Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has joined the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, to condemn the Federal Government’s “no-work, no pay” rule on university lecturers following the union’s six-month-old strike.
According to them, the university lecturers were not the architects of ASUU’s strike.
Therefore, NLC backed ASUU on its insistence on the payment of the withheld salaries of its members as a condition to end a six-month-old strike.
ASUU pointed out that it was unfair for the Federal Government to invoke a no-work, no pay rule on university teachers, who were not the architects of the lingering strike.
Urging the government to “tone down its rhetorics and be more accommodating”, the NLC warned that its threat to embark on a nationwide strike over the lockdown of the universities had not been ruled out.
Head of Information of the NLC, Benson Upah, disclosed the union’s position as students suggested Public-Private Partnership (PPP) as a way of ending the crises in the university system.
The Minister of State for Education, Goodluck Opiah advised Nigerians not to allow reports on the ASUU strike to rubbish the gains of the over N3 trillion investment by the Muhammadu Buhari administration in the education sector.
Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, had said last week that the insistence of ASUU on the payment of the withheld salaries was stalling negotiations by the parties.
TheNewsGuru.com reports that the ASUU strike started on February 14, 2022.
In 2017, the union went on strike for 30 days; in 2018, the lecturers shunned work for 90 days while in 2020, the public universities were shut down for 270 days.
Recall that earlier, ASUU raised alarm over the resignation of lecturers from the nation’s universities for greener pastures abroad.
The union attributed the development to the Federal Government’s poor treatment of its members which it said had forced many to venture into other sources of livelihood.
