ASUU strike update today, Monday, March 14

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has accused the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) of peddling lies.

The president of ASUU, Emmanuel Osodeke, made this claim in a statement after the National Executive Council (NEC) meeting on Sunday.

He warned the DG, NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa, to desist from making comments that could jeopardise the joint ongoing testing of UTAS between the NITDA Technical Team and the union.

The union also threatened that it would demand that the initial NITDA Technical Report on UTAS, where it scored 85 per cent in User Acceptance Test (UAT) be made public if it (NITDA) continues to insist that UTAS failed the integrity tests.

Being one of the contending issues that necessitated the ongoing ASUU strike, UTAS has sparked more conflict between the union and the Nigerian government over a recent disclosure that it failed ‘integrity tests’.

The NITDA boss had said UTAS failed three integrity tests – user acceptance test, vulnerability test, and stress test, which were conducted by his agency.

He said: “We did all these three tests with them and the system couldn’t pass. We wrote the reports and submitted them back to the honourable minister, which he forwarded to all relevant institutions, including ASUU. As we speak now, ASUU is working, trying to fix all the issues we highlighted with the system and we will review it again. But that is just one half of the story.”

But ASUU has insisted that UTAS scored both 85 and 77 per cent, which are “high class grades in any known evaluation system”.

Mr Osodeke, explaining further in the statement, stated that NITDA carried out the first integrity test on August 10, 2021, in NUC where relevant government agencies and all the end-users in the University system were present. He said all accepted UTAS as a suitable solution for salary payment in Nigerian universities.

“However, in a curious twist of submission, the NITDA Technical Team, after conducting a comprehensive functionality test came out to say that out of 687 test cases, 529 cases were satisfactory, 156 cases queried, and 2 cases were cautioned.”