ASUU declared a full indefinate,total and comprehensive strike. In this insightful press statement the union takes time to x-ray many issues including the response of the FGN on the pandamic corona virus. See detail of the issues raised by ASUU below :

TEXT OF THE PRESS CONFERENCE HELD AT THE END OF AN EMERGENCY
NATIONAL EXECUTIVE COUNCIL (NEC) MEETING OF THE ACADEMIC
STAFF UNION OF UNIVERSITIES (ASUU) AT THE FESTUS IYAYI NATIONAL SECRETARIAT COMPLEX, UNIVERSITY OF ABUJA, ABUJA, MARCH, 2020

I. Protocol.

II. Introduction
Dear Compatriots of the Press.

You would recall that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) declared a two-week warning strike on 9th March, 2020 following the resolution taken at the National Executive Council (NEC) meeting held at the Enugu State University (ESUT), Enugu. At the ESUT-NEC meeting, the Union reviewed the level of implementation of the 2009 Agreement reached between the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) and ASUU. The skeletal implementation and actual non-implementation of provisions of the 2009 Agreement – funding, conditions of service, university autonomy and academic freedom, and other matters related to the operational environment of Nigerian public universities – gave rise to series of actions by ASUU to get Government to full implement the Agreement. Notable landmarks of those actions are the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) (2013), Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) (2017) and Memorandum of Action (MoA) (2019). The point must be made that the various memoranda all have their roots in the 2009 which was due to renegotiation way back in 2012. ASUU agreed to the MoUs and MoAs only as stopgap measures to track issues in the four key aspects of the 2009 Agreement.

The Federal Government usually ignored ASUU’s calls for full implementation of agreements and memoranda signed with the Union. Indeed, it is no news that successive governments in Nigeria have been treating matters of education, particularly university education, with levity. Operators of governments relate to universities scornfully and dismiss university scholars as irritants. They send their children abroad and consign children of the poor to an education system bereft of all ingredients of quality. The Nigerian ruling class professes to be committed to using education as a tool for achieving national development. Yet, on daily basis, they kill the same education system through contractocracy and the spread of the intervention resources available at the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) too thin. Before we know it, both federal and state governments have turned creation of new universities into constituency projects. In less than ten years, many of these unplanned universities have become crisis centres for Nigeria. Nigerians must begin to ask questions on why government is always interested in negotiating agreements and signing memoranda it has no intention to implement. Clearly, Nigerian rulers are insensitive to the plight of the poor, especially on quality of life matters such as education and health.

III. Background to the Crises in Education
In the ongoing struggle of the Union, ASUU has taken it upon itself to alert the Nigerian people about the current environment of education and at the same time place it in the context of the crises of the external control of our country in collaboration with Nigerian indigenes that have seized leadership in our country, especially in the last forty years or so. Specifically, the crisis arising from the neglect of the education sector developed with the general crisis of the abandonment of the public sector and the valorization of private ownership via liquidation of public facilities such as the banks, the power sector, aviation, telecommunication, roads, etc. Consequently, excuses were produced for the sale of public properties to the same people along with their friends who wrecked these public facilities in the first place, especially because they claimed public enterprises are not efficient. The paradox of this situation is that these privatized facilities are surviving today only because tax-payers’ money is being used to bail them out from complete collapse. But for the intervention of ASUU, the extent of this looting of public properties was to include the sale of Unity Schools and even public Universities.

At this juncture, it is noteworthy to remind the general public of the efforts of ASUU to save the Nigerian public universities from total collapse. Each struggle of ASUU had yielded an agreement of some sort between the Union and the Government. Of significance are the 2009 FGN-ASUU Agreement, the 2012 and 2013 Memoranda of Understanding, 2017 and 2019 Memoranda of Action, which have all been ignored by the government. It should be clear from the foregoing that what they call the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) deployment in the University System is a strategic diversion especially from the many years of neglect and abandonment of the University System.

