ASUU: FG abandoned us — so we resorted to strike

Emmanuel Osodeke, the national president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), says lecturers resorted to strike after the federal government abandoned them.

Osodeke spoke on Tuesday on ‘Good Morning Nigeria’, a Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) programme.

Members of the national executive council (NEC) of ASUU, on Monday, announced a four-week total and comprehensive strike effective from February 14.

According to ASUU president, all efforts by the union to hold a meeting with the government have been futile.

“We have reached the government but they have abandoned us as they are no longer responding to us. In November last year, the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council (NIREC) wrote to us and we acceded to them because they are the leaders of the two major religions in Nigeria. It was because of NIREC intervention, the strike would have started since November,” he said.

“Between that time and this time, they met with us twice, they met with the government team and we told them to tell the government that our NEC is coming up on the 12. We asked them to ensure a meeting is arranged between ASUU and the government team to discuss the issues but they never responded since then.

“The government team refused to have that meeting. They refused to come for the meeting that we can resolve the issue. The chief of staff and the minister of labour should be held responsible because If they had acceded to the request of the NIREC to have a meeting with us, maybe, some of these issues would have been resolved.

“We have followed all the processes. We have written to the ministry over time. We signed memorandum of understanding (MoU) in December 2020 before we called off that strike and the issues for which we went on the strike were well laid out and timeline for implication were indicated and none of that timeline exceeded three months. Today we are in 2022 and most of those issues have not been resolved.

“On this issue, we met with the speaker of the house of rep in October last year. The house of rep, represented by the speaker, the government, represented by the minister of finance as well as the minister of education and ASUU, they gave assurance that they were going to resolve this issue within few days. That was in October last year, nothing happened.

“We have met with all of them and till now, we have not had any official invitation, nothing. If they were serious about this issue, we have been in the press for the past two weeks appealing to them to call us so we can talk despite being in the news for over two weeks, none of them wrote to invite us to a meeting. They are not interested, they will not be interested, until there is a strike.”