The Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Sonny Echono, says the ASUU strike would have come to an end but for one unresolved issue.
The Punch quoted Echono as stating this Sunday in Abuja.
He stated that President Muhammadu Buhari was very concerned about the prolonged ASUU strike, describing it as “unnecessary”.
According to him, there were other ways of getting things done.
Echono added, “There’s a shared acceptance of so many of the issues and we are at a point that very quickly and soon, it will be resolved. There’s only one issue in contention, really. The other issues have either been resolved or there have been some kind of compromise that worked out.
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“We believe that reason will prevail and the overall national interest will be the guiding principle in coming to a quick resolution. I can assure you that work is going on assiduously in this.
“Only two days ago, the ASUU executives were at the Ministry to meet with the Minister for certain consultations and we felt we needed to tell them exactly what our positions are.
“We will look at the overall interest of the Nigerian people. We know that we also operate in a context of government playing out different segments even in the University setting.
“We have four different unions making demands and we have to balance this. We understand the peculiarities of ASUU and we believe the members are patriotic enough to know when to call it quits and what to call a compromise.”
Recall that ASUU embarked on the ongoing strike on March 24, 2020, over the Federal Government’s insistence on the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) which the union rejected and failure to keep to the terms of a 2009 Agreement.
Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, said on Friday that Federal Government would be holding more negotiations with the Academic Union of Universities (ASUU) next week.
However, he said FG would be forced to explore other options if the negotiation’s fail.
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