SSANU, NASU suspend strike, ASUU adamant
Strikes by SSANU, NASU has been called off, but still ASUU remain adamant
The five-month-old protest by the Non-Academic Staff Union of Allied and Education Institutions (NASU) and the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) has been called off.
Following a meeting in Abuja with the minister of education, Adamu Adamu, the two unions decided to call off the strike on Saturday.
Adamu reportedly informed the unions that the Federal Government had set aside N50 billion for their earned allowances, according to a report by Channels Television.
The minister said that the N50 billion in earned allowances that the government had sanctioned would also go to the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), which has been on strike for six months without calling it off.
The majority of the country’s public universities would continue to be without academic operations due to ASUU’s strike, according to Diaspora Info, notwithstanding the resume of SSANU and NASU.
Speaking on Channels TV’s Sunrise Daily on Friday, ASUU President Emmanuel Osodeke threatened to keep his members off the job unless the government made up the six months’ worth of unpaid salaries that had accrued during the union’s strike.
According to Osodeke, his members wouldn’t come back to work until the government agreed to forgo covering all the lessons that students missed due to the strike, which would result in the loss of an academic session.
To discourage more professors from going on strike in the future, the education minister had pledged that the government would not pay the lecturers while they were on strike.
