COLLEGES OF EDUCATION BEGINS NATIONWIDE STRIKE TODAY

Members of the Colleges of Education Academic Staff Union (COEASU) have declared full industrial action nationwide effective from today. COEASU made this known yesterday in a letter addressed to the Supervising Minister of Education, Nyesom Wike, a copy of which was made
available to National Mirror.
COEASU’s grievances include infrastructural decay in collleges of education, poor funding, nonimplementation of the 2010 FG-COEASU agreement, poor conditions of service, brain drain and alleged illegal imposition of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) on its members.
The association stated in a letter signed by its National President, Asagha Nkoro and Ogirima, that the government directive to National Commission for Colleges of Education to impose the IPPIS on colleges without recourse to earlier meetings by concerned parties was unsuitable.
Part of the letter reads: “While the government held series of talks with the union leadership between September and December 2013, evidence abound that government does not wish to keep her side of the bargain in meeting the understanding reached at such meetings.
“This, without equivocation, is unacceptable to our union given the peculiar high nuisance and volatile nature of the colleges of education sector.
“More so, but for the constitution and inauguration of the Needs Assessment Committee, government merely paid lip services to all other issues, highlighted in our earlier correspondences”.
Other complaints by the associations against the government are: refusal to fund the Peculiar and Responsibility Allowances as obtainable in Earned Allowances of the universities; refusal to implement the migration of lower cadres as obtainable in polytechnics; and non-accreditation of programmes of the colleges of education among others.
In compliance with the resolution of its Expanded National Executive Council Meeting, COEASU said its members had been directed to resume a full scale strike action suspended earlier this year, “unless and until government meets the demands.