365news gathered that The Federal Government is wasting golden opportunities to settle disputes in the education sector, according to a branch of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in Adamawa State. The ASUU has accused “an evil gang-up” against Nigeria’s public education system.
El-Maude Jibreel Gambo, the chairman of the ASUU chapter at Modibbo Adama University (MAU) in Yola, who on Tuesday accused the government of “crass neglect” of public education, charged that Dr. Chris Ngige, the minister of labor, was engaged in a personal vendetta against ASUU.
Addressing a press conference on Tuesday in Yola, Gambo said although ASUU has complied with the ruling of the National Industrial Court and that of the Court of Appeal, the Federal Government has refused to engage the union in finding lasting solutions to the lingering issues between it and the lecturers.
“The Federal Government is missing the opportunity presented by the suspension of the strike to engage the union in finding amicable ways of resolving the issues that led to the strike.
“Instead, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige in pursuance of his personal vendetta and war he declared against ASUU, wrote to the minister of finance to pay our members pro-rata salaries,” Gambo said.
According to him, FG’s refusal to pay lecturers their seven months of withheld salary clearly signals a hidden agenda to casualize the academic environment and suffocate public universities.
“ASUU has signed three different Memorandum of Action (MoA) with the current government in 2017, 2019 and 2020. But the government failed to implement substantial components of the MoA’s. This is apart from the government discarding the reports that arose from collective bargaining between the two committees constituted by the government headed respectively by Prof. Munzali Jibril and Prof Nimi Briggs on one hand and ASUU on the other hand.
“The collective bargaining reports contain far-reaching agreements on condition of service of university staff, funding and autonomy of universities that if implemented would go far in changing the narrative of the university education in Nigeria p. The FGN mischievously refused to accept the reports of committees the government itself set up but insisted on ASUU accepting ridiculous take it or leave it offer,” Gambo said.
He accused the government of consistently failing to address the major contentious issues, including review of the condition of service of university staff, payment of outstanding Earned Academic Allowances (EAA), funding for revitalization of universities and release of reports of visitation panels to universities.
“Majority of the people in government are products of free education but they deliberately refuse to extend such gesture to the children of the masses. They are comfortably siphoning our common resources to educate their children in private foreign universities while superintending the conversion of public universities to glorified secondary schools,” Gambo added.
