Students of the University of Jos may have to stay a bit longer at home as a result of the lingering three months old internal strike action embarked on by the Academic Staff Union Of Universities, ASUU, in the institution.
Indications to this emerged early January, when national TRAIL gathered that the institution’s senate was unable to resolve the issues in contention when it met late last year.
Although there has been no official comments on the next line of action from the authority, a cross section of students have continue to lament their stay out of school, while appealing to the ASUU and the management to iron their difference so that school can resume just like others.
In an interview shortly after the commencement of the strike last year, the ASUU Chairman, Christopher Piwuna, accused the management of insincerity in the management of resources; where, he said the over 300 members of the union were being short changed.
He explained that the issue started shortly after the national strike by ASUU in June, 2013 after which government released funds for the welfare of “our members and funds for the NEEDS assessment, which was the crux of that strike we had”.
Piwuna hinted that the amount given to the University of Jos, was N1.16 billion, and it was suppose to be shared between the academic and non-academic staff, but the University went ahead to disburse the money arbitrarily to academic and non-academic staff.
According to him, “we have written about 13 letters over this matter, and that’s what the processes are, we declared an industrial dispute with this University on the 19th, June, 2015, we forwarded the letter to them, they never acted.
“We wrote several reminders over these issues, we met with them, they agreed that we had a point and that they were going to address the issues, at the time they said they were going to address the issues, they never did. ASUU is a Union of procedures. Once this issue couldn’t be resolved between us and management, we took it to our zone, that is the procedure of ASUU.
“Our Zone on two occasions referred us back to discuss with management, to see if management can to solve these problems, but they never did. We took it to NEC after the Zone hard intervened, without any result, but NEC still returned our matter back to the zone, urging the zone to go back and intervene.
“Zone came back, met with the management of the University on the 6th, August, 2015, that was when they gave us 28th, August, 2015 to settle our issues, they never did. Despite all these efforts, they management never did. It is also important to note that despite the fact that this has been on since 2013, it was on 19th, June, 2015, that we declared an industrial dispute with the University”, he stressed
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