According to reports, the Academic Staff Union of Universities is the umbrella organization through which the Federal Government has started paying academics’ salaries that have been withheld.
Prof. Gbolahan Bolarin, the chairperson of ASUU at the Federal University of Technology, Minna, acknowledged the development on official records, stating that it is factual.
The money has begun to come in. Four of the eight months that the ASUU withheld the pay of its employees were released, as approved by President Bola Tinubu Tinubu in October 2023.
The salaries were withheld when the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari invoked a ‘No Work, No Pay policy’ against some university-based unions that embarked on a strike that lasted eight months in 2022.
According to a recent statement by Tahir Mamman, the minister of education, the government has raised the pay of university employees by 35%.
The minister added that by removing universities from the Integrated Payment and Payroll Information System, the government has given them liberty.
He also mentioned that recruiting and filling positions at universities no longer require a waiver. According to Mamman, these decisions were arrived at after informal discussions with the unions headquartered in the post-secondary educational institutions.