• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Oloyede decries delayed decisions over ASUU’s 176 days strike

Lower JAMB cut-off marks seen as threat to education

Ishaq Oloyede, the registrar and chief executive of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has expressed worries over the delay in arriving at decisions over the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU’s) 176 days strike.

Oloyede in a statement on Saturday, August 6 during his monitoring exercise of the 2022 mop-up Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) said the delay means postponing evil day, hence he appealed to striking lecturers to call off the strike and resume normal academic activities.

Recall that JAMB held a mop-up examination in order to provide equal chances to all candidates seeking tertiary education.

All candidates who took the UTME at the centres indicated during the first sitting in May were rescheduled for August 6, mop-up. Candidates who were absent from such centres for whatever reason are however not qualified for the mop-up examination.

According to the JAMB report, more than 42,000 candidates participated in the exercise conducted in 45 centres in five states of the federation.

Read also: We are conciliators to ASUU – Festus Keyamo

The former vice-chancellor of the University of Ilorin urged both ASUU and the federal government to try and reach a truce to ensure affected students return to the classrooms.

He reiterated that the need to put a permanent end to the incessant strike by the lecturers, insisting that even if ASUU called off the strike, it would not prevent it from happening again.

“I believe that what we should do is to look at the system and make some hard decisions.

“If we do not take such decisions, then we may be postponing the evil day,” he said.

ASUU has been on strike for 176 days since February 14 over the non-implementation of the 2009 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and 2020 Memorandum of Action (MoA), the earned academic allowances of lecturers, and the rejection Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) platform among others by the federal government.