For the records, since 1979 when the World Bank took definitive control of Nigeria and especially throughout the 1980s that the Nigerian ruling-class imposed World Bank Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) on Nigerians, ASUU has struggled patriotically to persuade Nigerians that they must struggle against the World Bank and the Nigerian ruling class in order to save Nigeria. It is significant to note that SAP was a product of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus”. This so-called consensus aims at perpetually underdeveloping African and other countries where the Euro-American institutions and agents are working for the total control of their economies and their peoples.

In April 1984, ASUU produced a prophetic document, “How to Save Nigeria”; detailing the dangers ahead on the economy, agriculture, banking and finance, education, environment, infrastructure and the instrumentality of foreign loans in the orchestration of these dangers. We note that the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) is directly hooked to a foreign loan, the purpose of which is to control Nigeria and ensure the enslavement of her people. Various items of information in public domain have shown that the IPPIS handlers in the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation (OAGF) have neither the competence or capacity to handle centralized payroll system, especially for the University system. Indeed, some of the MDAs that have been conscripted into the IPPIS platform have been complaining publicly about the disaster that IPPIS represents. Yet, others have insinuated massive corruption in administration of the IPPIS platform.

ASUU is persuaded that there is a programme spearheaded by foreign forces to bring the Nigerian University System to its knees through systematic underfunding and loans/other financial interventions. The Bretton Wood Institutions (World Bank and International Monetary Fund, IMF) are determined to control Nigeria’s development not only through unsolicited loan, as in the case of the one attached to IPPIS, but more specifically to frustrate ASUU’s struggles in the defense of Nigerian education. ASUU has documents that date as far back as 1978 in this regard.

In the face of this history of conspiracy, ASUU has struggled to compel the Nigerian State to adequately fund education and to avoid dependence on hand-outs that are tied to external programmes of underdevelopment. If our educational system, especially the University System, was allowed to develop at the intensity of ASUU’s vision since the mid-1970s, we are certain that our country would have been in a position to deal decisively with the economic, social, cultural, environmental and security challenges of today. We emphasize that the neglect of public purpose springs from the ideology of a ruling class that discounts public purpose. Only people who are victims of illusions will believe, for example, that our country is prepared for disasters such as the COVID-19. This is not because we could not have been able to credibly prepare for this challenge. The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), since 1984, has been struggling under constant threats with the Nigerian State to call public attention to the parlous state of all levels of public health delivery service.

The warnings of ASUU about the neglect of the education sector and its attendant consequences were not heeded by the Nigerian ruling class. Instead, the ruling class had erroneous conception of ASUU, which it has used propaganda to sell to the public. The decay in the education sector occasioned by this neglect has spread to almost all other facets of our national life: the near collapse of the economy, the decay in the health facilities, social services infrastructures, governance, public service, security, crisis of the environment and our peoples’ confidence in the viability of their own country.

IV. Nigeria’s Response to COVID-19
As part of the general Nigerian crisis, occasioned by bad governance and criminal abandonment of the constitutional responsibility of public purpose, it was not surprising that our health facilities were not equipped and staffed to respond to emergencies such as the Coronavirus pandemic otherwise called COVID-19. ASUU is not convinced that governments at various levels are doing enough now that the nation must grapple with the globalised disease. Our Union expects government to maximize the use of Nigerian scientists and other critical stakeholders to fight the pandemic. Unfortunately, what we see are groups of politicians and bureaucrats assuming leadership in the fight against the virus. We truly hope government officials are not toying with the lives of Nigerians and exploiting the situation for self-aggrandizement. So far, desired results are not coming, while reported cases are daily on the rise. Although 30 cases were reported as at 22nd March, 2020, the figure has the potential of increasing exponentially in the coming days.

