I want to urge the Federal Government and the Federal Ministry of Education to look into the internal strike in Kaduna Polytechnic before things get out of hand. Kaduna Polytechnic is known to be the largest polytechnic in West Africa. It is reputed for academic performance and infrastructural development, its size and the population of students. I am afraid that the polytechnic’s ranking in the country, Africa and beyond may soon decline due to incessant strikes.
I call on the concerned authorities to quickly and adequately address the troubling issue of strikes in the polytechnic in order to prevent the school from going into extinction so that it can continue contributing to the development of the country in the area of illiteracy elimination.
Barely few days after the school’s resumption from the last Yuletide break, students were hit with yet another indefinite strike embarked upon by lecturers over the non-payment of five months arrears of salaries and hazard allowances. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened.
There are allegations that the management of the polytechnic failed to disburse to the lecturers, the funds released by the Federal Government to pay the allowances in contention. Any time the polytechnic goes on strike, the reason cited by the lecturers is always the non-payment of their allowances and this is always affecting the students, making them to spend extra year (s) in the institution. The time to solve this problem once and for all is now.
Ifeoma Nmeregini.
Nyanya, Abuja.
and then