ASUU to announce decision on strike Wednesday

The hope that the protracted industrial action embarked upon about nine months ago by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) would be suspended last Friday became dashed as the union failed to make any announcement.

But it was leant on Monday that the union had asked for Wednesday this week to aggregate views of their members from all the branches in order to present a united position.

This is coming as sister workers’ unions in the universities are warming up to start their own strike on demand for a salary raise and mode of payment, thus indicating that students may not resume academic activities in the nation’s universities anytime soon.

ASUU was expected to revert to the government latest last Friday on whether or not it has accepted the proposals to end the nine-month-old industrial action by its members.

But ASUU has asked for an extension of time to Wednesday as it could not collate all the branches’ decisions by last Friday.

The government has offered to pay the lecturers not registered with the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) salary arrears from April to June using the old payment method as a measure of goodwill, pending the approval of the ASUU-initiated platform, the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS).

Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, said the government had earlier brought an aggregate offer of N50 billion to ASUU, N20 billion for revitalisation and N30 billion for earned allowances.

He said in order to show good faith that the government is still with the lecturers on the issue of funding, a new proposal was made to increase the revitalisation fund from N20 billion to N25 billion and for the earned allowances to be raised to N40 billion immediate payment, making a total of N65 billion for revitalisation.

But ASUU rejected the amount at their last meeting with the government.

The union demanded N110 billion, which is 50 per cent of a tranche of N220 billion it had earlier demanded but the federal government rejected, citing fund paucity.

This resulted in another offer by the government team to raise the revitalisation fund to N40 billion while the earned allowances for unions remain N30 billion.

The government also gave assurances that it would address the pending issues of constituting visitation panels for federal universities and raising a new renegotiation team to begin talks with ASUU on the 2009 agreement.

ASUU agreed to go back to brief its organs and to revert to the government last Friday on whether or not it had accepted the terms to call off the strike.

But preliminary reports from the congresses held by ASUU branches last week to ratify the agreement showed a divergence of opinions.

While some accepted the government’s offer, most of them were said to be demanding full payment of their salary arrears up to November before suspending the strike.