Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi chapter, has faulted the Federal Government’s mode of paying its members’ backlog of salaries for the 2022 eight months industrial action.
It described it as “discriminatory.” Speaking with newsmen in Bauchi, yesterday, ATBU-ASUU Chairman, Dr. Ibrahim Inuwa Ibrahim, chided the former Minister of Labour and Productivity, Dr. Chris Ngige, for allegedly misinforming Nigerians on his colleagues at ATBU’s College of Medical Sciences (CMS).
Ibrahim said: “To convince Nigerians, Dr. Ngige claimed that lecturers under the umbrella of the Medical and Dental Consultants’ Association of Nigeria (MDCAN) wrote to him through the University Vice Chancellor, dissociating themselves from the ASUU national strike. As a ploy, Ngige presented MDCAN as a purely academic union. He hid from the public the fact that not all medical and dental consultants operating in the teaching hospitals are core staff of the academic unit that forms the CMS.
“Under this guise, Ngige made a case to the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation (OAGF) for some lecturers in the CMS of the university to be paid. If it were true that lecturers in the CMS were working during strike, this would have given the medical students an edge over their mates from other faculties. Unfortunately, this is not the case, because our members in all the academic units of the university were on strike,” he said.
The lectures said it became necessary for the union to call the attention of the Nigerian state on Ngige’s ploy to divide and break the resoluteness of union members during the 2022 national strike that lasted almost eight months.
At the peak of our national strike, Ngige deceptively told Nigerians that lecturers in CMS of ATBU were not on strike.
“The union wonders why a minister, who took an oath to ethically conduct himself in accordance with the dictates of the Constitution of the country, will allow ego to take him this far. It was obvious that the former minister allowed ego, rather than the Constitution, to guide his judgment on matters of national interest. The union patriotically calls on the Nigerian state to address this unfair treatment meted out on academics in public Universities,” Ibrahim said.
