The Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU), has said its members can embark on strike anytime, as the Federal Government is reneging on its promise to implement the Memorandum of Action, MOA, the two parties signed last December.
Briefing the press in Lagos on Tuesday, the Lagos Zonal Coordinator, Dr Adelaja Odukoya, also accused the government of trying to cripple the union by withholding check off dues of members for over a year.
He said the dues ran into millions of naira and that the act was perpetrated by the government through the controversial Integrated Personnel Payroll and Information System,IPPIS.
“We called off our strike last December and signed a MOA and out of the nine items on the list for implementation, only two have been done. The first is the setting up of Visitation. Panels to universities.
Can you image that we as a union are the ones asking the government to set up panels to know what is happening in their universities? Setting up of panels ought to be done every five years.
“The second item is the promotion arrears and that has not been done completely. A number of our members in some universities are yet to benefit. Can one say scoring two out of nine marks is enviable?
“The Revitalisation Fund that they said had been deposited at the Central Bank of Nigeria since January this year is still crawling and has not got to the accounts of beneficiaries,” he said.
Similarly, the Zonal Coordinator, ASUU, Bauchi Zone, Prof Lawan Abubakar said members of ASUU in the Bauchi zone had been stretched beyond their elastic limit and could not continue to wait for the government and its agents displaying all manners of antics, which amounted to delay tactics.
"Anytime from now, the union will conclude the process. We have already started the process of going back and when we exhaust our procedures, then, we will announce the date for the strike.
“We are pained to bring these issues to the public, because more than nine months after suspending the 2020 strike, the government has again reneged on the MoA. The public, in this circumstance, should not hold our union responsible for any disruption of academic activities in Nigerian public universities.” He stressed.
