The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), today declared a “comprehensive, suffocating and total” strike over a failure of the Federal Government to implement the renegotiated 2009 Agreement.
The National President of the Union, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, who made the declaration after a three day National Executive Council stated that the strike commences on Monday, February 14, 2022, and would last for an initial period of four weeks.
Also, The Union faulted the promotion of Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr Isa Ali Pantami, as a professor, declaring the promotion as “illegal”.
Osodeke said, “You cannot be a minister and a lecturer in a university. It is an encouragement of illegality. Pantami has to quit as a minister and be tried for doing double jobs within the same federal system. He is not qualified. Pantami should not be treated as a professor.”
It would be recalled that on September 2021, the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, promoted the minister and other seven lecturers to the position of professors.
ASUU holds that the promotion of the minister was wrong because the minister is yet to be qualified to be promoted to such a position, saying that the Union has resolved to sanction FUTO Vice Chancellor and other their members, who involved in the promotion.
Speaking on the strike action, Osodeke said, the union tried to avoid the strike but the Federal Government is unresponsive to the union’s demands stressing, “We don’t like to see our students at home. We don’t want our academic calendars disrupted but our demands are not met.”
The ASUU chairman also said ASUU NEC faulted the creation of new universities.
Osodeke asked the Federal Government to call the Vice-Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Prof. Eyitope Ogunbodede, to order the unpaid Earned Academic Allowances of its members in the university.
“We have an agreed template with FG but the VC refused to pay. Failure to pay using that template is a misappropriation. He should be cautioned,” the ASUU president said.
Members of the union’s National Executive Council had held marathon meetings since Saturday at the University of Lagos titled, ‘NEC for NEC.’
ASUU had sensitised and mobilised lecturers and students across all universities on the reason the union might likely go on strike.
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