The ongoing industrial action embarked on by ASUU, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, has been extended by further 2 months, bringing the strike to a cumulative period of a 3 months, or about an academic semester.
At an emergency meeting held on Sunday, Sunday, March 13, 2022 at its National Secretariat at the University of Abuja, to review the ongoing strike, ASUU President, Emmanuel Osodeke, that the national executive council of the union “was disappointed that Government did not treat the matters involved with utmost urgency they deserved during the four-week period, as one would expect from a reasonable, responsive, and well-meaning administration.”
He said NEC concluded that the government had failed to satisfactorily address all the issues raised in the 2020 FGN/ASUU Memorandum of Action (MoA) within the four-week roll-over strike period and resolved that the strike be rolled over for another eight (8) weeks.
The statement read in part: “The meeting was called to review developments since the Union declared a four weeks total and comprehensive roll-over strike action at the end of its NEC meeting at the University of Lagos, Akoka, Lagos on 12th-13th February, 2022.
“NEC noted that the leadership of ASUU has held some interactive meetings with agents of government in the last four weeks that the strike action had lasted. However, NEC was disappointed that Government did not treat the matters involved with utmost urgency they deserved during the four-week period as expected of a reasonable, responsive, and well-meaning administration.
“NEC acknowledged the intervention efforts, in various ways, by patriots and friends of genuine national development (students, parents, journalists, trade union leaders, civil society activists etc.) to expeditiously resolve the crisis which Government’s disposition had allowed to fester. However, ASUU, as a union of intellectuals, has historic obligations to make governments honour agreements.”
In the main, the union demands that government implement the Memorandum of Action (MoA) it signed with it in December 2020, on funding for revitalisation of public universities (both Federal and States), renegotiate the 2009 FGN/ ASUU Agreement, and deploy the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS).
Other demands of the union as listed by ASUU include Earned Academic Allowances, State Universities, promotion arrears, withheld salaries, and non-remittance of third-party deductions.
