By: AbdulQudus Suliamon, NIJ
As the National Conference inauguration continues, President of the Muslim Students Society of Nigeria, Lagos State, Engineer Kameel Kalejaiye urged that the exercise should address the problems faced by Nigerians.
Kalejaiye spoke at the annual Campus Interactive Forum organised by Council of Higher Institutions, COHI, in Lagos.
He recalled that the former President Olusegun Obasanjo held a conference but yielded no result or implementation.
He said the only condition that would make the confab credible was the acceptance of recommendations of the three month exercise by the National Assembly.
“The national confab will be a waste of Nigeria resources if National Assembly rejects the recommendations from confab then we have wasted the time of delegates and wasted 3months out of hour daily lives monitoring the confab. This Confab is only aimed at wooing Nigerians for the interest of the President in 2015,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Education Rights Campaign (ERC) has also declared President Jonathan’s National Conference a charade.
In a press release, the group described the National Conference has an expensive sideshow that is not designed to address the country’s challenges like mass unemployment, rotten public education sector, and degenerate public health services etc.
It also condemned the participation of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) at the National Conference which has been convened by a deeply unpopular government looking for any straw to hang onto.
ERC urge the mass of students not to entertain a single shred of hope that the six delegates presented by National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) will ever represent their best interests.
The group stressed that “NANS as an organisation has in the recent years failed woefully to represent the best interests of students concerning issues such as education funding and democratic management of schools. During the last strike of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) which was waged for adequate funding of the public universities, the national leadership of NANS came out in support of the Federal government. Right now public Polytechnics and Colleges of Education have been shut for months yet NANS has not deemed it urgent to call a nationwide protest to compel government to meet ASUP and COEASU’s demands. Against this background, it should be clear to all discerning minds that the six delegate slots allocated to NANS is not an appreciation of the weight of the students population in society as some impressionable minds have said.
