The two-day hunger strike by members of the Human Rights Writers’ Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) as a strategy to compel the Nigerian Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to end the almost four months old university strike has been declared a success.

“It was successful,” HURIWA’s National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, told News Express shortly after the end of the hunger strike at 6pm yesterday.

He disclosed that apart from drawing public attention to the need to take urgent action to end the industrial action by ASUU, the hunger strike also attracted the attention of government. “We got calls from some top government officials,” Onwubiko, who writes the popular RIGHTSview column that appears Tuesdays and Saturdays in News Express, said but refused to give further details.

He, however, reiterated that the struggle has just started as the hunger strike “is only the first phase of our civil disobedience activity as we will proceed to the next stage if after 14 days the strike is not called off.”

Onwubiko insisted that the strike is “a crime against humanity.” He also described it as “a conspiracy by the elites against the commoners and the poor since 90 percent of the students affected by this shameful industrial action are children of the very poor of the Nigerian society.” His reason: “Children of the rich and the political elites are either schooling in some of the best schools in Europe and the USA or if at all are they are in Nigeria school system they are usually enrolled in the few highly expensive private universities whereby their parents pay these obscene school fees using financial resources drawn from the public treasury which they are in custody of as political office holders.”

News Express reports that Nigeria’s public universities have been deserted since ASUU launched the strike on July 1 in a bid to force the government to keep a funding agreement signed in 2009 which government says it lacks the resources to fully implement.

•Photo shows HURIWA’s National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko.

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