UNIABUJA VC to ASUU: We won’t allow you cripple university

In a strike called by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the management of the University of Abuja has said academic and administrative activities on campus would go on unhindered.

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Rising from a meeting with the provost, deans, directors, and heads of academic departments, the vice chancellor, Professor Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah, described the strike by the ASUU chapter of the university as divisive and unnecessary, vowing that the management would never allow the university to be crippled again.

Acting Director, Information and University Relations, Dr. Habib Yakoob, in a statement on Friday in Abuja, affirmed that the ongoing examination has been stopped while other academic and administrative activities are ongoing despite the strike announcement by the University of Abuja chapter of ASUU.

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The Vice-Chancellor said: “As far as the management of the university is concerned, this institution is not on strike. Some people said they had declared a strike, but all of us, with the management, have decided that our normal activities at the university must go on.

“Our exam is going on, Senate meetings will continue, everything we do as a university will continue, and our calendar will not be disrupted by the grace of God any longer.

“It is wrong to cripple the university over issues that are merely sentimental, some of which we have dialogued over and resolved. We are prepared not to allow this disruption again.”

Na’Allah debunked all the reported allegations of the Union, which it claimed informed its declaration of an indefinite strike.

“Take, for instance, the advertisement for the position of vice chancellor; we are not the only university that has advertised,” he said.

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“We had the support and approval of the government. The advertisement was done by the Minister of Education; all I did as vice chancellor was to request and ask for what was next, and they decided this is what we must do.

“And if you look at the advertisement from the beginning, this fact is very clear. It is only that they had to send it to us for execution, that’s all.”

He also described the Union’s allegations of illegal recruitment, promotion, delay in the election of deanship, and microfinance bank establishment as unfounded, saying that the University had followed due process in all of these matters and ensured that relevant institutions concerned with oversights were contacted.

While speaking specifically about the election of deans and the establishment of the microfinance bank, he noted that the election timetable had long been publicised and four elections of deans had been conducted so far, while the university management had invested over N200 million in the proposed microfinance bank over the ASUU’s N4 million, before the union wrote directly to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to stop granting the licence for our operation instead of interacting with the board of the bank about whatever their requests were.

Nallah said, “The bank is purely a business outfit and a service to our local and indigenous community, including market men and women, farmers, and small and middle-scale business people.”

The vice chancellor said his administration had been working hard to develop the university and would not fold its arms and allow a group of people to destabilise its calendar.

“For over four years, our goal has been to lift this university much higher than it was, and this we have succeeded in doing by taking our academic and infrastructural developments to a world-class level, developing an integrated portal that ensured transparency and ease of accessing results, branding the university, introducing foreign languages, introducing new faculties, and several departments, among numerous achievements.”