The All Progressives Congress (APC) has described as the height of insensitivity the decision by the First Lady, Mrs. Patience Jonathan, to travel to South Korea to receive an honorary doctorate award, while Nigeria's public universities have remained shut for many months due to industrial action.
The party said the first lady's trip was a jamboree and an assault on the sensibilities of Nigerians, especially the students, who have been forced to stay at home for almost four months. In a statement yesterday by its interim National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party said if the first lady and her advisers had been perceptive enough, they would have known that embarking on such a mission would send wrong signals to Nigerian people.
"In their eagerness to gobble up one spurious award after another, they forgot that if the Hansei University in South Korea had been shut by a strike because the government there had repudiated an agreement it willingly signed with the teachers, the institution would not have been able to give any honorary degree to anyone "hahahahaha".
"Any government that is unwilling to spend the nation's resources on the education of its youth has no qualms about wasting the same resources for a junket by the first lady and her cheerleaders halfway around the world for what is nothing more than an ego-massaging award," it added.
According to APC, since charity begins at home, the first lady, as a mother and a 'humanitarian', would have done well to rally women to put pressure on the government, led by her husband, to quickly reach an agreement that will end the long-drawn ASUU strike.
"It is instructive that the first lady would rather corral some hapless women to the Eagle Square in Abuja to illegally campaign for her husband, in furtherance of her 'humanitarian' gesture, instead of leading a campaign of concerned mothers and 'humanitarians' to protest the deadlock in ending the strike in our public universities," it said.
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