Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), started a four-week strike on February 14, 2022, to push home their unmet demands on the Federal Government.
Some of the demands were the payment of promotion arrears, adoption of the University Transparency Accountability Solution (UTAS) as the preferred payment option, rather than the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), and funding for the revitalization of public universities, which totals N1.1 trillion.
Others included the rectification of discrepancies in the IPPIS and the revision of the 2009 ASUU-FGN Agreement.
ASUU and other university labour unions have been meeting with the Federal Government’s Briggs Renegotiation Committee since April 2022. The unions went on strike as a result of their dispute with government and the failure of government to satisfy their demands under the 2009 agreements they signed with the Federal Government.
ASUU continued to be steadfast in its resolve to push forward with its demands, and, on August 1, it again extended its ongoing strike by another four weeks to give the Federal Government more time to settle outstanding issues in contention. This was after previous extensions of the industrial action.
The parties’ negotiations are being stalled by ASUU’s demand on the payment of the salaries that have been withheld, according to comments made by Minister of Education Adamu Adamu last week.
He stated that all of ASUU’s requests had been met by government, with the exception of the payment of six months’ worth of wage arrears, which President Muhammadu Buhari turned down when a plan to that effect was given to him.
In this interview with Daily Sun, the union’s president, Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, discussed a number of topics, including the purported plot to outlaw ASUU, how the Federal Government’s “No-work-no pay” policy is impacting its members, and the union’s insistence on getting paid for the time it was on strike.
There are reports that FG is planning to proscribe ASUU. Are you not worried?
No, we are not worried.
What is ASUU’s reaction to government’s move to register CONUA?
We don’t know what they call CONUA.
CONUA is the Congress of University Academics that claims to have broken away from ASUU and is a faction of the union.
We do not have any faction. I don’t think we should waste our time on what does not exist. If we have a faction, why is it that all the universities are closed? Why are their members also on strike? See, we should not be playing to these people who are just looking for ways to distract the issues at stake of why we are on strike. These are just distractions. Instead of addressing the issues, you want to go and raise a team of one or two men to say we have a faction? They have done it during the military and it didn’t work, is it now that it’s going to work? So, they should concentrate on the issues. It will be easier for the government to address the issues than testing to see how they can mobilize a group. Why are they coming out this time?
Government should look at how to resolve the problem so that these children can go back to school. And all these distractions they are doing here and there, “No-work-no-pay, we want to punish you, we want to set up another group.” So, those are just distractions.
Why should government pay backlog of wages to ASUU members that have not worked for the past six months?
You see, for me, I really don’t want to comment on this issue but let me also tell you that academic staff are different from other staff. Whenever we go back to work, we are going to start work from where we stopped. We are going to teach people who are 2021, 2022. We are going to reach them. Those things we should have done during the strike, we are going back to do all these work. We have to graduate all these sets of students, bring them up to date. And then we move on. In doing that, we will sacrifice our leave. An academic session is 34 weeks in a year, 17 weeks per semester. If we deduct 34 weeks from 56 weeks, what does it give you? You have 22 weeks. The time we are supposed to use for our leave, for our research, we are going to sacrifice it to make up and catch up with the backlog. So, if you say you are not going to pay for that period, it means you are saying we should leave out the strike period. Let’s start from 2022 to 2023. What will happen to those students who are in those areas? This set of people that JAMB has admitted, will Nigerian government say we should allow them to go? And start a new one? So, that is the difference. When we go on strike, when we come back, we have to do backlog of what we didn’t do while we were on strike. And we are not going to do it for free after you have punished us. I just lost a member two days ago in Uniport. And what was the cause? When he was told that he was not going to be paid for the six months, knowing that he had borrowed so much money from the bank, he collapsed and died. Is it the N400,000 you pay a professor that he is going to use to feed the family for the past seven months? And the man died.
It so sad that this government is reducing this country to this level. You deliberately delay negotiations so that you can punish them. I think Nigerians should rise against this, in the interest of these children who have stayed at home for so long.
