By Our Reporters
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has extended its strike by another four weeks, saying that it will give the federal government more time to meet its demands.
The union took the decision at the end of its National Executive Council (NEC) meeting at its national secretariat in Abuja on Sunday.
In a statement issued by its President, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, the union said: “Following extensive deliberations and taking cognisance of government’s past failures to abide by its own timelines in addressing issues raised in the 2020 FGN/ASUU Memorandum of Action (MOA), NEC resolved that the strike be rolled over for four weeks to give government more time to satisfactorily resolve all the outstanding issues.
“The role-over strike action is with effect from 12.01a.m. on Monday, 1st August, 2022.”
To this end, ASUU said the strike has been extended by another four weeks on the basis that government was not serious in addressing its demands.
“Since there is no sign of any serious commitment on the part of the government, there was no need for the NEC to consider suspending the strike. Can anybody say this is what the goverement is offering? They were the ones who set up the Briggs Committee and it made recommendations and the government jettisoned the report.
“The government is not sincere. Let us assume that we are asking too much, which is not even the situation, is it not that the government will come out with its offers and we will deliberate whether to accept or not. We have been saying it that they want to kill the university system just as they did public primary and secondary schools,” ASUU said.
The union called out its members on a one-month strike on February 14, 2022 over the non-implementation of the Memorandum of Action (MoA) it signed with the federal government and the insistence of the government on the adoption of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) as the payment platform for all federal workers.
The union had proposed UTAS as an alternative platform for the payment of salaries for its members following alleged discrepancies highlighted in the use of IPPIS.
The university teachers are on the three-month strike declared by ASUU after the expiration of the two-month warning strike.
The university teachers have been on strike for 168 days.