To prevent and control the spread of COVI-19, Nigeria needs clarity and forcefulness in the measures to be taken. If the emerging success stories of China and other countries are anything to go by, the Nigeria needs a command structure led by experts and professionals. Such structure should include:
Teams of researchers, scholars and medical scientists not groups dominated by bureaucrats and politicians.
Inputs from the Committee of Chief Medical Directors at both the state and federal government levels. They would provide information about the state of readiness of the Isolation Centre in each hospital, state the current response capacity and projected capacity to cope with the disease in terms of bed space and equipment.
Virtually all universities, federal and state, have epidemiologists who should play critical roles in the fight against COVID-19. We need them to develop models of the disease spread taking into consideration the peculiarities of our country. Data from these experts will gvie the required pathways for speedily arresting the pandemic.

These measures, along with early detection and isolation, will significantly reduce the spread of the disease. We would like to use this opportunity to challenge investigatory agencies in the country to let Nigerians know why the isolation centres meant for the Ebola disease in 2014 are yet to be completed and put into use. A case in point is the Centre at the University of Abuja Teaching Hospital, Gwagwalada. It is good that governments are promoting “social distance” approach to reduce contact and movements. While addressing that, what we need now, more than ever before, is to address the infrastructural gap in healthcare delivery. There is also an urgent need to address the spread of the disease at the community level, where people take crowded minibuses to their homes in low-income areas. This is a “petri-dish” for the spread of COVID -19.

The Grammy Award winner, Mariah Carey, says: “We belong together”. When the government talks of self-isolation in Nigeria, where do we place the taxi driver, the market woman or the village farmer who lives on daily income. Governments in other climes are proactive to under-write house rents, assure unbroken food supply chains, subsidize incomes and introduce other measures that assure the people of a return to normal life in the post-corona era. But where are the poor, the unemployed and the under-employed in the Nigerian government’s approach to preventing the spread of COVID-A9? How prepared are we to respond to an imminent locked down which stares us clearly in the face today?

There is a need for quality surveillance to be mounted in rural areas where over 60% of Nigerians currently reside. With no health insurance or universal health coverage for most slum dwellers, it is almost certain that we cannot cope with community spread of COVID-19 among those living at the fringes of the society. ASUU has always argued against the underfunding of education and health. Nigerians should demand that government release funds to public hospitals to scale up their preparedness for the disease, as most of the ongoing efforts are by Chief Medical Directors with little or no Federal Government assistance. This can also be done through provision of support for laboratories in Nigerian universities to mass produce hand sanitizers, face mask and oxygen plants to support hospitals in the treatment of severe cases.

To demonstrate our concerns for the welfare and well-being of the Nigerian people, ASUU members nationwide shall be willing to work with medical and paramedical workers as volunteers in their public enlightenment and professional intervention initiatives. All our branches shall explore areas of strategic collaboration with federal, state and local governments to provide support in terms of information and expert skills drawn from our membership across the nation.

Our Union finds it highly hypocritical that, while the Nigerian rulers compete for space on national television to talk about the corona virus, very little is on the ground to support the media hype. It is a shame that Abuja, the nation’s capital city, has less than 50 intensive care units ready in case of serious outbreak. In fact, the Chief Medical Director in Gwagwalada is currently converting the old emergency unit into an Isolation Centre. It took repeated visits by the President of the Senate, Dr. Gambo Lawan, to begin to see some concrete deliverables at the tertiary health facility!

Nothing illustrates the disinterestedness of the ruling class in quality of life issues for people outside their class more than Nigeria’s response to COVID-19. Budgetary allocations to education and health has remained scandalously low over the years. The National Health Act remains largely unimplementable. The 2020 budgetary allocation to the health sector was a paltry 0.4% of the entire 11 trillion naira, a far cry from the 2001 Abuja declaration, which adopted a minimum of 15%. The entire allocation to health is 46 billion naira, which translates to N300 (three hundred naira) to each Nigerian. This is not only a threat to individual security but to national security. It speaks volume when a country of 200 million people allocates little or nothing in its budgetary planning for healthcare of its people. As late Professor Olikoye Ransome-Kuti once rhetorically asked: Who cares for the health of Nigerians? Corona virus has exposed the hypocrisy of this government and the lip service it pays in delivering healthcare, just like those before it. Nigerians must scrutinize how the recent 1.1 trillion naira emergency fund released for the control of the corona virus is spent. Our experience with Ebola suggests that, unless water-tight measures are taken to safeguard the emergency fund, it may become another conduit pipe for corrupt government officials who award contracts to themselves and their cronies. Nigerians should not allow these economic vampires to feast on our collective vulnerabilities.

