The majority of the country’s federal and state universities are still
reeling from the effects of the Sunday, November 4, directive of the
National Executive Council (NEC) of Academic Staff Union of Universities
(ASUU) to its members to embark on total and indefinite strike with
immediate effect
The marching order was the outcome of the
deliberation of the NEC, which met at the Federal University of
Technology, Akure (FUTA), Ondo State.
Six weeks after, the
various campuses across the country are looking like ghost towns as
students were forced to go home. Since then, the students have been
anxiously waiting for when the government and ASUU would resolve the
issues in contention.
Checks on campuses across the country
showed that the lecture halls and libraries are empty while the
lecturers have also abandoned their offices in compliance with the NEC
directive.
The representatives of the Federal Government and the
leadership of the union have met severally, including on Monday,
December 10 with no end in sight. Even when the Federal Government
invoked the ‘no work, no pay’ rule and asked vice chancellors to stop
salaries of the striking lecturers, the university teachers were not
bothered as they vowed to also apply ‘no pay, no work’, a development
that forced the government to withdraw the directive.
After one
of the meetings, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris
Ngige, told Nigerians that the government had partially met the demands
of ASUU, which led to speculations that the union would suspend the
ongoing strike.
But in swift reactions, some principal officers
of ASUU on Wednesday and Thursday last week denied that it was planning
to suspend the industrial action, stating that there was no concrete
agreement on ground.
The officers told Sunday Sun that only the NEC could suspend the strike, pointing out that no NEC meeting had yet been fixed.
Since
the strike, ASUU and the government have met many times, the last being
on Monday, December 17, and like others in the past, the meeting ended
in a deadlock. The leadership of the union expressed displeasure in the
way the government representatives were handling the discussion.
One
of the branch chairmen told Sunday Sun that if the government officials
continue with the lackadaisical attitude towards resolving the issues
in contention, the implication would be that the students would continue
to stay at home for a long time except President Buhari intervened and
took decisions that would allow peace to return to the various
universities.
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