Contrary to the earlier claim by Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, that the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, demanded for N92bn from the federal government, the union has debunked the statement, claiming that they demanded N87bn and not N92bn as disclosed by Iweala. ASUU in a statement issued on Wednesday stated that it did not demand for such amount as earned allowances in the 2009 agreement it reached with the Federal Government. It would be recalled that the Minister had earlier in the week in Minna, Niger State said that the Federal Government was unable to cough out the N92bn allowances demanded by striking lecturers. The university lecturers, in a communiqué by the University of Ibadan branch chairman, Olusegun Ajiboye, described the Minister’s claim as a mere imagination. He explained that the earned allowances, the union and the government 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 the union to scale down from the initial N127bn. Speaking further, Ajiboye said the N87bn was totalled based on 15 per cent of the annual recurrent expenditures of some Nigeria’s universities. The statement reads, “I want Nigerians to ask the Minister where she got her figure of N92bn from. There was never a time that ASUU made a demand that is up to N92bn. I think the N92bn is just the imagination of the. Minister. “But that is not to say that this government did not enter into an agreement with us. This is a government that signed an agreement with us on January 24, 2012 to the effect that they would inject N100bn as funding into the universities in the first one month and that before the end of 2012, they would inject another N300bn.’’ Meanwhile, University undergraduates have been at the receiving end since the Union commenced its strike action. Several appeals have been made to the Union to call of the strike, yet it remains adamant, affirming that until its demands are met, students will remain at home.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 06:37:04 +0000