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The Federal Government on Monday insisted that it has met all of the demands of the Academic Staff Union of Universities(ASUU).
Minister of State for Education, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba said this in an interview with reporters on the sidelines of the commemoration of the 2022 Commonwealth Celebration in Abuja.
ASUU, on Monday, announced a rollover of its strike action by two months at the end of a meeting of its National Executive Council held at its National Secretariat on Sunday at the University of Abuja.
The union, in a statement by its President ASUU, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke, on Monday morning at the end of the NEC meeting, said the eight-week extension was to give the government enough time to address its demands in “concrete terms.
“NEC, having taken reports on the engagements of the Trustees and Principal Officers with the government, concluded that government had failed to satisfactorily address all the issues raised in the 2020 FGN/ASUU Memorandum of Action (MoA) within the four-week roll-over strike period.
“NEC resolved that the strike be rolled over for another eight (8) weeks to give the government more time to address all the issues in concrete terms so that our students will resume as soon as possible.
“The roll-over strike shall commence by 12.01 am on Monday, 14th March 2022,” the statement said.
However, Nwajiuba during the interview, insisted that the Federal Government had met all the demands of the union.
According to him, all the earned allowances as well as revitalisation funds had been released by the government.
He said: “ASUU announced and we met and everything that they have demanded, we have done all of them including the earned allowances and the revitalisation fund; they choose to extend it for two months maybe.”
ASUU on February 14 declared a warning strike following the failure of the Federal Government to deploy the University Transparency and Accountability Solution and other demands.
The strike, according to the union, was due to the failure of the government to implement the re-negotiated 2009 agreement since May last year.
ASUU also accused the federal government of working against the deployment of the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), a payment platform designed by ASUU as an alternative to the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) of the government.
Despite a series of meetings with the Federal Government team chaired by Minister of Labour and Employment, Sen Chris Ngige, both sides have failed to reach an agreement.
