ASUU Strike: JAMB Registrar Says ‘Very Hard Decisions’ Needed To Address Issues

Professor Ishaq Oloyede, Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), said unless the Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) take some hard decisions to address their differences once and for all, strikes by university lecturers may continue to linger.

Oloyede appealed to the government and striking lecturers to quickly resolve the issues to enable public university students who have been at home for about five months to return to school.

He made the appeal while monitoring the 2022 mop-up Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in Lagos on Saturday.

“I appeal to ASUU, I appeal to the government to please solve the problem so our children can go back to school.

“As far as I am concerned, even if ASUU calls off the strike, that will not prevent it from happening again.

“I believe that what we should do is to look at the system and take some very hard decisions.

“If we do not take such decisions, then we may be postponing the evil day,” Oloyede said.

The Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo, had on Friday asked parents to appeal to ASUU to call off the strike, saying “The nation cannot ground to a halt because we want to take care of the demands of ASUU.”

The union had on Monday extended its strike which commenced on February 14, 2022, by another four weeks.

It extended the industrial action by two months on March 14, to allow the government meet its demands which include the release of the revitalisation funds to universities, release of earned allowances to university lecturers, deployment of the University Transparency Accountability System for the payment of lecturers’ salaries and allowances, as well as the renegotiation of the ASUU-Federal Government 2009 agreement.