According to the Academic Staff Union of Universities, public university lecturers in the country have been on the same salary schedule since 2009, when the naira to the dollar exchange rate was N120.
This is because the reviewed agreement with the Briggs-led government team on the FGN/ASUU Re-negotiation Agreement of 2009 has remained in draft form from 2021 till date.
During a press conference in Abraka, Delta State, Benin zonal president of ASUU, Professor Monday Igbafe, stated that what a professor at a bar makes in today’s Nigeria is roughly $400 per month, which is a terrible undervaluation of scholars.
According to Igbafe, the need to re-negotiate the 2009 FGN/ASUU agreement is crucial to the government’s unsolved issues with ASUU.
According to him, the Union and its members had had enough, and “there is no long story on this anymore.”
“You are not unaware that the government has been foot-dragging on the need to conclude and sign the renegotiated 2009 Agreement, which commenced in 2017.
“After a tortuous exercise, a draft agreement was reached with the Professor Briggs-led Committee in 2021.
“Unfortunately, agents of the Buhari government refused to approve the draft agreement for reasons best known to them.
“The then Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, played the leading role in truncating the successful conclusion of the FGN-ASUU renegotiation process that had lasted for more than four years.
“The union believes that the satisfactory and conclusive renegotiation of the agreement and its successful implementation is the desirable recipe for the worsening living and working conditions of staff, the pandemic problem of underfunding and other challenges of university governance in the country.
“Indeed, the depressing existential condition has made it expedient for the President Tinubu-led administration to immediately set in motion the process leading to the review and signing of the Nimi Briggs-led renegotiated draft agreement as a mark of seriousness and assured hope for Nigerian academics and Nigeria’s public universities.
“Any further delay on this path is an invitation to crisis,” he thundered.
The ASUU leader also took a swipe at the festering culture of illegal dissolution of the governing councils of public universities in the country, as well as the refusal or neglect by some state governments to manage theirs without governing councils.
He said while the federal government has hastily reconstituted the governing councils of federal universities after 11 months of their illegal dissolution owing to the threat of industrial action by the Union, some state governments have remained adamant to the contrary.
“This unwholesome act has led to unthinking aberrations in the universities with the introduction of obnoxious policies that are antithetical to the university culture.
The zonal president cited Ambrose Alli University (AAU), Ekpoma, as a classic example of a state university where there has not been a governing council for three years, with a strange body supposedly playing the role of a governing council.