Posted by Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), discusses the challenges returning to work due to the outstanding eight months’ wages.
This occurs only days after the union, in response to a court order to restart their eight-month strike, put it on a conditional hiatus.
Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke discussed a variety of factors that make resuming difficult in a recent interview with Channels TV, one of which was transportation.
His words are;
When I went to school, every instructor lived on campus, and you could walk to your office.
Nowadays, however, many teachers live 20 to 30 kilometers away from their places of employment.
How will they cover the cost of their commute to work?
These are the problems that we’ll face and that the branches will have to resolve.
While we are working on other matters, we want the government to pay the money [eight months of unpaid wage arrears] so that these individuals may return to work.
We called off the strike in the hopes that the government would act appropriately, and that by tomorrow, if the institutions were open, the professors would resume their jobs.
Due to the fact that the concerns have not been entirely addressed and no agreement has been reached, we are restarting because we are following an industrial court ruling.
We also hope that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, would intervene as he promised to do in order for us to quickly find a solution to this issue.
Our professors will educate, but you can’t expect someone who is due eight months’ pay, maybe from his bank, who has racked up more than N1 million in loan proceeds, and you haven’t given him a single kobo to attend to class and teach.
I hope they go there and give it their all because of the kids. You can’t expect a guy who is starving to attend school with an open mind.