The Congress of Nigerian University Academics (CONUA), a parallel union which claimed it broke out of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), has claimed its members are ready to abandon the eight months’ lingering industrial action embarked upon by ASUU.
The National Legal Adviser of CONUA, Misbau Alamu Lateef, insisted that they were over 1000 university lecturers, and ready to return to class.
Lateef said this in a statement released on his Facebook page after the Nigerian government presented a certificate of registration to the union on Tuesday.
“We insisted that the right approach was to insist on the government (our employer) incorporating our peculiarities into IPPIS rather than insisting, as ASUU has futilely done till now, that we must dictate a payroll or payment method to our employer. You will never see any example in the world where employees dictate to their employers the mode of payment of their wages. Yet, that’s one of the major reasons ASUU has forced a strike on our universities for 7months plus.
“However, we have nothing personal against our teachers and seniors in ASUU. We are all friends and colleagues even as I type now. We mostly disagree on their modus operandi and ideology (outdated leftist mentality). So, the guiding philosophy of CONUA is Constructive Engagement to rebuild our universities without destroying them.
“What’s in this for the hapless Nigerian students? The siege is over. I can assure you that there are 1000s of lecturers only waiting to get back to the classroom to resume their work while the struggle for better funding of universities continues without destroying the universities to build them,” he said.