ASUU Meets Today To Decide On Strike

As students in the nation’s universities await the official response of their lecturers under the auspices of  ASUU.

The much awaited meeting of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) will today hold following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the union and the federal government on the agreement reached.

The meeting is scheduled to hold at the Federal University of Technology, Minna, the Niger State capital.

A decision is expected to be taken at the meeting on whether the government, by acceding to ASUU’s demand to include its ‘fresh’ demands in the now signed MoU, has shown enough good faith for the union to suspend its six months old strike, but from all indications, the meeting was just necessary as it was protocol, as sources within the ranks of the union say most of the members of the union are comfortable with the MoU signed last week.

An ASUU official confirmed the scheduled meeting to Thisday, saying there was a possibility that the NEC officials would find the contents of the MoU acceptable and suspend the strike.

“One of our demands was that the agreements from the 13 hour meeting be put into a MoU. We also requested that our people should not be victimised and the salary arrears should be paid.

“We asked that all these be included in the MoU. So, the MoU was our doing and before Dr. Nasir Fagge signed it publicly, it meant that it was acceptable to us,” the official said.

Last Wednesday, after signing the MoU with the government representatives, Fagge had given the assurance that the NEC meeting would hold within one week.

Speaking during the signing of the MoU, Fagge had blamed the government for the delay in resolving the strike.

“If what we had agreed on at that 13-hour meeting had been judiciously documented and our members were convinced that it would be implemented, we would not have wasted this time because we have a lot of respect for the Office of Mr. President.

“Our members are intellectuals. It is simply because over the years particularly, since the signing of the 2009 agreement, we have been pursing government to get that agreement implemented, we only succeeded in getting to implement a portion of that agreement and here we are over four years. I think it’s never too late though,” Fagge had said.