ASUU finally suspend the 8-month strike during a meeting of its leadership that started on Thursday night and lasted into the early hours of Friday.
By Emma Ogbuehi
After a protracted eight-month face-off with the government that saw the universities closed and students lose an academic year, the Academic Staff Union of University (ASUU) has eventually suspended the industrial action. The Union however laid out conditions to be met to avert its members taking up the gauntlet again. This was disclosed by a member of the union’s National Executive Committee in a chat with Channels TV early Friday.
The union decided to suspend the strike during a meeting of its leadership that started on Thursday night and lasted into the early hours of Friday.
The meeting was called by the union to determine its next line of action after its state branches met over the Court of Appeal ruling last week.
The Court of Appeal had ordered ASUU to suspend the strike before its appeal of the ruling ordering lecturers to resume work can be heard.
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Members of the union’s National Executive Committee, which comprises the chairmen of the state chapters and members of the national executive, attended the meeting at the ASUU National Secretariat in Abuja.
The strike began on February 14 following the failure of the Federal Government to renegotiate the agreement it signed with ASUU in 2009, demand by the teachers for the replacement of the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS), with the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), as the payment platform in the university sector, among others.
The lecturers insist that IPPIS has never been implemented in any university system anywhere. Among its drawbacks, they say, is that it will shut the door against foreign scholars, contract officers and researchers needed to be poached from existing universities to stabilize new ones.
But the Federal Government insists that the payment system is for transparency and neither intended to trample upon university autonomy nor designed to subsume the university into the civil service.