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ASUU  President Dr  Nasir   Fagge , left, and Nigerian Minister of Education  Nyesom   Wike . ( ASUU ; Facebook) The Nigerian federal government called on the Academic Staff Union of Universities ( ASUU ) to end its several-month-long strike and accused the opposition All Progressives Congress of politicizing and manipulating the industrial action. “By the time we finish with the strike, the crisis will take its toll on states as many of them won’t be able to pay allowances,” Minister of Information  Labaran  Maku said, adding that the strike is starting to damage the Nigerian education sector,  reported the  Osun  Defender. He said that some states might not be able to pay allowances on lecturers by the time the strike ends. Maku also accused the All Progressives Congress of manipulating the strike. “I know  ASUU  very well.  ASUU  went into the strike out of the conviction that they would get more ...

The nature of two holes on the late Professor Festus Iyayi’s body gives life to suspicions by his colleagues that he may have been shot. Along with grief, anger will be the dominant emotion when Professor Festus Iyayi is buried this week in his hometown, Ugbegun in Edo State. The two feelings have mixed, predictably with unsavoury outcomes, since the former president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, died on 12 November in an auto accident on the Lokoja-Abuja Expressway. Iyayi was travelling to Kano in the company of three other ASUU members for a meeting on the ongoing strike by members of the union when a police escort van in the convoy of the Governor Idris Wada of Kogi State rammed into the bus the university teachers were travelling. Iyayi died instantly, while three his colleagues were seriously injured. Wada, who was severely injured in an accident involving his convoy last year, was widely criticised by ASUU and the wider public for his failure to lea...

The Academic Staff Union of Universities on Wednesday faulted the statement credited to the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala, that the union demanded for N92bn, describing the claim as false. ASUU said it never demanded such amount as earned allowances in the 2009 agreement it reached with the Federal Government. Okonjo-Iweala had on Wednesday in Minna, said the Federal Government couldn’t meet the N92bn allowances as demanded by ASUU. The university lecturers, in a statement by the University of Ibadan branch chairman, Dr. Olusegun Ajiboye, described the amount mentioned by the minister as “a the imagination of the minister.” Ajiboye explained that the earned allowances, the union and the governemnt calculated in the 2009 agreement, amounted to N87b, which covered allowances for three and half years for the lecturers in the nation’s universities. He said, the N87bn was a compromise made by ASUU to scale down from N127bn. He added that the N87bn was computed ...

There appears to be no end in sight for the on-going strike embarked upon by members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities as the Federal Government has declared that it does not have the resources to meet the financial demands of the University lecturers. The Minister of Finance, Dr. Okonjo Iweala indicated this in her speech at the opening of a two-day meeting of Commissioners of Finance and Accountants Generals of states ministries of Finance in Minna. She noted that the N92 billion being demanded by the University lecturers is not within the reach of the Federal Government. ‘At present, ASUU wants the federal government to pay N92bn in extra allowances, when resources are not there and when we are working to integrate past increases in pensions. We need to make choices in this country as we are getting to the stage where recurrent expenditures take the bulk of our resources and people get paid but can do no work’. She stated that if the demands of the university lectu...