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The Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities (CVCNU) has said for the Federal Government to apply for no work, no pay policy to the university lecturers, who reluctantly suspended their eight months of industrial action and just returned to the classrooms on the basis of trust is a bad omen for the system.
The Secretary-General of the committee, Prof Yakubu Ochefu, gave this position in an exclusive interview with Tribune Online at the weekend.
He said it was only after the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, intervened and brokered peace between the Federal Government and ASUU leadership over their protracted crisis that ASUU agreed to go back to work in good faith.
He said it is not now that the lecturers are back in the classrooms and commenced work that the government would now want to play pranks on them.
He said in the first instance, ASUU has never trusted the government nor its agents in fulfilling promises in the past and that now with the half payment of salaries to them has reconfirmed their worries to trust the government or people making decisions on its behalf.
Prof Ochefu explained that even though the labour law is clear and nobody is contending against the no work, no pay policy, the peculiarity of the academic environment particularly the university system work against such policy.
He said this is simply because the academic calendar and coursework cannot be jumped over and somebody must have to do the work at any time and they are the lecturers.
Explaining this, he said now that lecturers have resumed academic activities, they must have to start from where they had stopped before the strike, finishing their coursework, conduct examinations if they had not done so before they embarked on strike and also do the markings of scripts and recordings and all that,
He said since that is the way things are done in the academic environment, implementing no work, no pay policy would certainly be a difficult thing, and hence, they deserve their wages in full.
“So, the best way out is for government to find an administrative solution around the policy and not be unnecessarily rigid about it so that our public university system will continue to run,” he said.
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