ASUU noted that there is a need to salvage
the country’s educational sector from collapse in order to save the future of
the country.
Comrade Raphael Amokaha, the Zonal
Coordinator, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Nsukka Zone (ASUU-NSUKKA
ZONE), made this known on Thursday during a press conference held at Federal
University Lokoja, saying that the renegotiation of the 2009 agreement was the
main reason for the strike all this while.
He opined that ASUU has apparently
exercised unparallel patience and explored all avenues for a strike free solution
to the government-induced crisis in the public universities without finding a
headway.
According to him, this was against the
backdrop of the legendary reputation of successive Nigerian governments for not
honouring agreements with ASUU.
He noted, “How else can it be explained
that we have a set of leaders that pay lip service to their commitment to
national development? ASUU has consistently demonstrated that it is a patriotic
union.”
The zonal coordinator stated that having
gone out of its way to spend from the miserable salaries of its members to
develop a more robust homegrown payment platform in UTAS at no cost to the
government, it was hoped it would restore faith and confidence in the
educational system and also, to prove again that the challenge in the
university system has nothing to do with the capacity of the lecturers but
everything to do with the people charged with the responsibility of running the
affairs of the country.
He noted that it would seem, with benefit
of hindsight, that the insistence of the government on deploying IPPIS which
was used to continuously starve and subject their members to untold hardship,
stressing that decapitating their salaries arbitrarily and outright nonpayment
for months despite the manifest inadequacies of the platform was a ploy to
distract them from their original goal.
He asked why else the government would
delay the deployment of UTAS, a more efficient, Nigerian designed alternative,
which has passed all the tests put forward by government agencies.
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