Lecturers at the University of Port Harcourt, have expressed dissenting positions over the two-week warning strike declared by the National Executive Council of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).
While ASUU members in UNIPORT said they have joined the nation-wide warning strike, its counterparts under the auspices of the Congress of Nigerian Universities Academics (CONUA) assured students of the institution that academic activities would not be disrupted.
Chairman of ASUU in UNIPORT, Dr Austin Sado who confirmed the decision of the lecturers to join the strike to newsmen in Port Harcourt after an emergency congress meeting said all academic activities in the institution had been halted as a result of the strike.
Sado said the decision was in accordance with the directives of its national leadership which declared the two weeks warning strike, saying, “The branch (UNIPORT) has therefore, written a notification to the university, to inform the university of withdrawal of service.
“Our members will not be available for two weeks. Our members will not be available for meetings, they will not be available for supervision of projects, they will not be available for lectures, and neither will they be available for examinations.
“At the expiration of two weeks, the situation will be reevaluated and actions according to the exigencies of the time will be determined,” he said, noting that members of the union decided to embark on the strike after the federal government defaulted on promises to implement key ingredients of the agreements it reached with ASUU in 2019,” Sado stated.
But in a swift reaction, CONUA Coordinator in UNIPORT, Dr Ovunda Ihunwo said CONUA had over 800 of the 1, 200 lecturers in the university that had enrolled for the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information (IPPIS), insisting that the industrial action by ASUU would not affect academic activities because its members (CONUA) are not on strike.
Ovunda said: “Those who are paid will be working. So if you take the statistics, I am using UNIPORT now, we are about 1, 200 lecturers or thereabout. We have 871 who are on IPPIS. That is above 60 per cent of the entire lecturers.
“It will not hamper academic activities. At least we can make adjustments where necessary to make sure that students don’t lose out unnecessarily on anything while we are still hoping and appealing to our colleagues who are not on IPPIS to learn how to obey their employers.”

Dennis Naku