NASU Threatens To Go On Strike Next Week

THREE months into the shutting of academic work in the nation’s universities, the non- academic staff of the universities on Tuesday said they would embark on their strike action next week except the government pay the two months’ salary being own them before then. General Secretary, Non-Academic Staff Union of
Educational and Associated Institutions, Mr. Peters
Adeyemi, told journalists in Ilorin, Kwara State,
that members of the union were being forced
into embarking on a strike action by the refusal
of the Federal Government to pay their salaries for August and September. The NASU scribe said, “NASU will start its own
strike next week because we have been
working and government has refused to pay our
salaries. For us, it does not make sense to
continue to keep the system running when we
are not paid our salary. The reason for this is not known to us. “Workers in all federal universities are not paid
their salary right now and that is big challenge.
Government has not paid our salary for August
and as we are talking now, today is September
24, they are effectively owing us two months’
salary and there’s no way we can continue to do this work with empty stomach, while they go
about running around the globe with heavy
stomach.” Adeyemi, who spoke during NASU’s National
Executive Council meeting on Tuesday, said the
union had displayed maturity in handling its
grievances but that the government was pushing
the members to the wall. He said NASU had shied away from joining the
three-month-old strike by the Academic Staff
Union of Universities, though the non-academic
staff had been having their own grouse with the
Federal Government. Adeyemi said the government had not explained
to them why their August and September salaries
were yet to be paid. He said that the union had been reluctant on
embarking on strike since many Nigerians felt
uncomfortable with the incessant strikes in the
nation’s tertiary institutions. He, however, said that members of the union
could not continue to work while being inflicted
with hunger by the non-payment of their
salaries. Adeyemi said, “We we think as Nigerians and
parents, we don’t have to unnecessarily ground
the system. But if you take this our maturity and
level-headedness to mean stupidity, then of
course, we are running out of patience. “Nigerians would have known that we
deliberately did not want this continuous
disruption of academic activities because, of
course, Nigerians are complaining that those of
us in the academic world have continuously
ruined the future of students by going on to many strikes imposed on us by the government. “That is one of the reasons why this time around
we did not want to necessarily go on strike, but
government is pushing us to that point and
Nigerians will have no reason not to understand
our position if we start the strike by next week.”