Following the decision of the Federal Government to stop salaries of lecturers who have not enrolled in the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, the Academic Staff Union of Universities has hinted on a nationwide strike. This was revealed when ASUU held its National Executive Council meeting at the Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Enugu, on Saturday and Sunday, and issues such as the IPPIS and the Federal Government’s failure to honour the 2009 agreements were discussed.
February salaries ofFG workers, including university lecturers, who had registered on the IPPIS is due this week. However, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zanaib Ahmed, at a management retreat in Kano on Thursday, had said lecturers who did not enroll for the IPPIS would not be paid their February salaries. This followed the directive of the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), in October last year that all Federal Government workers enroll in the IPPIS to ensure transparency.
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However, recall that ASUU resisted the directive on the grounds that it negated the principle of autonomy of Universities. The union directed its members to shun government officials sent to universities between October 25 and November 7, 2019, for the purpose of enrolling workers in the IPPIS.
On Thursday, the finance minister said 55 per cent of ASUU members had registered for the IPPIS, saying, “the ones that have not are not getting their February salary.”
The Chairman of ASUU at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, Dr Christina Opata, said lecturers at the university were waiting for directives from the leadership of ASUU at the national level before embarking on strike, if their salaries were stopped.
According to the ASUU branch chairman, the integrated payroll system is defective and corrupt. She said, “The Federal Government has not told Nigerians the truth about what it wants to achieve through the IPPIS because the IPPIS is an embodiment of corruption itself. There is evidence to prove that many people are on the payroll under IPPIS yet they are not working anywhere. If they are sincere they should decentralise it.
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“Each university should have desk officers so that anytime somebody has a complaint, it doesn’t require the person going to Abuja; you walk over to the desk officer in your university and put up your complaint. But as it is now, if you go to Abuja you will hire a hotel and you may spend three, four days without meeting the officer in charge. These are the things that people have been pointing out but they don’t want to understand it that way.
“They say they want a centralised system of payment as if those who are there are the saints of society. But whatever it is, our own concern, the concern of ASUU is that the IPPIS is not corrupt-free. You say you want software that can control everything about Nigeria, yet the software is not domiciled and controlled by Nigeria. It is controlled by a foreign country. The software that they are using is that of the Apple domiciled in the United States of America which means every information about Nigeria is to be managed by the US.”
The Chairman of ASUU, University of Ibadan, Prof. Ayoola Akinwole, when asked what ASUU would do if the Federal Government failed to pay February salaries, said the union would respond appropriately when February salaries were paid.