Unpaid salaries: ASUU flays Dickson over new varsity

The Academic Staff Union of Universities, Niger Delta University chapter, has lambasted the Bayelsa State Governor, Seriake Dickson, for establishing a private university christened, ‘the African International University’.

The academic body also lamented months of unpaid salaries of lecturers, the alleged underfunding of NDU as well as a ploy by the governor to strangulate the state-owned university because of the new private university.

The NDU expressed these concerns on Friday during a press conference at the NDU’s Faculty of Law Campus in Yenagoa,  Bayelsa State capital.

The Chairman, ASUU, NDU chapter, Dr. Stanley Ogoun, who addressed journalists, said the passage of the bill to establish AIU,  a public-private partnership arrangement, to be sited at Toru Orua,  Dickson’s hometown, was an attempt to destroy the state-owned university.

Ogoun wondered why a government that was unable to adequately fund the NDU could espouse the idea of establishing a new university under a partnership arrangement via counterpart funding with a promise to make it better than NDU.

The ASUU Chairman sought to know why the supposed faceless “investors” involved in the PPP arrangement could not put together the legal instrument required towards obtaining a National University Commission operating licence.

Ogoun also wondered why the state Assembly passed the bill with an unprecedented speed, within 24 hours, without recourse to a public hearing.

He said that a glance at the bill indicated clearly that it is simply prototype of the NDU law 2000 as amended in 2004, noting that the NDU Law 2000 was copiously plagiarised.

He, therefore, called on all Bayelsans, the Ijaw nation and the general public to be vigilant and stand up against any fraudulent intent that would enslave the masses.