Our Salaries have been held for Six Months – ASUU President

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) had said none of its university lecturers had been paid since February when it began its industrial action.

ASUU President, Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, stated this on Tuesday during an interview on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily. He accused the Federal Government of using hunger as a tool to force the striking lecturers into returning to their classrooms.

Osodeke stated that the current administration could not use hunger to force the union members on strike to end their protests because their paychecks have been kept for the previous six months.

He claims that the Federal Government believes depriving university professors of their wages will cause them to give up and abandon the strike.

“Our salaries have been held, and this is the sixth month our salaries have been held. They thought that if they hold our salaries for two or three months, we will come begging and say, ‘please allow us to go back to work,” the ASUU President said.

“But as a union of intellectuals, we have grown beyond that. You can’t use the force of hunger to pull our members back, which is exactly what the government is doing.”

President Muhammadu Buhari had, on July 19, instructed the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, to offer a solution to the problem and report back to him in two weeks out of concern over the ongoing labour conflict.

Today is the deadline for the presidential ultimatum, and ASUU won’t relent until its demands are satisfied. The union, unperturbed by the event, decided to extend the strike for an additional four weeks, dashed students’ dreams of returning to class.

Professor Osodeke responded to Buhari’s decision to call off the strike by insisting that the union is still open to talks with government officials to resolve the labour dispute.

He asserted that there is no place for a master-slave dynamic in academia and that employees have the right to object to bad policies.