Taraba govt has to augment funding of its university –ASUU

Academic staff in your university have been on strike for the past three months, what really went wrong?In 2013, the national body of ASUU embarked on a strike which we joined as a result the government denied us of our five month salaries for embarking on the strike. We knew the relevance of that strike […]

Academic staff in your university have been on strike for the past three months, what really went wrong?
In 2013, the national body of ASUU embarked on a strike which we joined as a result the government denied us of our five month salaries for embarking on the strike. We knew the relevance of that strike because a young university such as ours cannot fully be catered for by the state government without the support of the federal government.
At the end, our university was gazetted amongst universities that will benefit from the federal government funding having taken part in the struggle.
After the federal government has fulfilled its own part of the agreement to the university, the state government being the proprietor of the university refused to fulfill its meager part which is not up to half a billion naira.
 We mounted pressure on the then acting governor Garba Umar who said there was not enough money to pay all the allowances at once. After negotiation, we came to term that government would be paying N100 million monthly beginning from September 2013 until the payment was completed. They made the first payment and we suspended our strike action.
Subsequently, the government refused to pay until the Supreme Court judgment removed Garba Umar from office and then Sani Danladi took over power as the acting governor.
 We related the earlier agreement and he told us he inherited empty treasury and needed time. After much pressure, he issued us N100 million cheque which bounced because there was no cash value to the cheque. The cheque was issued since March 31, and still lying in the bank because there is no cash value.
Our national body sent officials down to the state to meet with the SSG and permanent secretary over the cheque issue but to no avail. It was as result of that development that we embarked on the strike and still on it
The new administration is begging you to call off your strike and resume work, what is your reaction to such appeal?
We have met the SSG on two occasions for negotiation and all they are saying is that there is no money. What we are saying now is that the new government should at least add value to the cheque already issued to us. Then, we can meet with congress and appeal to congress to suspend strike while we give government time to pay up the remaining balance. We have presented our case to them since but we are yet to hear from them.
What is your take generally on the issue of funding as it concerns Taraba state university?
It is funding that has been the major problem all along and all issues are centred on poor funding. The funding of the university is very poor and some of these allowances we are agitating for are part of our salary components which have not been paid to us over the years. You know what it means for someone to be sacrificing part of his salary since 2009 and now you are asking them to go back to work without having money to pay.
If you minus all the TETFUND projects, there is nothing you would call a university here. University cannot be gotten on a platter of gold. University is capital intensive and now that the state has delved into, she has to fund it.
Now that the federal has come to our aid, the state government ought to have augmented by paying up its counterpart funding but has not been doing that. Apart from the N 100 million given by the state government so far, nothing has come to the university from the state, which is too bad.