Just In - "No Going Back On ASUU Demands"

The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has said that it would not shift grounds on its demand for 100 per cent implementation of the 2009 agreement it signed with the Federal Government, pointing out that the government was not sincere in addressing the rot in the education sector.

Chairman of ASUU at the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University in Bauchi State, Dr. Lawan Abubakar, made this known in an interview in Bauchi yesterday.

Abubakar also lamented that both the Federal Government and the National Assembly were  gambling and playing politics with the future of students in the universities by refusing to implement an agreement it consciously entered into with the union four years ago.

According to him, “I can recall vividly that in December 2011, ASUU went on strike over this same non-implementation of the 2009 agreement. In January 2012, we sat down again with the government and drafted a Memorandum of Understanding, MOU, on how the 2009 agreement would be implemented.

“In the MOU, all the nine demands of ASUU were given deadlines for their implementation. If the government had sincerely followed the MOU, implementation would have been completed within June last year, but the government kept dragging the issue,without any positive headway,” he said.

Abubakar further said that the Chairman, Implementation Commitee on the Needs Assessment of universities, Governor Gabriel Suswan did not disclose to the union the source of the N100 billion  Infrastructural Intervention Fund to the 51 benefiting universities in the country, even as none of the tertiary institututions in the country had received its 2013 allocations from the government.

According to him, Suswan did also not state when the government would release the N400 billion intervention fund to tertiary institutions which was already due just as the release of N30 billion as earned allowances of federal government universities was ‘’unacceptable to the union because by the analysis that was made in 2012, the cost implication of the arrears was N87 billion and not N30 billion.
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