Percy Onyeka
Techrectory has learned that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is the umbrella organization through which the Federal Government has started paying professors’ salaries that have been withheld.
Our correspondent in Abuja received confirmation of the development on Monday from several scholarly sources.
Prof. Gbolahan Bolarin, the chairperson of ASUU at the Federal University of Technology, Minna, acknowledged the development on official records, stating that it is factual. The money has begun to come in.
Four of the eight months that the ASUU withheld the pay of its employees were released, as approved by President Bola Tinubu Tinubu in October 2023.
The salaries were withheld when the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari invoked a ‘No Work, No Pay policy’ against some university-based unions that embarked on a strike that lasted eight months in 2022.
The Minister of Education, Tahir Mamman, recently said the government has increased the university workers’ salaries by 35 per cent.
The minister also said the government has granted autonomy to the universities by removing them from the Integrated Payment and Payroll Information System.
He added that the universities no longer need a waiver to recruit and fill vacancies.
These resolutions were reached through informal consultations with the unions based in the tertiary institutions, Mamman said.
Details later…
