by the federal government include but not limited to; funding requirements for Revitalization of the Nigerian universities; Federal government assistance to state universities; and progressive increase in annual budgetary allocation to education to 26% between 2009 and 2020.
The Rights group said it was inconceivable why the Nigerian state has consistently spent almost the entire budget on defence while neglecting the vital sectors of education and agriculture which have the capacity to reduce poverty and insecurity.
