After months of negotiation with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), who had embarked on a 9-month strike, the Nigerian Government recently reached an agreement with the union, hence ending the strike.
ASUU embarked on the strike action in March 2020, following its disagreement with the Federal Government over the funding of the universities and implementation of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), which according to the union, negates the autonomy policy for the universities.
President of ASUU, Prof Ogunyemi, blamed these for the alleged irregularities in the payment of salaries and allowances of lecturers, with some lecturers receiving very poor remuneration in some cases.
Adamu Adamu
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) was founded in 1978 as an educational trade union to act as a collective pressure group on behalf of all public universities. This was in the heady days of the 1970’s when trade unions had enormous powers and held governments to ransom. We recall that it was the unions in the United Kingdom that brought down Edward Heath’s government in 1974.
Strikes have been a constant feature of ASUU, accounting for about 30 percent of their total existence being lost to strikes which have greatly eroded the value of Nigerian education. A typical Nigerian student spends about six to seven years for a four-year course. Most public school students know when they commence their studies but are clueless as to when they will graduate due to no fault of theirs due to the strikes.
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Published 13 January 2021
Within two weeks of the conditional suspension of the nine-month strike embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities, the Federal Government has stuck to her notoriety of flouting agreements willingly reached with the university teachers. As intellectuals, ASUU was wise when it said the strike would be ‘conditionally suspended’ and would be reactivated should the Federal Government renege. As of December 31, 2020, the Federal Government had failed to fulfil three agreements reached with the union. One, it promised to release 40bn Earned Academic/Earned Allowances to offset part of the outstanding claims of the members of all registered trade unions in the universities on or before December 31, 2020 but did not. Two, lecturers received only two months’ salaries out of six months (including December 2020 salaries) owed lecturers. Not all lecturers were even paid the two months. In the University of Ibadan for exa