Strike is a universal right of workers. Workers can go on strike and the law is explicitly clear and I would refer to the Nigerian trade dispute act as well as international labor organization code, they allow strike actions even without notice is allowed but we should ask ourselves, does it appeal to common sense that a union should embark on a one year strike or six months strike, well the answer is known to all of us. We would say well since the workers have the right to go on strike, they should try to moderate how to do it so that the lives of the young ones would not be put into jeopardy and that is the way I see all those things.

ASUU and the government are right to some extent, where government is right and where ASUU is right should be the meeting point for the two bodies and I will give you examples. I want to say it without any fear of contradiction from anywhere, the salary of a Nigerian professor is too poor, given the present level of inflation. A situation where a professor has been earning the same salary since 2009 is not acceptable. ASUU 2009 agreement is what the lecturers are still earning, even if it is the civil servants that are still earning the same salary, it is not acceptable. The salary that was calculated in 2009 was based on 2009 situation. We should moderate on the way we do things, that is on the side where ASUU is correct. Another side ASUU is correct is the level of decay in the university system, you go to some laboratories in the federal universities, you will cry that this is where they are teaching students, things are dilapidated. Some of the state universities, including Uniosun are far better than several federal universities. If you go to the laboratories in Uniosun, you will have the wrong impression that Nigerian universities are very standard, if you go to some federal universities you will cry.

One side the government is right but they are not right completely is IPPIS. In universities, you have granted them autonomy, having granted them autonomy allow them to operate. What the government should do to IPPS is to bring the package to the universities and ask the universities to domesticate the IPPIS. When universities domesticate the IPPIS, the government will play monitoring role. Do you get the point I am making? For example in Sun State University here our government is doing something similar to IPPIS but they give our university the autonomy. And the role our government plays is the monitoring role. And that is excellent. Monitoring role in the sense that they monitor how much we pay as salaries, monitor how we operate our salary account, they capture our bio-metric data every two years. But the state government allows us to manage our own finances as well as payment of our salaries. That is what the Federal Government should have done, borrow a leaf from the government of the State of Osun. Take the IPPIS to the universities, get the universities to buy into it, give the entire package to the universities, then set up your monitoring and evaluation team in Abuja, somewhere under the Federal Ministry of Finance or the Nigeria Universities Commission, let them come to the universities every two years to revalidate all the data submitted by the staff. That would have solved the problem. But the government wants to control the salaries of the federal universities from Abuja. The Federal Government has too many problems. I am not saying they should not dictate how to pay, they can dictate how to pay by handing over this IPPIS to the universities, domesticate it in the universities, let the salary units of the universities manage it. Then you play the role of monitoring and evaluation agent, you send your officers to the universities to monitor how it is being operated. That is what we are doing in Osun State and it is working like magic.


https://www.vanguardngr.com/2022/06/fg-should-use-osun-model-to-solve-ippis-crisis-adebooye-uniosun-vc/amp/