V. Issues in Leading to the Warning Strike
Comrades and compatriots of the Press, ASUU makes bold to say Government ignited the events that led to the two-week warning. Government ignored the outstanding issues in the FGN-ASUU Memorandum of Action of 7th February, 2019 and refused to take action on at least three letters written by the Union. Government triggered the crisis not when it introduced the IPPIS and tried to sell it through dialogue, but when it resorted to the use of force. Government officials provoked Nigerian academics into strike when it stopped the payment of the salaries of academic staff in Federal Universities, citing Mr. President’s Budget Speech as a directive to Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). ASUU will always respond positively to the force of logic, but the Union resents and resists decent to the logic of force.

It could be recalled that during our meeting with Mr. President on the 9th of January, 2020, the President did promise to set up a high-powered enquiry to look into how much could be allowed in terms of management of resources and personnel by the universities, within the limit of the Constitution. ASUU was still expecting the fulfilment of this promise when the Union was confronted with the obnoxious and unilateral stoppage of salaries by the Government on the account of non-enrolment on the IPPIS platform.

It is now public knowledge all that ASUU has consistently rejected IPPIS because of its technical and procedural deficiencies. With the payment of some categories of university staff through the IPPIS platform last month, our fears about distortion in take-home pay, non-release of third-party deductions (including union dues and cooperative deductions), arbitrary award of sums on the payment, inability to link the personnel information with the payroll system have been confirmed. If Government had encouraged our Union when the idea of IPPIS in universities was first mooted in 2013/2014, a credible alternative would have since provided.
In ASUU’s letter dated 17th February, 2014 to the Accountant-General through Mrs. Fatima N. Mede (then Director, IPPIS), we wrote:
Please note that our Union is still awaiting your response to our earlier observations on the IPPIS to enable us present a credible alternative to IPPIS that will be mutually acceptable.
Again, in more recent letter dated 22nd November, 2019 and addressed to the Accountant-General through Akor Emmanuel Idoko (Deputy Director (Accounts) IPPIS), ASUU again concluded that:
We, therefore, restate ASUU’s demand, as canvassed at the 8th October, 2019 meeting, that the Union be allowed to develop and present its alternative personnel and payroll information system which would be domesticated in individual universities, with different levels of control, instead of the centralised system of IPPIS, that violates the Autonomy law.
So, it is not true that ASUU has just come up with the idea of the UTAS contrary to what the IPPIS agents are peddling. ASUU first proposed to offer “a credible alternative to IPPIS” in 2014. However, government never responded to our proposal until five years later (July 2019) when officials from the IPPIS suddenly introduced the no IPPIS, no salary policy. ASUU rejects the application of force on our members to join IPPIS irrespective of the patriotic evidence shown by the Union to offer a more credible alternative to IPPIS. And we shall use all legitimate means to defend the interest of Nigerian academics.

