FG not ready to end strike – ASUU After 10 unsuccessful meetings with theFederal Government, the Academic Staff Union ofUniversities, ASUU, yesterday said government wasnot ready to end the 8-week-old strike, lamentingthat government displayed dishonesty and lack ofintegrity during negotiations. At a briefing in Lagos, ASUU’s President, Dr. IsaFaggae, claimed that government had declared itwould not implement the agreed injection of fundsto revitalise the public universities, but was onlymaking a dubious statement of supporting someuniversities with N100 billion. He said: “Government had also declared that it willnot pay university academics their earnedallowances which accumulated from 2009 to 2013.Rather, it is talking about providing N30 billion toassist various Governing Councils of FederalUniversities to defray the arrears of N92 billion owed to all categories of staff in the universitysystem.” Narrating the union’s experience at the lastmeeting with the Government held on Monday,Faggae said: ASUU was shocked by the level ofdeceit, dishonesty, and lack of integrity displayedby the Government. Never in the history of ASUU-Government relations have we, as a union, ever experienced the kind of volte-face exhibited byGovernment. At one stage in the interaction, theSecretary to the Government Federation ridiculedthe agreement, the MoU and the Needs AssessmentReport, mocking the Minister of Education to “goand give them N400 billion,” at which members of the government scornfully laughed.” He argued that the Governor Gabriel Suswam-ledImplementation Committee was being used assmokescreen to “deceive ASUU, Nigerian studentsand their parents, as well as other unsuspectingmembers of the public on the purportedly releasedN100 billion for the implementation of the Needs Assessment Report. First, he said, government plans to divert theregular yearly allocations to universities by TertiaryEducation Trust, TETFund, to make at least 70% ofthe N100 billion. This is unacceptable to ASUU. It islike robbing Peter to pay Paul, since the idea ofrevitalization took full cognizance of the intervention role TETFund ab-initio. “Again, contrary to subsisting operationalprocedures, about 75% of the money meant forrevitalizing universities would not be released tothem as the Suswam Committee plans to hand overconstruction of the hostel projects to the FederalMinistry of Education and/or the National Universities Commission, for implementation. This isillegal; neither the ministry nor NUC is backed bylaws of Nigerian Public Universities to divert moniesmeant for the development of these institutions intocentrally executed projects.” Dr. Faggae questioned the committee’s motives forproposing to commit N1.6 million to a bed space,instead of N200, 000 to N400, 000, saying, “We seea continuation of outrageous contract regimes inthe plan to centrally coordinate the construction ofstudent hostels as done in the case of the 12 newly established Federal Universities with TETFundresources. The NUC has transmuted itself into a“Tenders’ board” which awarded contracts for theconstruction of 560 bed spaces hostel for eachuniversity at a whooping sum of 1.2 bn. Thiscontract sum translates into N2.143 million per bed space.”