Professor Osodeke on ASUU Strike: “No Lecturer Has Been Paid Since February”
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) said on Tuesday that since the union began taking industrial action in February, none of its university lecturers have received payment.
ASUU President Professor Emmanuel Osodeke accused the Federal Government of using hunger as a weapon to coerce the teachers on strike into returning to their classrooms in an interview with Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily.
Osodeke stated that the current administration cannot use hunger to force the union members who are on strike to end their protests because their paychecks have been withheld for the last six months.
He asserts that the Federal Government believes that depriving university lecturers of their salaries will cause the teachers’ union to disintegrate and put an end to the strike.
“Our salaries have been held, this is the sixth month our salaries have been withheld. They thought that if they hold our salaries for two or three months we will come begging and say ‘please allow us to go back to work,” the ASUU President Professor Osodeke stated.
“But we as a union of intellectuals, we have grown beyond that. You can’t use the force of hunger to pull our members back which is exactly what the government is doing.”
ASUU began a strike on February 14 in order to press its needs for a better welfare package and the reformation of the country’s educational system, among other things. This has caused many Nigerian students to stay at home.
President Muhammadu Buhari had on July 19 instructed the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, to offer a solution to the problem and report back to him in two weeks out of worries over the ongoing labor action.
Today is the deadline for the presidential ultimatum, and ASUU won’t relent until its demands are satisfied. The union, unperturbed by the event, decided to extend the strike for an additional four weeks, dashed students’ chances of returning to class.
Professor Osodeke responded to Buhari’s decision to call off the strike by insisting that the union is still open to talks with government officials to resolve the labor dispute.
He asserted that there is no place for a master-slave dynamic in academia and that employees have the right to object to bad policies.
The Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), which the government was not to use to pay the salaries of academics, was excoriated by the ASUU leader.
