The meeting between the Academic Staff Union of Universities and the Federal Government slated for 16th August 2022 has yielded no positive result, as members of the union staged a walkout on government representatives. Sources confirmed that the meeting which was held at the National Universities Commission (NUC) headquarters, ended up in deadlock as both FG and ASUU refuse to come to terms after 3 hours of deliberation. The President of ASUU, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke, had earlier noted that the lingering strike will immediately come to a halt if only the meeting with the FG scheduled for yesterday ends in a positive way. He also revealed that the meeting was scheduled by the FG to renegotiate the demands of the ASUU FG 2009 agreement.
According to Osodeke, the government conceded its request to adopt the use of UTAS as the payment mode for the university staff. He added that should the government agree to meet its demands, the union was ready to call off the strike immediately.
“We have not had any serious communication though they have invited us for a meeting on one issue, tomorrow (Tuesday), which is the issue of renegotiation”. “The issues of IPPIS and UTAS have been put to rest because the test has been done and it has been agreed with the chief of staff, that UTAS will be implemented to cover the university…. If we go into that meeting tomorrow and the government says, what you have bargained for, we are willing to sign, the strike will be called off,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo, has faulted the Peoples Democracy Party-led administration as the cause for the lingering issues between FG and ASUU, stating that the Nigerians should not fault the current administration for the ongoing strike action. He claimed that between 1999 and 2015 when the PDP handed over to the ruling APC, ASUU was on strike 12 times, amounting to 900 days.
“The ASUU thing you are talking about. What is the problem of ASUU now? It’s the 2009 agreement signed by the PDP government. They signed agreements with ASUU that they couldn’t fulfill. We had to inherit those agreements and now are struggling to renegotiate those agreements.
“Imagine how irresponsible a government can be when they went into agreements with ASUU and signed conditions that they couldn’t fulfill and that is why ASUU is on strike, so let us tell Nigerians that ASUU is not on strike because APC signed an agreement with them. It was the PDP that signed the agreement.
