By John Ikani
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has extended its ongoing strike by another eight weeks, accusing the Nigerian Government of insensitivity and peddling lies.
The decision to extend the strike was taken at the union’s National Executive Council (NEC) meeting held at the University of Abuja on Sunday night.
A member of the union, who spoke to newsmen on condition of anonymity, said the two months is to give the Federal Government space to meet their demands.
ASUU had on February 14, embarked on a one month warning strike over the Federal Government’s inability to meet the demands the two parties entered into in previous times.
The source said: “Yes, we have extended the strike by eight weeks pending when the Nigerian government would find the university system worthy of the desired attention. A statement is currently being drafted to that effect. We will make it available soon.”
A wide range of issues for which ASUU members are demanding resolutions for include: non-implementation of the 2009 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) reached with it; salary shortfall caused by the introduction of IPPIS; revitalisation of universities across the country, among others.
On UTAS
The union had on Sunday slammed the Government over its recent proclamation that University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) has failed the integrity test.
It was angered by the claim of the Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa, who on Wednesday at the State House said UTAS failed three integrity tests of user acceptance, vulnerability and stress, that were conducted by his agency.
“We did all these three tests with them and the system couldn’t pass. We wrote the reports and submitted it back to the honourable minister, which he forwarded to all relevant institutions, including ASUU. As we speak now, ASUU is working, trying to fix all the issues we highlighted with the system and we will review it again. But that is just one half of the story,” Mr Inuwa said.
But ASUU insisted that UTAS scored both 85 and 77 per cent, which it noted are “high class grades in any known evaluation system”.
ASUU also threatened that it would demand that the initial NITDA Technical Report on UTAS, where it scored 85 per cent in User Acceptance Test (UAT) be made public if it (NITDA) continues to insist that UTAS failed the integrity tests.
ASUU said that NITDA carried out the first integrity test on August 10, 2021, at the NUC headquarters, noting that relevant government agencies and all the end-users in the university system were present.
The union added that all accepted UTAS as a suitable solution for salary payment in Nigerian universities.
ASUU also said; “However, in a curious twist of submission, the NITDA Technical Team, after conducting a comprehensive functionality test came out to say that out of 687 test cases, 529 cases were satisfactory, 156 cases queried, and 2 cases were cautioned.
“Taking this report on its face value, the percentage score is 77%. The question that arises from this is, can 77% in any known fair evaluation system be categorised as failure?”
Speaking further, he said NITDA “in their desperation to justify their false assertions, threw up issues such as Data centre and hosting of UTAS software which are clearly outside the rubrics of ASUU’s responsibilities in the deployment of UTAS.”
