ASSU Strike Continues As Meeting With FG Ends In Stalemate |The Source

By Uche Mbah

Nigerian students will stay at home longer than expected as the meeting between the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU)   and the Presidency, Thursday,  ended in a stalemate. This has raised  fears that the continuous staying at home of students would continue to fuel and drive the #EndSARS/#EndSWAT project.

The government had insisted that the lecturers should embrace a new payment platform for their salaries, which the lecturers refused to be part of. Recently there have been reports of scandals involving misappropriation of funds within the management of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), the platform in question, with many wondering why lecturers must be subjected to such  platform.

Lecturers have been without salaries for over six months due to the standoff.

But with the #endsars-#endswat protests, indications are that the government saw the reopening of schools as part of a strategy to whittle down the process and, therefore, invited the ASUU leadership for another round of discussions on the issue.

The meeting ended in a stalemate.

Sources indicate that there were hot arguments from both sides of the divide as both parties stood their grounds.

ASUU had insisted on the payment of outstanding salaries on the GIFMIS before the full implementation of UTAS, but the presidency  stuck to their guns on IPIS.

Even the recent appeal by the Senate President Ahmed Lawan for the Government  to pay outstanding salaries and allowances to the lecturers first before negotiating under the new platform seem to have been ignored by the presidency. Instead, the Accountant General of the Federation had insisted the lecturers receive their salaries under IPIS pending the resolution of the crisis, a move the lecturers rejected on the the ground that it was not demonstrated to them before they were railroaded into it.

Government is bent on sending IPIS officials to the universities to deal directly with the institutions in order to break their ranks beginning Monday, but ASUU had directed their members not to give them audience. Government, they believe, is using the Biometric capturing as a ruse to break their ranks.