We demanded N87bn, not N92bn - ASUU

THE Academic Staff Union of Universities on
Wednesday faulted the statement credited to
the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-
Iweala, that the union demanded for N92bn,
describing the claim as false.
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, 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.
He said, the N87bn was a compromise made
by ASUU to scale down from 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.''