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Senate President, Lawan faults FG as Senate tackles govt, ASUU logjam
The President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan, has berated the Federal Government for signing an unrealistic agreement with the Academic Staff Union of Universities.
He said, “When we negotiate, we must negotiate in such a manner that the final product will be implementable.
“This is to say that we have to accommodate each other with government doing what it is supposed to do and ASUU, being the body of our lecturers, stands to protect its members.”
Lawan said these on Monday when ASUU presented its alternative payroll system, the University Transparency and Accountability Solution, to the Senate.
He also pleaded with the ASUU not to be too rigid in its demands in order to move the country forward.
He said, “I am sure that we need to review some of the items on the agreements.
“We cannot have an agreement signed in 2009 and still think this is the only way we can deal with it.
“We should be able to have a look at the agreements signed and see at this time whether or not some of the issues are really practicable at all.”
The President of ASUU, Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi, who addressed journalists after a three-hour closed-door session with the leadership of the Senate, said the visit was a follow up to the earlier one held between ASUU and the Senate in October 2019 to find a way out of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System crisis.
The university teachers had told the Senate leadership at the October meeting that ASUU would design an alternative to the IPPIS, which would accommodate the peculiarity of the university system.
Ogunyemi said the UTAS was a home-grown system that would end the eight-month industrial action by ASUU if embraced by the Federal Government.
He said, “We had a positive meeting which was cordial and we are going to continue from there. We will still meet again to continue from where we stopped.
“We have developed what we call University Transparency and Accountability Solution. We have presented it to the Senate today and the Senate President commended it.
“We are going to present the platform to other stakeholders. UTAS is home grown while IPPIS is foreign.
“We have shown that we are inventors, we are creators of software and we are also capable of doing what our colleagues are doing in other parts of the world.”
Ogunyemi said ASUU had never shifted from its position to oppose the IPPIS, which would not benefit his members.
In his remarks before the closed session, the Senate President said the meeting was to explore how the Senate and indeed the National Assembly could resolve the outstanding issues.
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