The Academic Staff Union of University (ASUU) yesterday called a National Executive Council (NEC) meeting at its national secretariat at the University of Abuja (UniAbuja) main campus to evaluate the response of the Federal Government to its demands.
The union is expected to use the meeting to decide on whether to declare an indefinite strike at the end of its one-month warning strike declared on February 14, at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), or call it off.
ASUU President, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, confirmed the meeting to The Nation but refused to give details.
Despite a series of meetings with the Federal Government team, led by Labour and Employment Minister Chris Ngige, the union and the government have not agreed on a resolution over the agreements between them.
Osodeke had said what the government offered during their meetings were mere promises, which ASUU members were not convinced would be implemented.
Also, ASUU has said the User Acceptance Test (UAT) and Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Test (VAPT) on the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) is still ongoing.
In a statement by Prof. Osodeke, the union urged the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa, to stop making comments that could jeopardise the ongoing joint testing of UTAS between the agency’s Technical Team and the union’s officials.
The union warned that if the DG continued to make comments on UTAS, it would have no choice but to demand that the NITDA Technical Report on UTAS and ASUU’s response be made public in order to shed more light on the ongoing controversies without further waste of time.
The statement reads: “The one-month roll-over strike declared by our union on February 14, 2022, has entered the fourth week. During this period, we have been having engagements with the government over the contending issues that necessitated the action.
“One of the contending issues is the deployment of UTAS, which is a robust software created by ASUU Technical Group to manage personnel and payroll in the university system.
“The Federal Government had referred UTAS to NITDA to conduct UAT and VAPT prior to the final deployment. The process, which commenced on Thursday, March 3, 2022, is still ongoing.
“This statement is necessitated by the need for ASUU to put the records straight on the grounds already covered in our patriotic struggle to get the government to deploy UTAS as a suitable solution for salary payment in our university system…”
THE NATION
