By It appears students of public universities in Nigeria will spend longer time at home after the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) announced the extension of its ongoing strike action by eight more weeks.
It was gathered that the union took the decision at its National Executive Council meeting held at the University of Abuja on Sunday.
Confirming the development in a statement, ASUU said it resolved to extend the strike in order to give the Federal Government and its agencies enough time to meet the lingering demands of the union.
“NEC acknowledged the intervention efforts, in various ways, by patriots and friends of genuine national development (students, parents, journalists, trade union leaders, civil society activists etc.) to expeditiously resolve the crisis which the government’s disposition had allowed to fester,” the statement read in part.
“However, ASUU, as a union of intellectuals, has obligations to make the government honour agreements. NEC, having taken reports on the engagements of the trustees and principal officers with the government, concluded that government had failed to satisfactorily address all the issues raised in the 2020 FGN/ASUU Memorandum of Action within the four-week roll-over strike period and resolved that the strike be rolled over for another eight weeks to give Government more time to address all the issues in concrete terms so that our students will resume as soon as possible.”
Recall that the union began a four-week warning strike on February 14, to press home its demands to the Federal Government which include the renegotiation of the ASUU-FG 2009 agreement, a university revitalization fund, and the implementation of the University Transparency Accountability Solution (UTAS) payroll software, among other issues.
