Drama as ASUU President rejects intervention to end strike

There was a mild drama when the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) rejected Berekete Family radio’s intervention to end the ongoing strike.

ASUU has been on strike since February and all efforts to make lecturers return to the classrooms have not yielded results.

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On Saturday morning, host of the radio programme, Ahmad Isah, popularly known as Ordinary President, invited ASUU president, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, and his team, to explain to Nigerians the perennial problems and state why the union is still on strike.

Isah also said he had set up a special intervention bank account domiciled in TAJ Bank to raise funds for the union, with a view to ending the strike.

Apparently to convince ASUU to buy into the idea of the intervention, Isah publicly showed the N50 million cash donated by Governor Udom Emmanuel of Akwa Ibom State.

Immediately the money was displayed, ASUU President frowned at the development, saying they should not be associated with such.

At that point, Isah threatened to discontinue the intervention and many Nigerians who phoned in during the programme described ASUU as ”insensitive”.

The striking lecturers’ demands include, funding of the revitalisation of public universities, Earned Academic Allowances, University Transparency Accountability Solution (UTAS) and promotion arrears.

Others are the renegotiation of 2009 ASUU-FG Agreement and the inconsistency in Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System.

In an interview last month, Osedeke told NAN that none of these demands had been met by the Federal Government.

“All the issues that made us to go on strike are still there; that is the revitalisation fund, that is putting more money into universities and revitalising the infrastructure in the universities. There is also the issue of our mode of payments in the universities. There is no university in the world where lecturers are paid salaries from the Accountant General’s Office.

“We have challenged them to provide one, if universities are a universal body, why are they doing things differently. We talk of negotiation of the agreement, the proliferation of universities, among others, so there are lots of issues that they have not resolved,” he said.

The ASUU president also said that the government had also refused to accept UTAS that he said had been tested and passed with a scored 99.3 per cent.

Osedeke urged the Federal Government to do the needful in order for students to return to school.