Go back to classrooms or lose public sympathy, Mark urges ASUU

President of the Senate, David Mark, on Thursrday, called on the striking Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and other units of the nation's tertiary institutions, to go back to work or lose public sympathy. In a brief interview with airport correspondents at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos, the Senate President, while pleading with them to go back to work, said staying away from work was not the best thing to do. N.B Visit www.campusflava.com for updates and information related to other schools.   His words: "We are pleading with them to go back to work. I believe when they go back to work, they can negotiate, but to keep away is not the best. They have made their points in my candid opinion and to overdrive it now, they will be over flogging the issue. They should go back to work. The lecturers should not insist on not going back to the class room. The important thing is for them to make their points and let the government realise that they have got a genuine point and they have made it. If they over flog it, they will lose public sympathy, but at the moment, they have public sympathy and I think they should not over flog it," he added. In a related development, an association of Muslim Women in Business and Professions, has called on the Federal Government and the ASUU to resolve the current impasse between them. The organisation, in a release issued in Lagos by its district Amirah (President), Hajia Sherifah Joke Yusuf, described the situation as that of two elephants fighting, while the grass suffers, noting that leaving the young university undergraduates out of schools in the name of strike, portended a great danger ahead. The Amirah, an educationist herself, who argued that the incessant strikes were capable of exposing the undergraduates to series of unworthy activities, declared: "the devil finds work for the idle hands."                        By  Shola Adekola