The Federal Government is strongly considering exploring the provisions of the Labour Law to end the protracted strike in public universities started last March 24 by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), to compel government to properly fund public universities among other demands .
Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, who made this known on the Channels Television programme "Politics Today" monitored on Friday, however expressed optimism that the prolonged strike will be resolved by next week when the Federal Government team meets the union leaders again.
The minister revealed that both the government and ASUU had met six times on the union’s nine demands , hoping to end the prolonged strike when they meet again next week.
"By next week, we will conclude this matter. There are so many options left. We have the labour laws and I have options left to me in the labour laws. I have other channels.”,he stated.
Ngige quickly dismissed the possible option of not allowing the lecturers to return to the classrooms in the next one or two weeks,
“I’m not looking at that (long) period. I’m an optimist on this matter.
The minister who claimed that his children are also at home because of the strike, assured that the issues on the Industrial action would be resolved at the negotiating table next week.
"Even if countries go to war, at the end of the day they come to the negotiation table. I’m inviting them (ASUU) next week. We are doing side meetings on our part and we are collating everything. I’m collating responses from the Accountant General of the Federation’s Office and everybody who has something to do with this matter.",he added
Federal Government according to him," had agreed to give the University Transparency Academic Solution, the payment platform proposed by ASUU, a trial.
Ngige however explained that the feedback he got from the National Information Technology Development Agency, the agency mandated to follow-up the trial with ASUU, showed that they had just concluded the first phase and that the second phase to assess the functional requirement of UTAS had not been done.
The minister added that “UTAS is yet to be ready but government will not discourage them. And we have told them there is no need using the same old method of strike to make demands since such had been deployed since 2017.”
On the revitalisation fund to the Universities, he said government had agreed to release N30bn out of the N40bn demanded by the union as the payment for November 2019 and September 2020, adding that the remaining N10bn would be staggered.
According to Ngige,“A committee that looked into the Needs Assessment of universities held a workshop on how funds could be generated came up with the recommendation that other things could be done to raise funds, because revitalisation cannot be done through the budget, especially when the country is running a deficit budget,”.
Edu-Biznews recalled that the Lecturers had embarked on the indefinite strike over the failure of the Federal Government to keep to the 2019 Memorandum of Understanding between them as well as the lingering disagreement over the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System( IPPIS) rejected by ASUU .
No comments:
Post a Comment