The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has declared support for the Academic Staff Union of Universities’s decision to embark on an indefinite strike.
ASUU commenced an indefinite strike action across the nation beginning Sunday, August 13(http://dailypost.ng/2017/08/14/asuu-begins-indefinite-strike/).
NLC’s General Secretary, Dr Peter Ozo-Eson, in an interview with Punch, stated that all employers including the government, had a responsibility to honour agreements reached with workers.
Ozo-Eson was part of the team that negotiated the 2009 agreement on the side of ASUU and said the government had refused to implement the agreement, because children of the political class school abroad.
“When an employer enters into a collective bargaining agreement, it is expected that both parties will honour the terms of the agreement. The 2009 agreement was entered into. Incidentally, I was a member of the negotiating team.
“I negotiated that agreement on the ASUU side and it took a long time for a decision to be reached. Initially, government backed away, then it reconstituted and gave authority to the Onosode committee and at the end, the agreement was signed, but government has failed to fully implement it.
“In 2013, when there was a problem, the NLC had to broker the condition that led to the signing of the MoU. Government again has reneged on its own side of the bargain. So when we say ASUU has gone on strike so many times, we need to put it in perspective to say government has consistently failed to honour its own side of the bargain.
“They (government) do this so brazenly and so easily because most of their children do not attend universities here. They are abroad. And that is where the citizens come in. Citizens must be able to hold these people accountable by insisting that their own children have a right to uninterrupted education too and therefore force government to do what is correct so that education can be without interruption,” he said.
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