The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has called on the Federal Government to recruit more lecturers into public universities, saying that excessive academic work is responsible for the rise in the number of deaths among lecturers in the institutions.
The recent among such sad events is the demise of 52-year-old professor of Exercise Physiology at the University of Ibadan, Olasupo Abass. Friends and relatives of the late lecturer, who died last week, said that he was hale and hearty until his final breath, suggesting that he might have died of stress resulting from excessive workload.
In a release signed by its chairman, Dr Deji Omole, the UI Chapter of ASUU said that Nigeria public universities in Nigeria were currently short of 40,000 lecturers. It warned that inability to beef up the academic staff could result in more deaths among the lecturers working in the schools.
He said, “The Federal Government should open up the recruitment of the academic staff of public universities in order to save overworked lecturers’ from untimely death. The union is also calling on the various tertiary educational institutions comprehensive medical check-up by various institutions to ascertain the health conditions of their staff. In the struggle for survival, many lecturers who think they are well may have death threatening health conditions.
“The state of our members’ health is fast depreciating due to excessive workload occasioned by the failure of the FG to employ more lecturers to cope with the number of admitted students. While the academic staff of universities continue to work in the most dehumanised conditions, the FG has refused to pay the earned academic allowances from 2011 to date. Apart from job overload, non-approval of annual leave as and when due has led to the loss of our members to death across the nation in 2018.
“Prof Abass was an outstanding scholar in UI. He was always ready to assist the students and the university system. The vacuum created by his sudden death will be very difficult to fill by the university.”
Omole noted that because of bad economic fortunes and overload of work, lecturers hardly found the time to attend to their health, accusing the FG of killing the lecturers with stress, especially at the UI.
