We’re Working To End ASUU Strike Soon, Ngige Assures

The Federal Government, yesterday, expressed the hope that the one-month warning strike embarked upon by Academic State Union of Universities, ASUU, on February 14, 2022, would soon end.

Recall that 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.

Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, expressed the hope of an end of the warning strike when he spoke with newsmen at the end of a conciliation meeting between government and the union.

Ngige 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 government and revert to him before the week runs out.

He noted that many of the items in the 2020 Memorandum of Action, MOA, had been dealt with exhaustively, while some were being addressed.

He said: “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, chaired 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.”

Ngige said a new team had been constituted to take a second look at that document.

Earlier, the President of ASUU, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, said: “The education sector in Nigeria is in crisis and money is being lost at the primary, secondary and tertiary education levels.”

He noted the quantum of money that ought to have been used to fund education in Nigeria was being lost to other countries as he called for a declaration of emergency in the sector to solve the problem