THE Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), on Wednesday, June 26, agreed to amicably resolve all contentious issues to avert strike.
At the end of their closed-door meeting, they also agreed to kick-start a communication process to avert the planned industrial actions by the union.
These were part of the outcome of the over two-hour meeting held at the Federal Ministry of Education headquarters in Abuja, attended by the two Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, the Minister of State, Dr. Yusuf Sununu, and other top officials of the ministry in the government’ team.
ASUU President, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, who led the union’s team, told journalists after the meeting that negotiation process had begun, hoping that the federal government would follow up on what had been agreed on.
“We have discussions on all the issues and we have given assignment to some people to look at and agreed on the way forward.”
Osodeke said the team would go back and give the details of the meeting to their members, who had earlier issued a two-week ultimatum, saying: “What is important is that we have started the process and our prayers is that we resolve it for the interest of our young men and the interest of the nation.”
On his part, Mamman said consultations would commence immediately to overcome the problems facing higher education, adding: “We’ve had a very good meeting and a very productive one. We’ve discussed progress on how to ensure that the system works well and lots of the issues we talked about are those that we inherited and some ongoing. We discussed them all without exception and we have consensus on the way forward.
“A lot of consultations will still continue on some information we don’t have, which are beyond the scope of the ministry and which will require us to connect with our colleagues in other ministries.
“But the most important thing is that we had a very good meeting and agreed to continue with the consultations to overcome the problems bedeviling education in Nigeria.”
Recall that ASUU had threatened to embark on a nationwide strike over federal government’s failure to meet its demands, giving it two weeks within which to address all its outstanding demands.
Some of the issues of contention include removal from IPPIS, Renegotiation of the 2009 FGN/ASUU Agreement, all the backlog of Earned Academic Allowance (EAA) and all the outstanding salaries, among others.
