The striking lecturers of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have said that the seven-month old strike would continue intil the Federal Government pays their withheld salaries and completes the negotiations of what led to the strike.
The academic union have a accused the Federal Government utilising hunger as a weapon of war to suppress striking members of the union
Prof Ade Adejumo, the union’s zonal coordinator from the University of Ibadan made this statement while speaking with journalist on Wednesday.
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He said, “We are ready to suspend the strike if the government pays our withheld salaries and completes the negotiations that led to the strike. Our children too are tired of staying at home but we cannot work on empty stomachs while politicians’ homes and warehouses are filled with palliative materials that they don’t even need”.
The union lamented that despite being patient for a long time while granting the government enough leverage to come up with solutions they did not utilise it.
“Rather than for Government to utilize the opportunity of the lockdown to address our grievances, it was during that lockdown that our salaries were stopped so that our members could die of hunger in their various homes”.
“It took a high level of intervention before our members were paid amputated salaries for three months after which Government resorted to blackmail by whipping sentiments against us while taking our members as enemies deserving of starvation.”
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“The intellectuals are citizens, not enemies but Government appears to have declared war on us using the weapon used during the war against adversaries: hunger.”
“Some people have been wondering why ASUU is on strike again. The simple answer is that ASUU is on strike because of the survival of the university system where many of us still have our children as students since we cannot afford sponsoring our children abroad with our measly salaries as politicians do”.
“ASUU is on strike in order to restore the past glory of public universities and address the infrastructural decay and deficit in our institutions. ASUU is on strike for the legitimate dues of its members who are the least paid in the tertiary education sub-sector. For the sake of emphasis, the truth that will shock many Nigerians, which is available for verification, is that Chief Lecturers in some tertiary institutions, who are not required to supervise postgraduate students or conduct research, earn more than professors in our lopsided education system”
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