The University of Uyo branch of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has expressed sadness over more than 22 of their lecturers owed salaries for two years.
The union have also expressed their readiness to join others branches in a nationwide strike to press home their demand for improved conditions of service and upgrade of facilities in the country’s university system.
Branch chairman of the union Dr. Happiness Uduk who made this known during a protest March in Uyo accused the Federal Government of plans to destroy the public universities in order to create market for the private ones most of which are owned by the policy makers.
Usuk explained that the FG is yet to meet any of the agreement reached in December 2020 opun which the union suspended it’s strike of March to December 2020.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is no longer news that our Union has been engaged in what look like endless battles with successive neo-colonialist governments of our dear nation for the survival of the nation’s public universities.
“And it no longer requires any dizzying analysis and discernment to understand that Nigeria’s ruling class, for some time now, has been on a mission to completely destroy the nation’s public institutions in order to create the market for the private ones most of which are naturally owned by the same policy makers and executors of the nation’s education policies.
“A clear manifestation of this scheme to kill the nation’s public universities (which have remained the only hope for children of the nation’s poor to have access to education), just as the public primary and secondary schools have been ruined, is the disdain with which the successive governments have treated matters related to education ranging from the ever-diminishing budgetary allocations to the sector, total neglect of the welfare of lecturers, lack of infrastructure and facilities for both the staff and students, imposition of strange, murderous systems on the institutions and, above all, chronic failure to honour agreements freely entered into with university-based unions and associations.
“It is against this background that we have decided to call you, ladies and gentlemen of the press, as witnesses, once more, to the fact that the FG has now sufficiently pushed the Union, once more, to the precipice of a nation-wide total and indefinite strike through its failure to honour the Memorandum of Action reached with the Union in December, 2020, upon which the Union suspended conditionally its nine-month strike of March to December, 2020.” She explained.
According to her, the Memorandum of Action include Renegotiation, signing and implementation of the 2009 Agreement between the Union and the FG, implementation of the UTAS to replace the corruption-prone, obnoxious IPPIS, payment of arrears of members’ Earned Academic Allowances as due and review of the NUC laws to check the current indiscriminate establishment of universities by state governments, payment of staff promotion arrears and University autonomy.
The chairman attributed the plight of the more than 22 lecturers owed salaries for two years to errors in the IPPIS payment platform adding that efforts by the union and the university authorities to correct the abnormally have not yielded any positive result.
“The Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), which the FG has imposed on the Nigerian University System is about the worst tragedy the nation’s educational system has ever suffered. Besides, as a recent report of the Auditor-General has vindicated, the IPPIS establishment is a huge monument of corruption and incompetence and fraud.” She concluded.