Following the declaration of the two-week warning strike at the Enugu State University, ASUU and Government have held consultative meetings on 12th March, 2020 and 17th March, 2020 respectively. ASUU made it clear at those meetings that our Union was always at pains going on short- or long-term strike action. However, we equally made it clear that no responsible Union will sit idly watching its members’ welfare and survival being trampled upon. In view of these developments an emergency meeting of the National Executive Council (NEC) of ASUU was held in Abuja last Saturday, 21st March, 2020 to review the warning strike and take decisions on Government’s proposal for resolving the crisis. Issues addressed by NEC are:
Funding for revitalisation of public universities.
Payment of the Outstanding Balance of Arrears of the Earned Academic Allowances.
Salary shortfall at the Federal University of Technology, Akure.
Underfunding and proliferation of State Universities.
Payment of Earned Academic Allowances (EAA) to Loyal ASUU Members in University of Ilorin
NUPEMCO
Visitation Panels to Federal Universities
Renegotiation of the 2009 Agreement
IPPIS
NEC observed that the document being put together for ensuring sustainable funding of education in Nigeria did not, in anyway, refer to the 2019 FGN-ASUU MoA. ASUU demands a clear timeline for the phased release of the outstanding balance of about N1.1tr based on the 2013 Memorandum of Understanding of FGN and ASUU. NEC further observed that the “sign of commitment”, promise by government, to the 2013 MoU should not be less than a tranche of the outstanding balance which is N220 billion. On EAA, NEC demanded the immediate release of the long-overdue balance of the calculated arrears, and the calculation should be done with the full participation of the Union to ensure that our members are not marginalised. ASUU NEC did not object to Government holding Vice-Chancellors accountable with respect to shortfall in salaries. However, the Union argued that the excuse of “gazetting” visitation panels for more than one year was no longer tenable. ASUU NEC would like to see a situation in which all obstacles to the smooth operation of the Nigerian University Pension Management Company (NUPEMCO) are fully removed in order to assure comfort for our members at old age. Towards this end, NEC called for immediate release of the actual license of NUPEMCO since the letter of approval for its operation has since expired. It is important to note that the renegotiation of the 2009 FGN-ASUU Agreement which we thought was edging towards being wound up could again be threatened with the unilateral postponement of the planned meeting by the government team on account of COVID-19.
Government has told ASUU that it now accepts the Union’s proposal on UTAS with the given timelines for full development: (a) Software Development: six (6) months (b) Alpha Testing: three (3) months (c) Beta Testing: six (6) months (d) Stable Release to GA: three (3) months. However, the appeal of Government to encourage ASUU members enrol on IPPIS, within the intervening period before the full development of UTAS, was rejected as a booby trap. ASUU rejects the application of force on our members to join IPPIS irrespective of the patriotic evidence shown by the Union to offer a more credible alternative to IPPIS.

VI. Resolution
Comrades and compatriots, it was difficult for NEC to some painful decisions at the its last meeting. Our wish was that Government would satisfactorily address issues that gave rise to the warning strike which was billed to end today. However, we are not yet there as country – a situation in which peaceful means, other than threats would be adopted to resolve industrial harmony. Nigerian government has elected to use hunger as a weapon of war against its academics and we are not going to sit and watch. Action and reaction, as they say, are equal but opposite. So, the resolution of the emergency NEC meeting is as follows:
Based on the review of reports from ASUU leadership’s engagements with Government, NEC concluded that Government had failed to satisfactorily address the outstanding issues raised in the FGN-ASUU 2019 MoA and ignored the objections of ASUU against IPPIS. Consequently, NEC resolved to embark on a total, comprehensive and indefinite strike action beginning Monday, 23rd March, 2020 until the issues are satisfactorily resolved.

VII. Conclusion
Compatriots of the Press, no one will develop Nigeria except by ourselves. Acquiescence to policies that are inimical to our people’s welfare and the survival of our institutions have contributed greatly to our story of underdevelopment. The World Bank agents locally and abroad pretend to act in our interests, when they are feathering their own nests. We call on all freedom loving people to join ASUU in wresting this nation from the stranglehold of those who have held it captive for decades. We invite our students to this mission of liberation. For instance, IPPIS which is a brainchild of the World Bank has no place for contract scholars and academics in diaspora who we direly need to give international flavours to curricula, research and procedures in Nigerian universities. Agents of IPPIS have directed universities to “look inward” to generate funds to pay this category of scholars. Without missing words, Government is introducing tuition fees, which ASUU has always resisted, through the back door. Our union shall align forces with the labour movement, professional bodies (NMA, NBA etc.), students, farmers and artisans to ensure that the dignity of scholars is not totally eroded in Nigeria. So, for ASUU, the struggle continues!

Thank you.

Biodun Ogunyemi
President

23rd March, 2020

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A must read: ASUU exposes FGN .