ASUU: FG has no intention of resolving strike

The Academic Staff Union of Universities has said the Federal Government has no intention of resolving its current face-off with the union and the ongoing strike.

ASUU said this on Monday in a statement by its Coordinator, Lagos Zone, Prof. Olusiji Sowande.

The union alleged that the slow pace of negotiations with government was an indication that the government had no intention to end the over seven-month strike.

He said this could be inferred from a statement by the Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr. Chris Ngige, that government would call for a further meeting with ASUU after collating necessary data to ensure pending issues were bought to the negotiation table.

Sowande said it was appalling that the government team, having had series of meetings with the union was just collating vital data required to engage the union.

He said, “Government has deliberately been wasting time and resources of our union on meetings and engagements it was not prepared for.

“It is therefore not surprising that Dr Ngige-led government team has not been able to return to negotiating table since the last engagement with our union on November 4, 2020.’’

ASUU urged parents, students and the general public not to be persuaded by Ngige’s statement that government could not afford to pay the conservative N110bn for the revitalisation of public universities.

It said the Needs Assessment Report of 2012 provided evidences of the need to save public universities from imminent collapse.

Sowande said, “In fact the document stipulated that N1.3 trillion injected over five years would save the public universities from collapsing.

“Government’s failure to faithfully release the revitalisation fund over the years is a deliberate attempt to allow the public universities to collapse.”

According to him, only recently, government approved N5bn as bailout fund to operators in the aviation sector to ameliorate the harsh realities of COVID-19 on their operations, adding that over the years, the Nigerian Government has spent over N1.5tn to bailout power generation and distribution companies to keep their businesses afloat despite the privatisation of the power sector.

Sowande said trillions of naira had been granted commercial banks as bailout funds to save them from collapsing, adding that if government could bail out private businesses for “business good” then Nigerian public universities deserved to be bailed out for “public good”.

He added, “In the interest of our students who have been at home for seven months, our union has shifted ground from the initial insistence of a release of one tranche of N220 billion revitalisation fund to demand for 50 per cent of one tranche (N110 billion) for government to show its commitment to revitalisation of our universities.

“This is a major reason government has not been able to return to negotiation with our union in the last two weeks.”

Sowande said the issues in contention go beyond ASUU’s rejection of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, for which the union had developed an alternative: University Transparency and Accountability Solution.