And the new academic session is rolling!

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In consonance with its culture of maintaining a predictable and reliable academic calendar because of absence of strike actions, Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD) has published its approved academic calendar for the 2014/2015 academic session.

For some times now, the pandemic strike actions afflicting Nigeria’s educational landscape has almost become a ritual with one strike action taking off no sooner than another one that has just been called off, thereby nearly bringing the nation to its knees, educationally speaking.

Today, all manners of unions just go on strike in the country’s various tertiary institutions without complying with relevant parts of the constitution and labour laws, thereby allowing the educational landscape to be sliding gleefully towards the Hobbesian state of anarchy.

For example, on July 1, 2013, members of the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU) embarked on another indefinite strike action, to get government to honour the term of the agreement reached by the two parties in 2009 and the January 2012 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to rehabilitate and revitalize Nigeria’s universities, thereby truncating the nation’s academic calendar.

As if a total eclipse of the nation’s educational system is intended, the Senior Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), the Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU) and the National Associations of Academic Technologists (NAAT) on Monday, July 22, 2013, threatened to resume their suspended strike over government’s failure to honour the 2009 agreement entered into with the unions.

All of these strike actions, in addition to some other factors, contribute significantly to situation whereby students in public universities spend between seven and eight years for a four-year programme and the attendant falling standard of education in the last two decades.

But thanks to Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), its Founder and President Emeritus, Aare Afe Babalola, SAN and some other private universities in Nigeria for taking the gauntlet to stem this seemingly untidy and ugly tide. Some sanity has definitely crept into the nation’s Univesity system