Salary withholding: UniAbuja SSANU, ASUU launch protest
The government’s refusal to release the university employees’ four months of salaries while they were on strike in 2022 prompted the
Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities and the Non-Academic Staff Union of Universities and Allied Institutions of the University of Abuja to launch a protest on Tuesday.
The head of the chapter, Nurudeen Yusuf, addressed the media at the beginning of the demonstration and called the government’s actions “provoking.”
Because the academic and non-academic workers of Nigerian universities participated in an industrial action that shut down the
institutions for eight months in 2022, the Nigerian government withheld their pay.
SSANU and NASU took part in the four-month strike.
President Bola Tinubu ruled in October that the academic staff’s eight months’ worth of salaries that had been withheld be paid, but not the non-teaching staff.
The government and the non-academic staff union experienced a fresh rift as a result of this development.
Both SSANU and NASU have protested the “selective payments” since the announcement and have requested to be included.
The four months’ worth of salary, which were paid in February, were exclusively given to the academic staff. A nationwide demonstration had been called by the unions’ national bodies.
“Recall that on March 18, 2024, we invited you when we embarked on a week-long protest to bring the government’s attention to
issues bordering on our welfare and university education in general, most especially, the payment of our withheld four months salaries,” Yusuf said in an address to journalists.
Given that the same presidential decree was only partially executed to the benefit of our teaching counterparts, the academics, this is extremely frustrating and thought-provoking.
“Today’s protest marks the start of a sequence of union actions that will lead to the complete closure of all Nigerian universities.”
Since this action is avoidable and preventative, we demand that the Minister of Education wake up and quit being such an ostrich.
We further urge the Minister of Labor and Productivity to use her excellent position to stop the discord and disillusionment
among our university employees, which are unnecessarily interfering with our academic program and events.
