By Agboola Bayo
Ibadan
Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) yesterday declared that the federal government presently owes public universities N660 billion Needs Assessment Intervention Fund.
ASUU zonal coordinator for Ibadan Zone and chairman University of Ibadan chapter of the union, Professor Segun Ajiboye, said this in Ibadan during a chat with journalists.
Ajiboye stressed that the N600 million was part of the unpaid intervention fund for the year 2014 (N220billion), 2015 (N220billion) and 2016 (N220billion) which was part of the N1.3trillion intervention FGN/ASUU agreement signed in 2013.
Speaking further, the. ASUU coordinator lamented that President Muhammadu Buhari did not mention any issue relating to how the federal government will fulfill its agreements reached with ASUU, saying, “government is owing academic staff in the public universities more than N200 billion arrears of earned allowances for the 2014 and 2015 academic years”.
Ajiboye reminded the President Buhari-led federal government that the 2009 agreement which was due for a review in 2012 has not been addressed by the federal government despite that ASUU had written severally to the government on the need to start the renegotiation of the agreement to reflect modern and contemporary realities.
“When you consider the agreed intervention fund in 2013, it was N1.3trillion but has the federal government kept to that promise? They only released N200billion in 2013 after the six months strike and since then nothing has been injected.
“Unfortunately, it is the same government agents that will be saying Nigerian universities are lowly ranked globally without doing the needful to make the universities meet global standard. This involves injecting enough funds into the tertiary education system, if the funds are released, our universities will be able to compete when the necessary infrastructure is in place,” he said.