Breaking: ASUU extends strike again
Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has extended its ongoing industrial action by another four weeks, saying it would give the federal government more time to meet its demands.
The union took the decision at the end of its National Executive Council meeting at its national secretariat in Abuja on Sunday.
The strike entered its 168-day yesterday.
In a statement issued by its President, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke, the union stated: “Following extensive deliberations and taking cognisance of government’s past failures to abide by its own timelines in addressing issues raised in the 2020 FGN/ASUU Memorandum of Action (MOA), NEC resolved that the strike be rolled over for four weeks to give government more time to satisfactorily resolve all the outstanding issues.
“The role-over strike action is with effect from 12.01a.m. on Monday, 1st August, 2022.”
It noted that the government was not serious in addressing their demands.
“Since there is no sign of any serious commitment on the part of the government, there was no need for the NEC to consider suspending the strike. Can anybody say this is what the government is offering? They were the ones who set up the Briggs Committee and it made recommendations and the government jettisoned the report.
“The government is not sincere. Let us assume that we are asking too much, which is not even the situation, is it not that the government will come out with its offers and we will deliberate whether to accept or not.
“We have been saying it that they want to kill the university system just as they did public primary and secondary schools,” it added.
ASUU had called out its members on a one-month strike on February 14, 2022, over the non-implementation of the Memorandum of Action (MoA) it signed with the federal government and the insistence of the government on the adoption of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel information system (IPPIS) as payment platform for all federal workers.