Nigerian govt uses hunger as bargaining tool, ASUU alleges
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) said, since the union began industrial action in February, none of its university lecturers has received payment.
ASUU President Professor Emmanuel Osodeke accused the Federal Government of using hunger as a weapon to coerce the teachers on strike into returning to their classrooms in an interview with Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily, on Tuesday.
Osodeke stated that the current administration cannot use hunger to force the union members who are on strike to end their protests because their paychecks have been kept for the previous six months.
He claims that the Federal Government believes that depriving university professors of their wages would cause them to give up and abandon the strike.
“Our salaries have been held, this is the sixth month or salaries have been held. They thought that if they hold our salaries for two or three months we will come begging and say ‘pls allow us to go back to work,” the ASUU President said.
“But we as a union of intellectuals, we have grown beyond that. You can’t use the force of hunger to pull our members back which is exactly what the government is doing.”
ASUU began a strike on February 14 in order to emphasize its demands for a better welfare package and the reformation of the country’s educational system, among other things. This has caused many Nigerian students to stay at home.
President Muhammadu Buhari had on July 19 instructed the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, to offer a solution to the problem and report back to him in two weeks out of concern over the ongoing labor conflict.
Today is the deadline for the presidential ultimatum, and ASUU vowed not to relent until its demands are satisfied.
The union, unperturbed by the event, decided to extend the strike for an additional four weeks, dashed students’ dreams of returning to class.
