The ASUU president added that the agitations of the union would be resolved in the interest of students, parents, and the country.
The National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke, has said that the Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige, should not be involved in the negotiations between the government and the union, because he has taken the matter to court.
Osodeke stated this on Tuesday when he appeared on Channels Television, adding that Ngige had lost his right as a conciliator, and was actually the one who wrote to the government to pay the lecturers, half salaries.
The ASUU president added that the agitations of the union would be resolved in the interest of students, parents, and the country.
He said; “He (Ngige) has gone to court, which means he has lost his right as a conciliator. Once he has taken this case to the Industrial Court, he has lost that right as a conciliator; he has no say again, but he’s still interloping.
“The Minister of Labour currently plays no role in the matter, he has nothing. He’s an interloper. If we’re calling him a conciliator, it has gone beyond him.
“And we have found that it was he who actually wrote to the Minister of Finance personally, not directed, that they should stop our salary. It’s just personal. We are surprised because, having taken the case to court, by all rights, he has hands are tied. He has no business with what we do.
“But to our surprise, the Accountant General Office decided to pay what some people have referred to as half. It’s very sad because professors who are on the same salary scale got varying amounts, N200,000, N180,000, N90,000 and what have you,” he said.
The ASUU president confirmed that the part payment was the first salary paid to union members since the strike commenced.
“The question we need to ask ourselves is, can a Minister of Labour direct the Minister of Finance on what to do? The answer is no. We are under the Ministry of Education, and we thought that anybody that can give such a directive who monitors what we do through the NUC is the Minister of Education.”
“It is the Minister of Education, who we are under, and the Speaker on whose intervention we called off the strike because of the issue we said that, one, they are going to pay us backlog of our salaries because ASUU is different from another union,” he said.