ASUU Gives Federal Government 6 New Conditions To End Strike

ASUU have presented six new conditions that must be met by the federal government before they can call off their two-week old strike.

Some of the options include:

Bringing back ASUU to the negotiation table;

Allowing the Wale Babalakin Panel to conclude its assignment;

Suing ASUU to either the Industrial Arbitration Panel (IAP) or the National Industrial Court (NIC); and

Referring all issues to the Ministry of Labour and Employment, in line with the Trade Dispute law.

According to a source, who spoke in confidence with our correspondent, the six conditions were not part of the previous demands referred to the Babalakin Committee for arbitration.

The new conditions are:

- The Federal Government should immediately accept payment of shortfall in salaries of universities;

- Universities to manage their IGR the way they like and exemption from TSA;

- Exemption of Endowment Funds, JV cash from TSA;

- Payment of University Salary Scale to teachers in primary schools in universities;

- Release/implementation of guidelines for the retirement of Professors in line        with 2009 FG-ASUU Agreement; and

- Waiver/ government fiat to set up Nigerian Universities Pension Management Company

According to reports “ASUU has brought proposals different from the agreement they reached in the Senate with the Federal Ministry of Education.

“They are asking the government to take over the shortfall in the salaries of universities when there were glaring cases of abuse of recruitment process and non-compliance with Integrated Personnel Payment Information System (IPPIS).

“They want the government to accept liability for the shortfall in spite of the fact that universities acted arbitrarily in increasing their wage bill.

“The lecturers have also asked the government to manage their Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) henceforth instead of remitting such to the Treasury Single Account (TSA) in line with their demand for autonomy for universities.”