Vice Chancellor, University of Witwaterstrand, South Africa, Professor Adam Habib has expressed displeasure over ongoing strike being embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), cautioning African governments and indeed Nigeria against embarking on a path capable of destroying public universities. Professor Habib stated this at the weekend while presenting70th anniversary Convocation Lecture at the University of Ibadan where the institution’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Idowu Olayinka and many other academics were in attendance.
ASUU had embarked on strike to force government fulfill its Memorandum of Action it signed with the union in 2017 bordering on funding and revatilisation of public universities, among other sundry issues. However, the South African Vice Chancellor noted that there were some political heads of governments in Africa, whose main aim was to deliberately destroy public university education, lamenting that such move would put African citizenry into perpetual servitude.
Habib, who noted that “the net effect of destroying our public universities would lead to the complete commodification of higher education, where local private teaching universities and foreign research universities would provide a quality education for the rich and the poor would be damned to an inadequate.
