The Federal Government moved yesterday to avert another round of strikes by university teachers by setting up a committee to address ‘’unresolved’’ demands of their umbrella body, the Academic Staff Union of Universities.
The constitution of the committee which has two to four weeks to turn in its report came barely 48 hours after ASUU appealed to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to wade into the“unresolved issues which are not new.”
Minister of State for Education Tanko Sununu told The Nation that the panel was set up after a two-hour meeting between a Federal Government team and ASUU leadership in Abuja yesterday.
Education Minister Tahir Mamman and Sununu led other top federal government officials to the meeting while ASUU President Emmanuel Osodeke headed the union’s team.
Sununu said: “We have reached a certain understanding with ASUU; we agreed to set up a committee with a timeline of two- to four weeks within which we are going to reconvene and look at all the issues.
“ASUU also agreed to go and brief their members on the outcome (of the meeting) while the committee commenced work.
“ASUU is going to forward some documents to the ministry so we are going to take a look at them.”
Education Minister Mamman said he was optimistic that the problems bedeviling the education sector would be overcome.
He said: “We had a very good meeting, a very productive one. We’ve discussed progress on how to ensure that the system works well and lots of the issues we talked about are those that we inherited and some on-going.
“We discussed them all without exception and we have a consensus on the way forward.
“A lot of consultations will still continue on some information we don’t have, which is beyond the scope of the ministry and which will require us to connect with our colleagues in other ministries.
“But, the most important thing is that we had a very good meeting and agreed to continue with the consultations to overcome the problems bedeviling education in Nigeria,”
Attempts by The Nation to get Osodeke’s reaction to the announcement by Sununu on the setting up of the committee were futile. He first picked up his call when contacted and asked our reporters to call him back. As of press time yesterday, he had yet to do so.
Osodeke had told reporters after the meeting that he was hopeful that the government would follow up on what had been agreed on.
“We have discussions on all the issues and we have given assignments to some people to look at, and agree on the way forward.”
