The Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), have agreed to resolve their differences amicably, thereby suspending initial plans of the Union to embark on a nationwide strike action.
The duo announced this after a two-hour closed-door meeting held at the Headquarters of the Federal Ministry of Education, Wednesday evening in Abuja.
ASUU President, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, said that the negotiation process had begun while hoping that the federal government, through the Minister, would follow up on what had been agreed on.
He said the meeting became necessary as no formal meeting has been held between the government and the Union since the commencement of the present administration for issues to be discussed.
“We had discussions on all the issues and we have given assignments to some people to look at and we have agreed on the way forward.
“So we will go back and give the details to our members. What is important is that we have started the process and our prayer is that we resolve it for the interest of our young men and the interest of the nation.
“The government has spent one year in office and we have not been called for any formal meeting. Today we are having the first formal meeting.
“There is a process we have started and we are going to set deadlines, we are going to meet to look at what has been done on those issues, we hope the process will continue,” said Prof.Osodeke.
On his part, the Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman disclosed that the meeting was fruitful, adding that consultations would commence immediately to assuage the challenges as regards the demands of ASUU and other problems facing the education sector.
“We’ve had a very good meeting and a very productive one. We’ve discussed progress on how to ensure that the system works well. Lots of the issues we talked about are issues we all inherited and ongoing.
“So we discussed them all without exception and we have a consensus on the way forward.
“A lot of consultations will continue on some information we don’t have which is beyond the scope of the ministry and which will require us to connect with our colleagues in other ministries.
“But the most important thing is that we had a very good meeting and agreed to continue with the consultations to hopefully overcome the problems bedevilling education in Nigeria,” he said.
ASUU had threatened to embark on a nationwide strike over the federal government’s failure to meet its demands.
The union had charged the government to act within two weeks to address all outstanding demands by the union.
Some of the issues of contention are removal from IPPIS, Renegotiation of the 2009 FGN/ASUU Agreement, all the backlog of Earned Academic Allowance (EAA) and all the outstanding salaries, among others.
