FG reaches agreement with university workers to call off nationwide strike
- The federal government has continued to negotiate with striking university workers
- The ministry of labour is optimistic that the industrial dispute with the unions will be resolved
- The striking workers have been complaining about the system adopted sed by the federal government to pay staff members
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The federal government has disclosed that academic activities in public universities will soon resume following an agreement it reached with striking university workers.
According to The Nation, the ministry of labour and employment made the disclosure in a statement on Friday, February 12.
Source: Twitter
The government explained that it reached an agreement with the leadership of the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities and the Non-Academic Staff Union of Universities and Allied Institutions (NASU), with a view to ending the strike on February 15.
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The authorities said media reports which claimed that a February 11 meeting between the government and the unions ended in deadlock were untrue.
The statement partly read:
“The meeting did not end in deadlock. Rather, agreements were reached on some issues with timelines and these were documented as Memorandum of Understanding and given to leaders of the two unions to go and consult their people with a view to calling off the strike latest by Monday, February 15, 2021.''
The Punch reported that the unions embarked on strike over the government’s handling of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS), among other issues.
Meanwhile, the IPPIS used by the federal government to pay staff members of universities in Nigeria has been described as a scam.
Wailing over the allegedly fraudulent system, the chairman of the NASU in the University of Lagos, Kehinde Ajibade, said the government deceived the union into the agreement, The Nation reported.
Speaking on Wednesday, February 10, Ajibade said the IPPIS is very faulty because through it the government shortchanges its members and makes unexplainable deductions from their salaries.
In another news, teachers of primary and secondary schools in Rivers state government-owned tertiary institutions have raised the alarm that they have not been paid their salaries running for five years.
Punch reported that they alleged that their salaries were stopped on February 18, 2016, by the Nyesom Wike-led administration.
According to them, a government directive was issued that the names of the affected teachers be expunged from the state government salary voucher.
Kess Ewubare is a senior political/current affairs correspondent at Legit.ng. He has both a BSc and a Master’s degree in mass communication. He has over 10 years of experience in working in several fields of mass communication including radio, TV, newspaper, and online. For Kess, journalism is more than a career, it is a beautiful way of life.
Source: Legit.ng
