By Cross Udo, Abuja
Yesterday, the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) told President Bola Tinubu that he should be aware that his government has saboteurs bent on frustrating his good intentions.
SSANU also told the government that its members were not enslaved and should be paid when they fulfilled their contractual obligations. It added that they would continue to agitate and down tools if the government did not respond positively to their agitations.
The National President of SSANU, Comrade Mohammed Ibrahim, stated the above in his remarks at the 47th National Executive Council, NEC, union meeting at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) in Ondo State.
Recall that President Tinubu had recently directed that university workers who were on a prolonged strike in 2022 and were not paid by Muhammadu Buhari’s administration during the strike should be paid four months of the withheld salaries.
While members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have been paid for the four months, the non-teaching staff, including SSANU, have not received anything, a development that threatens industrial harmony in public universities.
In his remarks, Ibrahim urged President Tinubu to purge his administration of saboteurs and replace them with people who are ready to help him deliver on his mandate.
He said, “The President should understand that he has saboteurs in his government. They need to be helping him and the powers of the President, and what will make him responsible and responsive to Nigerians is to hire and fire and work with people who can deliver.
“You cannot continue to keep a cabal within the system. And if you say one thing tomorrow, it’s sabotaged. As a union, we raise our voices that presidential pronouncements must be matched with action. We cannot continue to celebrate and clap over speeches. What we want is action.
“Workers in the universities deserve the best. We churn out young men and women to work in industry, to work for government, and to be on their own. And I have the course to say that if you spend well on education, you will spend less on insecurity, health challenges, and other issues. But when you don’t spend on education, you will continue to spend on defense, insecurity, and other frivolities.
“So people should understand, and our leaders should know that governance is not child’s play. If you’re a leader, you must be responsive. We have, of course, also to complain about how our state universities are treated.”
The SSANU President said his members are not enslaved and can never be, adding that they have a calling and a contract with the government and their employers to execute whatever they have agreed to do.
He said, “We do the work that we do. If we work and you don’t pay (us), we agitate. If we agitate and you don’t respond, we must go on strike because it’s lawful, within the ambit of the law, and within our rights.”
He said that the Nigerian economy is in bad shape, which has resulted in the currency being valueless.
“Our economy has wholly nosedived. Our currency has become valueless, as our Naira can no longer be respected, even within Nigeria. Therefore, we are having some of the most significant challenges of having to feed ourselves and our families and meet the domestic needs and challenges within our families.
“Therefore, as a union, we are joining the progressives in this country. We call on our leaders to put on their thinking caps. We cannot continue to do something the same way and expect a different result. This country’s history clearly shows that yesterday is always better. And this is not how it should be.
“As university workers, we have continuously lamented that funding remains the panacea to the operations of any citadel of learning. You cannot establish a university and then starve it of funds. Education is not only a social service, but it is a service that requires continuous expenditure, especially at the level of tertiary education. Universities must be given money to operate.
“To the crux of the matter, we are all witnesses to the recent, most unfortunate development that has occurred to workers in the federal universities. Recall that on March 27 (2022), all our public institutions, both state and federal, went on strike because of the deadlock we had in the discussions with the government. And we declared a trade dispute for two months running. Nobody even cared to call us for any discussion until when they saw that it was serious. That was when we discussed with the government.
“And as gentlemen, as people who believe miracles can happen, we thought we should consider them. We sat with them, negotiated and agreed, and signed documents, including the non-victimisation clause. But what did we get in the end? Our salaries were stopped, and that government was left with that draconian action.
“We welcomed this new government on May 29. The President displayed leadership by playing the role of a father by waiving the crisis that we had on the issue of our four months’ salaries. This was in October 2023. One month later, we had an engagement with the Minister of Education and his lieutenants.
“We discussed it, and he convinced us that the waiver and the approval were for all tertiary education unions at the federal level. And we left that meeting happy, and we reported, and it was in the press. November, December, January, February. What did we get at the end of the day? We now find that all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
