ASUU STRIKE: FG Gives New Waves 

The Federal Government of Nigeria has expressed the hope that the one-month warning strike embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) on February 14, would soon be over on this Wednesday in Abuja.

This was given by the Minister of Labour and Employment, Sen. Chris Ngige who expressed the hope of truncation of the warning strike when he spoke with the men of the press at the end of a conciliation meeting between the government and the union.

Recall that ASUU has called its members out on the warning strike to compel the Federal Government to address their demands, some of which had been lingering since 2009.

Ngige assured that the meeting agreed on many issues and a timeline was scheduled for the implementation of the agreements.

According to him, ASUU officials agreed to return to their members with offers made by the government and revert to him before the week runs out.

He noted that many of the items in the 2020 Memorandum of Action (MOA) had been dealt with exhaustively, while some were being addressed.

“We have only one or two areas that are new. One of the new areas is the renegotiation of the Conditions of Service, which is called the `2009 Agreement’.

“An agreement was reached in 2009 that their Conditions of Service would be reviewed every five years. It was done in 2014.

“We started one in which the former UNILAG Pro-Chancellor, Wale Babalakin (SAN), was chairing the committee.

“After Babalakin, Prof. Manzali was in charge and the committee came up with a draft document, proposed by the Federal Ministry of Education and ASUU.

“Today, Manzali’s committee has become defunct because many of the people in the committee are no longer pro-chancellors,” the minister explained.

Mouthpiece News NGR learnt that a new team had been constituted to take a second look at that documqent.