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From Oluseye Ojo, Ibadan
Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) will resist alleged grand plan of the Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government to turn intellectuals to slaves over his purported refusal to sign the renegotiated agreements with the union.
The union’s chairman at the University of Ibadan, Prof Ayo Akinwole, made the disclosure yesterday, when he briefed journalists shortly after the congress of the union.
He said the congress threw its weight behind the decision of the national leadership of the union in fighting for her members, whose welfare has been purportedly neglected for 13 years.
Akinwole, who was flanked by the union’s executive in UI, stated that the union had been pushed to the wall and would fight back. He added that the federal government had employed all formal and informal tactics to delay the renegotiation of 2009 agreements for four years, and the new agreement was supposed to have been effective if the government had signed it in 2021.
“The Federal Government now said the agreement will now be tabled before another tripartite committee to consider it. We know this is a strategy of the Buhari administration to continue to impoverish the intellectual community,” he said.
The union, according to Akinwole, has explored all possible avenues to make government do the needful, but the government has been adamant, saying the government “is still owing universities about N880 billion on revitalisation of universities and also refused to mainstream earned academic allowances in the 2022 budget as promised.”
He added that Nigerian politicians are among the highest paid in the world, but Nigerian lecturers are among the poorly paid in the world, with professors earning less than $1,000 dollars per month.