Even the children are going to go back to also face the problem. If you were having six-hour lectures in a day before, you are going to now have eight or 10 hours. So, that is what we are going to do, to make up for the backlog. You don’t say lecturers should throw that period away and start a new one. Please, Nigerian people should know that we are not asking government to pay us for work not done. An academic staff is not paid per hour. We are paid per work done.
Should ASUU dictate to FG how to pay its members?
This issue has come up again. Let me tell you, if you are working in an area, and the system of paying you is faulty, it is fraudulent, as a union of academics, will you close your eyes and pretend that it is good? You heard the Minister of Digital Economy say that IPPIS is corrupt. It’s bad. It’s not fair. The letter should have even done a letter commending us for raising this issue. Commending us to ensure that all the monies that have been stolen from our salaries using IPPIS that we are the ones who are raising that it’s not correct. In a normal country, we would be commended. And, two, in normal countries of the world, where things are working, if government has a problem, you go to the academics, to the universities, to look for a solution, not attacking the universities. So, what we are doing is a national duty. Government has paid hundreds of billions of dollars for that IPPIS to foreign countries. And we have developed one that can go round the whole country, and you don’t pay one kobo, developed by your own people for you. You can correct anything any day. And people are busy asking whether employer and employee. When you go the way you are reasoning, it becomes a master-slave relationship, which ASUU will not accept. And this has been sorted and government has accepted that IPPIS is bad. IPPIS and UTAS were tested and IPPIS was far below and UTAS scored very high. Tested by a government agency. I think government should commend ASUU for this national duty we have done for this country and accept it and move on.
Are there no other ways of pressing home your demands aside from these incessant strikes?
Can you suggest one to us? Because, as far as we are concerned, we had done everything before we went on strike. We addressed the press, met with the President, met with the Senate President, met with all sorts of people to appeal with the government, mobilized people, talked to parents. We have done all these. If we have done all these and the government did not do anything, so what else do we do? We have asked this country this question.
So, what is ASUU’s relationship with sister unions in the university system, because it seems you sometimes have contradicting demands?
We are working in the same system. We ought to be working together. But our past experiences and what has also been shown now show that it might be impossible to work together. The government says it is going to seize the salaries of your members and you say you are calling off strike. Besides, we didn’t go on strike together. We started first. We have our own issues, they have their own. So, they have a right to do their own. And we also have a right to do our own. And that is where we are. Government will prefer it to look as if unions on campus are fighting themselves. We will never fight against ourselves. We have e a common problem, but I hope our other colleagues also know that we have a common problem and not union problem in the universities.
Is ASUU not concerned that students may lose a whole session to the strike?
Let me explain to you: When you come to my house, I have six children and relatives who are staying with me at home because of the strike. They are here with me, I am taking care of them. I am making the sacrifice as well. But for me and my children that I have educated, it is better for us to make this sacrifice to have a university system that you will be proud of, to have education your will be proud of, to have an education system where everybody will be in this class, whether you are the son of the minister, you are the son of the President or you are the son of a lawmaker, all of us we are in the same class. That we don’t have classses among the Nigerian children. That is what we are fighting for. It’s their struggle also. It is not just ASUU’s struggle. It is a collective struggle. I have been at home for six months with my family, even with challenges.
How have your members been coping for six months without salary?
Many of my colleagues have gone to borrow money from banks to survive and, when they go back, they are going to pay heavy interest. So, everyone is making a sacrifice. When we were children, we made some sacrifices. Some of our colleagues died in the course of this struggle. “Ali Must Go,” remember? And it yielded some products, which is the TETFund that you have today everywhere. So, it is a collective thing, and, in future, if it works, they will be so proud that they were the set of students who were in school that time when this battle was fought and won. I appeal to them, they should just have patience. Hoping that government will begin to look in our direction, will begin to take education as a priority, and we will have a system that is good. That is the struggle and we hope that they understand.
