ASUU Members Agreed To Suspend Strike By December 9th – Ngige Reveals.

Nigeria’s Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige has revealed that the Federal Government has met the demands of ASUU and the union agreed to call off its strike by December 9.

Ngige in a statement released through his media on Tuesday, titled, ‘We have kept our promises to ASUU-FG’ disclosed that ASUU at the last meeting agreed to call off the nine-month-old strike before December 9.

“The truth of the matter is that a ‘gentleman agreement’ was reached at the last meeting in which ASUU agreed to call off the strike before December 9, 2020, and the Minister, in turn, agreed that once the strike is called off, he would get a presidential waiver for ASUU to be paid the remainder of their salaries on or before December 9,” Ngige stated.

The minister further stated that he had reached out to the Minister of Education on getting a waiver on the issue of ‘No Work, No Pay’ under section 43 of the Trade Disputes Act.

The minister said it is baseless for ASUU to claim it cannot go back to school on an empty stomach while the government had on compassionate grounds paid five months salaries out of the nine months they had been on strike.

“ASUU is fully aware of the principle of No Work, No Pay of section 43 of the Trade Disputes Act under which many unions like National Association of Residents Doctors in 2017 and Joint Health Sector Unions in 2018 among others, have lost salaries as a result of the strike,” he noted.

Ngige asked the university teachers to go back to work, pledging that the Ministers of Labour, Finance and Education would put up a memo to deal with the outstanding salaries for four months.

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