The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU has said that the Nigerian government is not utilizing the opportunity given by the union to resolve the industrial dispute between them.
ASUU said rather the government has ganged up against public education in Nigeria and the Labour Minister, Dr. Chris Ngige is harboring personal animosity against the union.
At a news conference in Yola on Tuesday, El-Maude Gambo, the chair of ASUU's Modibbo Adama University (MAU) chapter, criticized the government's neglect of public education and noted that issues that caused ASUU to go on strike for eight months are yet to be resolved.
He pointed out that ASUU, as an intellectual union that upholds the law, has complied with both the Court of Appeals and the National Industrial Court's rulings, but that the federal government has blatantly refused to work with the union to find long-term solutions to the ongoing problems it has with the lecturers.
According to Gambo, "The federal government of Nigeria is missing the opportunity presented by the suspension of the strike to engage the union in finding amicable ways of resolving the issues that led to the strike.
"Instead, the minister of labor and employment, Dr. Chris Ngige in pursuance of his vendetta and war he declared against ASUU, wrote to the minister of finance to pay our members pro-rata salaries, thus treating us as casual laborers. It's so sad that governance has been turned to an avenue of oiling personal ego irrespective of the damage being caused to the nation’s universities,” he said.
He remarked that the FG's failure to pay academics their 7 months of unpaid salaries in addition to the pro-rata payment of their October salary indicates a concealed intention to casualize the academic environment and suffocate public universities in Nigeria.
"ASUU has signed three different Memorandum of Action (MoA) with the current government in 2017, 2019, and 2020. But the government failed to implement substantial components of the MoAs.
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"This is a part of the government discarding the reports that arose from collective bargaining between the two committees constituted by the government headed respectively by Prof. Munzali Jibril and Prof Nimi Briggs on one hand and ASUU on the other hand.
"The collective bargaining reports contained far-reaching agreements on conditions of service of university staff, funding and autonomy of universities that if implemented would go a long way in changing the narrative of the university education in Nigeria to a better one.
"The FGN mischievously refused to accept the report of committees the government itself set up but insisted on ASUU accepting the ridiculous “take it or leave it” offer,” Gambo said.
He accused the FG of taking diversionary actions through litigation while refusing to pay legitimate claims, and
repeatedly neglecting to address the main issues at hand, including the review of university staff members' terms of service, payment of unpaid Earned Academic Allowances (EAA), funding for the revitalization of universities, and release of reports from visitation panels to universities, all of which, if done, would have revived public universities.
“The two key ministers (Adamu Adamu and Chris Ngige) have contributed significantly in ensuring that the impasse lingers without end in sight by creating bottlenecks and sometimes deliberately sabotaging efforts aimed at resolving the impasse.
"Moreover, Adamu Adamu categorically stated that he has failed in discharging his responsibilities but President Buhari is still maintaining him as a minister.
"Majority of the people in government are products of free education but they deliberately refused to extend such a gesture to the children of the masses. They are comfortably siphoning our common resource to educate their children in private foreign universities while superintending the conversion of public universities to glorified secondary schools,” Gambo added.
“We urge Nigerians to impress on the government that the path it has taken will not augur well for Nigerian education and economy. ASUU will not be coerced into abandoning the just struggle for the restoration of the university system for the benefit of the people of Nigeria, especially the poor and downtrodden Nigerians.
“ASUU will resist all attempts to treat academic staff of universities as casual laborers and any move to jettison the principle of collective bargaining,” Gambo said
The event was part of the protest rally directed by ASUU NEC on all its chapters following the part payment of their October salaries by the Federal Government.
Education
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