The Academic Union of Universities will meet with the Federal Government on Monday (today).
ASUU was supposed to meet with the FG on Friday, but the National President, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, said the meeting was postponed by the Ministry of Labour to Monday.
He said, “The meeting was postponed by the FG; they said they were still consulting. We will be meeting them on Monday in the afternoon.”
The PUNCH had reported that the union was invited by the Ministry of Labour to discuss issues surrounding the Memorandum of Action, which was signed with the FG in December 2020.
Osodeke said ASUU had no plan to go on strike if the government would grant its requests.
He stressed that the ASUU National Executive Council would meet in August to decide the next line of action if government refused to fulfil the MoA agreement.
The PUNCH had reported on that the spokesman for the Ministry of Education, Ben Gong, challenged the union to be more specific in its allegations that the government had violated agreements it reached with the union.
But Osodeke maintained that the Memorandum of Understanding which was signed with the Federal Government in December 2020 had not been implemented.
“They know that University Transparency and Accountability Solution, which is the major one, has not been implemented. The revitalisation fund has not been released. They agreed that they would mainstream our earned academic allowances into the salary system in 2021. We are in August and preparing 2022 budget, yet nothing has been done. They said by December they would pay the backlog they owe our members; till now they have not paid a number of them.
“They agreed that they would review the NUC law to ensure that no government would wake up one day and be proliferating universities, they haven’t gone to the National Assembly,” he said.
Copyright PUNCH.
