Asuu to Call off Soon

Details of the Monday/Tuesday marathon
meeting between President Goodluck Jonathan
and the leadership of the Academic Staff
Union of Universities have begun to emerge.
“The meeting should be the longest that we
have ever had on this crisis but I can tell you
that both parties were frank all through the
discussions. “The parties also showed
commitment towards ending the crisis. The
President in particular showed that he was
serious about ending the strike and that was
why he offered to release over N1tn to the
universities in the next five years.”
Punch gathered on Tuesday evening that a key
component of the agreement reached by the
parties was that the Federal Government
would inject N1.1tn into public universities in
the next five years.A reliable source, who
made this known, also hinted that the strike
would be called off anytime next week.
He said the government team which was led
by President Goodluck Jonathan would release
N220bn yearly into the sector beginning from
2014.The source added, “The money will be
released on a yearly basis at N220bn per
annum beginning from 2014. For the
outgoing year, the government will only
release N100bn and this has been processed.”
He said that the government, in order to
show its commitment to a fresh pact,
accepted that “the fund (N1.1tn) should
domiciled at the Central Bank of Nigeria”“The
money will be released on a quarterly basis to
the universities. So, there won’t be any
problem about funding the deal,” the source
said.
The National Universities Commission and the
Trade Union Congress, according to him, are
joint guarantors of the agreement while the
Minister of Education will be the
implementation officer.The source said that
the government agreed among other things,
to revamp the public universities by ensuring
that all those issues that always led to strike
were dealt with once and for all.It was learnt
that the negotiating team of ASUU led by Dr.
Nassir Faggae met on Tuesday to further
deliberate on the deal.
We gathered the ASUU team have reached an
agreement to take the deal offered by
Jonathan and that they will meet the larger
ASUU caucus by weekend to agree and end
the strike.
Source: Punch