Contrary to the claims of the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala that the Academic Staff Union of Universities demanded for N92bn, the university lecturers’ body has come out to correct her, saying what they asked for is N5bn less than what she claimed.
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, however, 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, which was a compromise made by the union from the original amount of 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.’’