ASUU threatens to down tools again if FG fails

Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has threatened to embark on another bout of industrial action, if government fails to fulfil its part of the agreement with the union nine years ago.

In a press conference yesterday in Awka, Anambra State, the coordinator, ASUU Owerri zone, Uzo Onyebinama, stressed that their patience was running out.

According to him, such action is not unexpected and ASUU will not be perturbed by it.

Onyebinama said: “Today again, we are envisaging that there may be an industrial action, if government does not do the needful.

We are also aware that the government in power today, which was in opposition then, will accuse us of being used by the opposition to undermine the government.”

He listed ASUU’s reasons for embarking on another strike, to include collapse of the 2017/2018 re-negotiation of the 2009 FGN/ASUU agreement due to government’s insistence on exorbitant tuition fees beyond the reach of Nigerian parents and non-implementation of components of the 2017 Memorandum of Action (MOA).

Others are non-release of over N1 trillion arrears of the revitalisation fund for public universities from 2014 to 2018, failure to mainstream the payment of earned academic allowances into the annual budget, and failure to pay arrears of shortfall in salaries that had been verified under the Presidential Initiative on Continuous Auditing (PICA).

The rest are poor funding of state universities, non-implementation of the Earned Academic Allowance (EAA), non-payment of arrears of Consolidated University Academic Salary Structure (CONUASS) in various state universities, and failure to release the operational licence of the National Universities Pension Management Company (NUPEMCO) to prevent retirement problems.

He refuted allegations that the proposed strike was politically-motivated, adding that such allegations were not unexpected.

In a similar development, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Anambra State chapter, has mobilised its workforce for today’s warning strike as directed by the organised labour.