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THE Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, weekend, described the Federal Government as an entity that lacked integrity and should not be trusted.
It also described the government as slave merchant, which only listened to and implement destructive policy recommendations of the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and World Bank against the larger interest of Nigerians.
This came as Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, weekend, said the adoption of the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System, IPPIS, as the payment platform for university workers was unsuitable for the university system.
It would be recalled that ASUU declared a month warning strike last Monday to press government to implement the agreement the union had with it and withdraw the IPPIS payment platform and replace it with the University Transparency and Accountability System, UTAS.
Chairman of the union at the University of Ibadan, Professor Ayo Akinwole, who stated this in a reaction to claims by the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, that he was looking for ASUU to resolve the issues before he heard that ASUU had declared strike.
He said: “The Federal Government lacks integrity. It is sad. The government cannot be trusted any longer. We have been on the same salary for 13 years and it is even shameful to show anyone your pay slip.
‘’When compared to the work we do, we have sacrificed for Nigeria to the detriment of our well-being and this is already dampening morale of our people.
“The Federal Government should sign the renegotiated agreement, implement it, roll out UTAS, pay unpaid earned academic allowances and commit more funds into the revitalisation of universities.”
Akinwole, however, urged parents to impress it on government to sign the new welfare package for ASUU members.
“If we fail to fight for our rights, the slave merchants in government will continue to trade with our future and future of the children of the masses,” he said.
Akinwole maintained that poor policy formulation and implementation in the education sector had been making government to treat lecturers like slaves, warning that the union would battle the slave merchant and liberate lecturers in Nigeria by getting better conditions of service, including salaries, allowances as well as preferred conductive working and learning environments for students.
According to him, the Federal Government and those put in charge of education ministry have displayed total incompetence and nonchalant attitudes to what mattered to Nigerians.
He said it was total falsehood for anyone in Nigeria to claim not to have heard or read series of ASUU warnings on the pages of newspapers at least one month before the union resolved to proceed on one-month warning strike.
Akinwole said due to the stress arising from failure of Federal Government to recruit more staff, ASUU had lost many of its members to death, while others had simply moved out of the country in search of greener pastures.
