Asuu Slams Okonjo Iweala; We demanded N87b, not N92b.

THE Academic Staff Union of Universities on Wednesday faulted the statement credited to the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala, that the union demanded for N92bn, describing the claim  as false. ASUU said it never demanded such amount as earned allowances in the 2009 agreement it reached with the Federal Government. Okonjo-Iweala had on Wednesday in Minna, said  the Federal Government couldn’t meet the N92bn allowances as demanded by ASUU. The univerisity lecturers, in a statement by the University of Ibadan  branch chairman, Dr. Olusegun Ajiboye, described the amount mentioned by the minister as “a the imagination of the minister.” Ajiboye explained that the earned allowances, the union and the governemnt calculated in the 2009 agreement, amounted to N87b, which covered allowances for three and half years for the lecturers in the nation’s universities. He said, the N87bn was a compromise made by ASUU to scale down from N127bn. He added that the N87bn was computed based on 15 per cent of the yearly recurrent expenditures of some nation’s universities. The statement stated, “I want Nigerians to ask the minister where she got her figure of N92bn from. There was never a time that ASUU made a demand that is up to N92bn. I think the N92bn is just the imagination of the minister.                         “But that is not to say that this government did not enter into an agreement with us. This is a government that signed an agreement with us on January 24, 2012 to the effect that they would inject N100bn as funding into the universities in the first one  month and that before the end of 2012, they would inject another N300bn.’’