In Nigeria, where poor funding remains a major challenge for the education sector, Trade Unions and Student unions with support from Solidarity Center have launched a campaign to revive the labour-student coalition to amplify issues affecting students and their working parents.
The campaign, tagged “Education: A Right, Not a Privilege”, will among other things draw attention to the need to increase funding for the education sector as well as an overhaul of the current national policy on education.
Our correspondent reports that in the 1980s, Trade Unions and the Student movement formed a strong alliance in the struggle against military dictatorship, with some student union leaders being recruited into the Labour movement.
But recently, the connection between the Trade Unions and student movement has seen a decline.
“When I came to Nigerian in 2019, I realised that there was a disconnect between the Labour movement and the civil society, particularly NANS,” Sonny Ogbuehi, Country Program Director, Solidarity Center, West Africa said during the launch in Abuja.
He explained that there is a need to revive the Labour-Student Coalition in a bid to strengthen labor unions’ ties with student-youth organizations with the aim of promoting democratic values and pursuing people-oriented policies.
According to the Solidarity Center country director, students are potential workers in the waiting, therefore, building an understanding of the conditions of schools and the workplace for both students and workers is a necessity.
He also noted that the Solidarity Center is implementing several projects around the informal sector and Gender Based Violence in Nigeria.
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In 2022, Universities across Nigeria were shutdown for 8 months due to a strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) who were protesting, among other things, poor renumeration and calling for increase funding for universities.
In some instances, the student unions were at loggerhead with the trade unions over the prolonged strike.
“The Nigerian government has a deliberate policy to destroy the unity of the students because it sees students as potential opposition to the misrule that has bedeviled this country,” John Odah the General Secretary of OTUWA said.
Odah said the relationship between workers and student unions is a necessary one