The Joint Action Committee (JAC)of the Non Academic Staff Union of educational and associated institutions and the senior staff of Nigerian universities (SSANU) have developed and presented a new payment platform to the federal government.
The platform, which has been named university peculiar personnel and payroll system (U3PS), was presented to Adamu Adamu, Education Minister, in his office in Abuja on Tuesday.
The unions like the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) had rejected the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), introduced by the federal government for the payment of workers’ salaries. But while ASUU had come up with the University Transparency Accountability System (UTAS), the JAC of SSANU and NASU opted to devlop U3PS.
Mohammed Ibrahim, president, SSANU, while presenting the platform to the Minister, said it serves as an alternative to IPPIS through which all personnel in the university system will be paid.
According to him, IPPIS was full of inconsistencies “so much that our members could no longer bear and were on our nerves.”
“We believe then that since the government said IPPIS was going to be used to fight corruption we should join hands with the government to give IPPIS a trial and we went through IPPIS from the first month to second and third, to fourth and there about it was full of inconsistencies.”
“We looked within us and found out that we have technical and ICT experts that can help us develop an alternative to IPPIS.”
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“We believe that all the inconsistencies in the IPPIS will be resolved and this platform is made in such a way that it will accommodate all the stakeholders in the university system, academic, non-teaching staff, and academic technologist, it takes care of every person in the system,” he added.
In response, the minister congratulated the unions for developing the platform and informed that both U3PS and UTAS developed by ASUU will be adopted to improve IPPIS.
Adamu expressed his wish that the platforms could have been developed earlier to save the country the money spent on IPPIS. He said, “I congratulate you for this, the government is always open to new ideas.”
“I congratulate Nigerian intellectuals who can do this, because I know IPPIS is being paid a large sum of money and probably in foreign exchange. So we have experts in our institutions who could do this, I don’t know why they never did it before.
” I am not an expert or know if this is workable or better than the provided by ASUU, but what I know is that in the end, we will probably have to accept a situation where your own may have some edge in a particular area, and UTAS may have an edge in another area and these two can be used to make IPPIS better.”
The minister, however, urged the unions to articulate the inconsistencies with IPPIS “because whether your own is accepted or any other is, there is need for us to know how things go wrong. When IPPIS started, it was working very well but now everybody is complaining including those running it. So please articulate these anomalies and inconsistencies and things that will make it better,” Adamu said.
He also urged the committee to present the platform to the ministry of finance, adding that the National Information Technology Development Agency will carry out an integrity test on the platform before other action.
