The Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities ,SSANU and the Non Academic Staff Union ,NASU of the Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA) Akure joined their counterparts in other parts of the country on a one day warning protest on Tuesday July 9,2024 to state their grievances over the non-payment of their four months withheld salaries by the Federal Government.
Addressing members of the union and the Press at the Main Entrance of the University, venue of the protest, the SSANU FUTA Chapter Chairman, Comrade Felix Adubi said “Today our goal is to address the concerns of our members and this national protest is going on simultaneously in all the universities in Nigeria. We are using this opportunity to call the attention of stakeholders in the Nigerian project to come and speak with the Federal Government to do the needful and pay withheld salaries as approved by the president. This protest is to send another note of warning to the government to avoid another long drawn battle that will throw the university system into another crisis we are here today to address the whole country and call the attention of government to this great negligence of the non-teaching staff in the Nigeria University System. We are gathered today to notify the government of our dissatisfaction with their inaction and inability to fulfil its promise”.
Adubi, who also doubles as the chairman of the Joint Action Committee, JAC pointed out that the government had not fulfilled its previous promises thus necessitating the current action.
He said “ At another meeting a Memorandum of Understanding that all the needs of the union will be looked into and necessary actions will be taken. However instead the government seized salaries of members and implemented the No Work No Pay Policy despite the fact that the government signed an undertaken that no member will be victimized on account of that strike. President Bola Tinubu on assumption of duty in October 2023 invoked a presidential pardon for all the striking workers whose salaries were put on hold promising to pay four months out of the withheld salaries. However out of the four university unions that embarked on the strike in 2022, only one union was singled out for payment leaving the rest of the members of the non-teaching union of the universities unattended to.
Comrade Adubi reiterated that the approval the president gave, covers all university staff involved in that strike action. He said “We wrote a series of petitions to call the attention of government to this omission and none of them was fruitful. Two weeks ago we gave the government another ultimatum of two weeks to address the injustice meted out to the non-academic staff in the universities. That ultimatum elapsed on the 4th of July and on the same day the government invited us to another meeting and we registered our displeasure at the government’s reluctance to pay us our entitlements as promised. After that the unions consulted its organs and a series of actions have been lined up to prosecute this struggle to demand for our withheld salaries”.
He appealed to the president to call those responsible for the non-payment of the salaries to order and compel them to release the entitlement of the non-teaching staff.
” The president promised that there will not be crisis in the university system again but the actions and inactions of the government officials are pointing towards a negative direction. We can no longer guarantee industrial harmony in the Nigerian university system as it stands today if the government fails to do the needful”, he said.