DON'T SCRAP TASUED NOW, ASSEMBLY TELLS AMOSUN
The Ogun State House of Assembly yesterday ordered a stay-of-action on the plan by the state government to scrap the Tai Solarin University of Education (TASUED).
Although the state government justified its action, the Assembly described the action of the Governor Ibikunle Amosun-led administration as 'putting the cart before the horse.''
The Assembly also described the action of the government as illegal, particularly as the laws on the establishment of the affected schools had not been repealed or amended.
The state government last week announced the scrapping of TASUED, the nation's premier university of education and merged it with the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ago Iwoye. The state Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Mr. Segun Odubela had told journalists that the decision to scrap and merge the university was borne out of genuine desire to enhance the quality of education in the university.
It also collapsed four existing Information and Communication Technology; (ICT) polytechnics spread across the state into one. This action had generated negative reactions from people, particularly from students of the tertiary institution who had not only condemned government's action but staged a protest during which one of them died in a motor accident last Tuesday with several others injured. Appearing before the state House of Assembly yesterday, the Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Alhaji Yusuf Olaniyonu and Odubela, though justified the rationale for the scrapping and merging of TASUED, members of the Assembly faulted the process of implementation.
The Speaker of the House, Suraju Adekunbi, after listening to the contributions of members, which included Remmy Hazzan, Olakunle Oluomo and Olayinka Mafe, among others, during the sitting of the committee of the House acknowledged the good intention of the government but regretted that the extant law on the school had not been amended. He then ordered: 'In view of this, I want to say that since we have not done any amendment to the extant law, we want to appeal to you to stay action until the right thing is done.' Olaniyonu, who spoke shortly after the Assembly's order accepted the advice from the House, adding that the state government had done nothing which affected the structure of the affected institutions. 'We have only announced an intention,' he stated.
Before the submission of the Speaker, a lawmaker representing the Odogbolu State Constituency, Hazzan, noted that good intention without the right approach usually brought negative effect. He recalled the nationwide protest that greeted the Federal Government's removal of fuel subsidy without adequate consultation.'Federal Government just decided to remove subsidy without doing enough of consultation and at the end of the day, it turned out that the legislative arm was not in agreement with the executive before it resulted in the brouhaha that we had in the last nationwide strike.''
Hazzan, who was once the deputy speaker of the House in the administration of Governor Gbenga Daniel added: 'Beautiful intentions, sometimes when they don't come with the right approach, get the kind of negative publicity that we have.'All that you have done here, no matter how beautifully conceptualised, are a negation of the provision of the establishment laws for all those schools. Because if you are saying a school becomes this and the law is still there, then it means you are standing the law on the head.
'The genesis of all you did should have been from this place, so that there would be amendment to give even the transition period that you are in a semblance of legality. Whatever you are doing now is outrightly illegal, that's just the truth,' he told the two commissioners and others.