The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has insisted that the adoption of the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) is critical to the resolution of the ongoing nationwide strike by the union.
ASUU contended that the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) had been decisively proven to be a porous and easily compromised payment platform as well as ineffective in curtailing waste of resources.
The chairman of ASUU at the Federal University (FUO), Otuoke, Socrates Ebo, stated this in a statement he issued to journalists in Yenagoa on Saturday.
According to him, the IPPIS had rather been allegedly “used to pad payrolls and used to effect all manner of fraudulent deductions from workers’ salaries. No lecturer under IPPIS can say for certain what his salary is.”
Ebo said, “What we find queer is the insistence of some government officials on the use of IPPIS when it is proven to be compromised and corruption-prone.
“UTAS has been designed to be corruption-proof. Why would government not be interested in a payment platform that is cheap, 100% corruption-proof and 100% indigenous?”
He said that claims of savings by IPPIS were fraudulent as the platform arbitrarily cut workers’ legitimate salaries to cover its alleged heavily corrupt and inefficient tracks to create the false impression of efficiency and savings.
Ebo further said, “If IPPIS was corruption-proof, how would it be possible for a government accountant to loot N80billion plus N70billion? How could such huge sums disappear under any serious payment platform?
“The recently paid minimum wage arrears is a case study. So many persons have not been paid. In my (ASUU-FUO) branch alone, 40 persons have not been paid. While the Minister of Labour thinks that we were paid 3 years arrears, what we received were mere 9 months without any clear template for payment.
“Nobody knows what they are entitled to, nobody can ask questions to anybody. Even the university bursars can’t explain how it was paid and what was paid. These are the monies IPPIS claims it is saving: people’s legitimate salaries blatantly stolen!
“We definitely can’t continue this way. The adoption of a transparent payment platform is critical in resolving the current impasse in the nation’s university system. UTAS has been proven to be a flawless payment platform but the deep-rooted culture of corruption in our government ethos is all out to frustrate its deployment.”
The ASUU-FUO chairman called on the government to be serious with education, recalling that in the 60s and 70s the country’s universities ranked high their peers and scholars all over the world were coming to teach and study.
“Today, our universities are so dead that even our politicians no longer believe in them. They now send their wards abroad for sane education. Yet these are the people killing education in the country. ASUU is the only bastion of defence for quality education in this country.
“Unfortunately when you destroy education you also destroy healthcare. Doctors are taught new procedures and skills in the universities, not at Aso Rock Clinic or National Assembly. Eventually, everyone gets sick and everyone eventually suffers the consequences of the dearth of educational infrastructure,” he added.
