Nigeria’s Federal Government on Wednesday in Abuja expressed the hope that the one-month warning strike embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) on February 14, would soon be ended.
ASUU called its members out on the warning strike to compel the Federal Government to address their demands, some of which had been lingering since 2009.
Senator Chris Ngige, Minister of Labour and Employment expressed the hope of truncation of the warning strike when he spoke with newsmen at the end of a conciliation meeting between the government and the union.
The Minister said the meeting agreed on many issues and a timeline was scheduled for the implementation of the agreements.
According to him, ASUU officials agreed to return to their members with offers made by the government and revert to him before the week runs out.
Ngige, however, noted that many of the items in the 2020 Memorandum of Action (MOA) had been dealt with exhaustively, while some were being addressed.
“We have only one or two areas that are new. One of the new areas is the renegotiation of the Conditions of Service, which is called the `2009 Agreement’.
“An agreement was reached in 2009 that their Conditions of Service would be reviewed every five years. It was done in 2014.
“We started one in which the former UNILAG Pro-Chancellor, Wale Babalakin (SAN), was chairing the committee.
“After Babalakin, Prof. Manzali was in charge and the committee came up with a draft document, proposed by the Federal Ministry of Education and ASUU.
“Today, Manzali’s committee has become defunct because many of the people in the committee are no longer pro-chancellors,” the minister explained.
Ngige said that a new team had been constituted to take a second look at that document.
“This is to make sure that some of the allowances are not against the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission (NSIWC) fixed rates for wages and allowances.
“If you propose allowances that do not comply with NSIWC rates, the government will not be able to accept it.
“So, it is important that they do the right thing from the beginning so that whatever the committee presents can be approved by the Federal Executive Council,’’ he said.
