The Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, has expressed hope that the one-month warning strike embarked upon by the Academic State Union of Universities (ASUU) on February 14, 2022, would soon end.
Vantage News reported a fortnight ago that ASUU called its members out on the warning strike to compel the Federal Government to address their demands, some of which had been lingering since 2009.
Ngige spoke with newsmen at the end of a conciliation meeting between government and the ASUU.
The minister confirmed that the meeting agreed on many issues and a timeline was scheduled for the implementation of the agreements.
He stated that ASUU officials agreed to return to their members with offers made by government and revert to him before the week runs out.
According to him, many of the items in the 2020 Memorandum of Action had been dealt with exhaustively, while some were being addressed.
He said: “We have only one or two areas that are new. One of the new areas is the renegotiation of the Conditions of Service, which is called the `2009 Agreement’.
“An agreement was reached in 2009 that their Conditions of Service would be reviewed every five years. It was done in 2014.
“We started one in which the former UNILAG Pro-Chancellor, Wale Babalakin, SAN, chaired the committee.
“After Babalakin, Prof. Manzali was in charge and the committee came up with a draft document, proposed by the Federal Ministry of Education and ASUU.
“Today, Manzali’s committee has become defunct because many of the people in the committee are no longer pro-chancellors.”
Ngige said a new team had been constituted to take a second look at that document.
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