Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities says saboteurs in the administration of President Bola Tinubu are bent on frustrating his good intentions.
SSANU also said that its members are not slaves and should be paid when they fulfill their contractual obligations, adding that they will continue to agitate and down tools if there is no positive response from the government on their agitations.
SSANU National President, Comrade Mohammed Ibrahim, stated this at the 47th National Executive Council meeting of the union at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, FUTA, Ondo State.
Recently, Tinubu directed that university workers who were on a prolonged strike in 2022 and were not paid by the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari within the period of the strike should be paid four months of the withheld salaries.
But while members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities have been paid the four months of the eight months withheld salaries, the non-teaching staff, including SSANU have not received anything, a development that is threatening industrial harmony in the public universities.
The SSANU president urged Tinubu to purge his administration of saboteurs and replace them with people ready to help him deliver on his mandate.
He said, “The President should understand that he has saboteurs in his government. They are not helping him and the powers of the President and what will make him responsible and responsive to Nigerians is to hire and fire, work with people who can deliver.
“You cannot continue to keep cabal within the system. And you say one thing tomorrow it’s sabotaged. As a union, we raise our voices that presidential pronouncements must be matched with action. We cannot continue to celebrate and clap over speeches. What we want is action.
“Workers in the universities deserve the best. We churn out young men and women to work in the industry to work for the government to be on their own. And I have the course to say that if you spend well on education, you will spend less on insecurity, you will spend less on health challenges, you will spend less on other issues. But when you don’t spend on education, you will continue to spend on defense on insecurity and other frivolities.
“So people should understand and our leaders should know that governance is not a child’s play. If you’re a leader you must be responsive. We have course also to complain about how our state universities are treated.”
The SSANU President said his members are not slaves and can never be, adding that they have a calling and a contract with government and their employers to execute whatever they have agreed to do.
He said, “We do the work that we do. If we work and you don’t pay (us), we agitate. If we agitate and you don’t respond, we must go on strike because it’s lawful and it’s within the ambit of the law and within our rights.”