2025 is the year of long battle with FG, ASUU declares

 

The Academic Staff Union of Universities has warned that “in the absence of visible and concrete efforts at addressing pending issues and meeting its expectations, 2025 will be a year of long-drawn confrontation between the union and the Federal Government.”

Describing efforts made by the Federal Government to address its issues last year as window-dressing and cosmetic, ASUU said the FG made no major difference in the university education sector, continued its neglect of the university system and failed to satisfactorily resolve its issues in the year 2024.

According to the Chairman of ASUU, Ibadan chapter, Prof. Ayo Akinwole, in a statement on Wednesday, the uninterrupted academic calendar in 2024 was a result of the sacrifice of the union not that the government had addressed its impending issues.

The union flayed the FG over policy summersault in the 18 years benchmark for admission into tertiary education and asked the President Bola Tinubu government to, instead of embarking on a fresh renegotiation of the agreement, set in motion a process that will lead to the review and signing of the Nimi Briggs-led renegotiated draft agreement.

The ASUU chairman said the FG continuously failed to put machinery in motion to address its long-drawn issues of “non-provision of funding for the revitalization of public universities based on the FGN-ASUU MoU of 2012, 2013, and the MoA of 2017; non-release of the three and a half months of the withheld salaries; non-release of third-party deductions like scheduled loans repayments, personal savings to retirement schemes and cooperative contributions.

The union listed other pending issues as non-release and payment of arrears of Earned Academic Allowance (EAA); the creeping fascism in some Nigerian universities; the problem associated with the proliferation of public universities; non-implementation of the reports of the Visitation Panels; non-implementation of UTAS in place of IPPIS and non-renegotiation of 2009 FGN/ASUU Agreement.

“These pending issues were yet to be satisfactorily resolved in 2024 and will, no doubt, define the trajectories of the relationships between our Union and the Federal Government in 2025. Having reviewed the state of education in Nigeria in 2024, it is time to set an agenda for 2025.

“Fellow Nigerians, given the usual adamant posture of the Federal Government to satisfactorily address the pending issues concerning the education sector in general and the university system in particular, we expect that the year 2025 may, if care is not taken, be a year of another challenge and struggle.

“In the absence of visible and concrete efforts at addressing the pending issues and meeting our expectations, there is likely to be a long-drawn confrontation between our Union and the Federal Government, which will probably lead to another round of untold avoidable crisis in the university system in Nigeria.