Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, the national president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, criticised Chris Ngige, the minister of labour and employment, on Tuesday for allegedly authorising the part-payment of salaries to union members after the union’s seven-month strike was suspended in October.
The eight-month strike by ASUU was put on hold in October after the National Industrial Court ordered the professors to resume their jobs.
On Monday, ASUU announced that it would hold a one-day nationwide protest against the partial payment.
“He (Ngige) has gone to court, which means he has lost his right as a conciliator. Once he has taken this case to the Industrial Court, he has lost that right as a conciliator; he has no say again, but he’s still interloping,” Osodeke said on Channels Television’s Politics Today.
READ ALSO: SDP Presidential Candidate, Adebayo Believes “Half Of Those In Government Should Be In Jail”
Asked what role the Minister of Labour currently plays in the matter, the ASUU president said, “He has nothing. He’s an interloper. If we’re calling him a conciliator, it has gone beyond him.
“And we have found that it was he who actually wrote to the Minister of Finance personally, not directed, that they should stop our salary. It’s just personal. We are surprised because, having taken the case to court, by all rights, he has hands are tied. He has no business with what we do.”
Osodeke provided assurance that the union’s protests would be put to rest in the best interests of the children, parents, and the nation.
The first wage provided to union members since the start of the strike was the portion payment, he further revealed.
“But to our surprise, the Accountant General Office decided to pay what some people have referred to as half. It’s very sad because professors who are on the same salary scale got varying amounts, N200,000, N180,000, N90,000 and what have you,” he said.
“The question we need to ask ourselves is, can a Minister of Labour direct the Minister of Finance on what to do? The answer is no. We are under the Ministry of Education, and we thought that anybody that can give such a directive who monitors what we do through the NUC is the Minister of Education.
“It is the Minister of Education, who we are under, and the Speaker on whose intervention we called off the strike because of the issue we said that, one, they are going to pay us backlog of our salaries because ASUU is different from another union,” he said.
