FG Faults NLC’s Demand for High-powered Panel on ASUU Strike

Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja

The federal government has described the call by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) for the setting up of a high-powered committee to resolve the ongoing strike by university lecturers as unwarranted.

The NLC had urged the government to immediately set up a high-powered panel whose target would be to address the grievances of the university workers with a view to ending the 59-day-old strike within 21 days.

However, the federal government said President Muhammadu Buhari has already mandated a team comprising his Chief of Staff, the Ministers of Labour, Education, Finance, Communication and Digital Economy to help resolve the crisis.

The government again appealed to members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to immediately call off their prolonged industrial action and return to their students for resumption of academic work in the public universities.

The Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige stated this to journalists yesterday in his office, shortly after receiving notification letter of his nomination by Sun Newspaper Publishing Limited for the award of ‘Public Service Icon 2021.’

Ngige said the federal government remained unrelenting in its efforts towards addressing all the industrial disputes in the university system, involving ASUU and the other unions.
The minister faulted the demand by the NLC, maintaining that the president had already put in place his own high-powered team.

According to him, everything contained in the December 2020 agreement were religiously executed to the extent that the federal government aggregately paid N92 billion from the 2021 budget to cover the revitalisation funds and Earned Academic Allowances/Earned Allowances for non-teaching staff.

Regarding the renegotiation of conditions of service of the university lecturers, Ngige maintained that it must be guided by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) principle of ability to pay.

Ngige said the former renegotiation committee headed by Prof. Jubril Munzali made a proposal of 200 per cent rise in emoluments of university workers, but the federal government through the Ministry of Education said it cannot pay.

He said the university system and the teaching hospitals consume two thirds of all the emoluments currently paid from the national budget of the country, meaning that an increase for the lecturers would necessitate an upward review of the salaries of allied professionals in the health sector, based on their different salary structures.
“There is no point giving you percentages on paper that nobody can pay. Munzali worked out a percentage which placed the university workers on about 200 per cent pay rise.

“The federal government through the Education Ministry said they cannot pay; the Ministry of Finance said they cannot pay. They came to me and I said nothing is wrong with renegotiation because even if a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) is signed, it could be renegotiated.

“The document produced by Munzali was not signed by both ASUU and the federal government. It is a proposal. Manzali’s committee had elapsed. The Education Ministry didn’t act as I wanted. The Minister was away but his lieutenants didn’t do anything for five months, contrary to my expectations.
“The minister has set up another committee headed by Prof. Nimi Briggs. They have been working and I have given them six weeks to come up with a proposal.”

On the payment platform for university lecturers, Ngige reiterated that NITDA informed him that UTAS proposed by ASUU passed user acceptability test but failed integrity and credibility test, which formed the bulwark against hacking.

“NITDA said UTAS failed. ASUU said it didn’t fail. As we were discussing, ASUU went on strike. In the face of this disagreement between ASUU and NITDA, we are talking with NITDA to bend backwards so that there will be a handshake between UTAS and the government certified IPPIS platform. After embarking on strike, ASUU has gone back to what I proposed to them,” he added.

Earlier, the management of the  Sun newspaper led by its Managing Director, Onuoha Ukeh described Ngige as a quintessential public servant whose contributions to national development started in his days as a staff of the Ministry of Health where he later retired at the management cadre.