According to the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the Federal Government’s offer was rejected because it was “miserable.”
This was said by Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, the president of ASUU, in a statement headlined “Why ASUU rejects government’s grant of pay” that was released on Thursday, August 18.
Osodeke requested that as a sign of good faith, the Federal Government, via the Ministry of Education, revisit the New Draft Agreement of the 2009 FGN/ASUU Renegotiation Committee, whose work extended a total of five and a half years.
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ASUU met with the FG last Tuesday via the Prof. Nimi Briggs committee.
The statement read;
The major reason given by the Federal Government for the miserly offer, paucity of revenue, is not tenable. This is because of several reasons chief of which is poor management of the economy. This has given rise to leakages in the revenue of governments at all levels.
There is wasteful spending, misappropriation of funds, and outright stealing of our collective patrimony. ASUU believes that if the leakages in the management of the country’s resources are stopped, there will be more than enough to meet the nation’s revenue and expenditure targets without borrowing and plunging the country into a debt crisis as is the case now.
Osodeke in the statement explained that the government imposed the ongoing strike action on the union, saying FG had encouraged it to linger because of its provocative indifference.
It further revealed;
The Munzali Jibril-led renegotiation committee submitted the first Draft Agreement in May 2021 but the government’s official response did not come until about one year later! Again, Award presented by the Nimi Briggs-led Team came across in a manner of take-it-or-leave-it on a sheet of paper. No serious country in the world treats their scholars this way.
Undermining Educational System
It emphasized that the government’s covert decision to disregard the widely accepted norm of collective bargaining could harm lecturers’ psyche and undermine their commitment to the university system.
It claims that this will undoubtedly harm Nigeria’s ambition to participate actively in the global knowledge industry.
The statement stressed that at the commencement of the renegotiation of the 2009 FGN/ ASUU Agreement on 16th March 2017, both the Federal Government and the union’s teams agreed to be guided by the following principles as their terms of reference:
Reversal of the decay in the Nigerian University System, in order to reposition it for its responsibilities in national development; Reversal of the brain drain, not only by enhancing the remuneration of academic staff but also by disengaging them from the encumbrance of a unified civil service wage structure; Restoration of Nigerian Universities, through immediate, massive and sustained financial intervention; and Ensuring genuine university autonomy and academic freedom.
