The ongoing strike embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) will linger as report has emerged that the aggrieved lecturers staged a walkout from the meeting with a federal government delegation.
Premium Times reports that ASUU delegation arrived at the ministry at exactly 5:00 p.m. but no member of the federal government delegation was around as at this time.
The government delegation led by the Minister of Labour, Chris Ngige, arrived at exactly 6:00 p.m while the minister of education, Adamu Adamu, was absent at the time the meeting started.
Before the walkout and at the start of the meeting, Mr Ngige told the lecturers that he hopes a consensus on most of the issues is reached at the end of the meeting.
But the leadership of ASUU refused to comment on why they were walking out of the meeting.
Last week, the minister had said that the federal government has reached a partial agreement with the striking lecturers.
Last Monday, the minister had said:
“We have finished our deliberation for today. I am happy to report that we touched some areas of understanding in implementation from the memorandum of action which we agreed to in 2017.
“Some of these areas we have substantial compliance and some other areas have not been fully dealt with.
“Like the issue of shortfall in salaries of some federal universities’ workers and lecturers, ASUU has given a list to the accountant-general’s office and we have agreed that by Wednesday that list should be cross-checked by the presidential initiative on continuous auditing.
“So, the accountant-general’s office is to get back to us by Wednesday.
“We also have the issue of earned allowances, revitalisation, these are issues of 2009 agreement and partial implementation and we have agreed on the modus operandi to look into the fund situation, this is due to low revenue on the part of government.”
“We have agreed on what we are going to do to make sure that the outstanding amount is handled in a way that all parties will be properly accommodated.
“We also discussed the issue of state universities and agreed also that even if education is on the concurrent list, the universities should be properly funded and staffed so that we do not produce half-baked students from those universities.
“In realisation of this the ministry of education will set up a committee, that would engage the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, and the minister of education has taken steps in that direction to formalise the interaction.
“Thus discussion are fruitful and we do hope that in the next adjourned date we would have had the requisite result on the few agreements reached today.”
