The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) has lamented that the strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) comes with attendant unprecedented and untold challenges and hardship to both the students and their parents.

The President of NANS, Comrade Chinonso Obasi, at a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday, said incessant strikes translate to the distortion of learning, unnecessary delays and waste of time in the completion of a course of study, risk to the students for having to travel back and forth and waste of non-available resources and pressure on the part of the parents and general loss to the economy.

While calling on the Federal Government to consider the monumental risk of millions of idle and redundant young people to urgently address the lingering issues that have led to the recent indefinite strike by ASUU to enable students return to school, the leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) is questioning the imperative of the over N1 billion expended to develop the recently launched National Economic Recovery and Growth Plan that does not have provisions for addressing the critical challenges of Nigerian universities and its students.

NANS is of the considered opinion that human capital development is an integral component of the nation’s economic development and growth and so excluding appropriate considerations for the sustainable development of the nations institutions in a strategic roadmap for building a prosperous future for the country essentially to enhance the prospects of learning and development of young people and to harness the resources for national development as critical assets in a strategic national development plan is only not an absurdity but an aberration that is grossly not acceptable.

According to Comrade Obasi, the National Economic Recovery and Growth Plan is purported to contain a holistic solution to the numerous challenges bedevilling the nation and designed to engender not only the recovery of the nation’s ailing economy but one that would move the country forward towards building a sustainable and prosperous future for the country with the youth at the centre.

Comrade Obasi emphasised that social inclusion and active participation of young people on issues that concerns them is a global trend and that the Nigerian students and youth cannot continue to sit back and fold their arms while things go wrong. The need for the Nigerian students and youth to know about the contents of the National Economic Recovery and Growth Plan and how it directly impacts on their lives now and in the future and understand how they can actively participate in the implementation of the plan cannot be overemphasised.

The NANS President posited that the Nigerian students unequivocally condemns the non-inclusion of critical issues relating to addressing the challenges of the Nigerian students and Youth in the recently launched National Economic Recovery and Growth Plan as well as provisions in the plan to permanently address and bring to an end the lingering issues and protracted disagreements between ASUU and the Federal Government.

As critical stakeholders in the Nigerian Project, the leadership of NANS is mobilising the Nigerian students nationwide to demand explanations from the Federal Government as to why a whopping sum of over N1 billion would be expended on document that is devoid of critical inclusions and provisions to address the challenges of the Nigerian students and youth as well as practical strategies to put an end to the germane and perennial issues that translates to the incessant distortion of smooth learning the nations ivory towers.

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