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George Onyejiuwa,Owerri
The Owerri zonal leadership of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has said that the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) is fraud-prone and dismissed the posturing of the Federal Government that it is a tool against corruption as not true.
This is even as it said that the the claims by the Minister for Finance and National Planning, Hajia Zaina Shamsuna Ahmed that IPPIS had flushed out 70,000 ghost workers from the payroll of the Federal Government was not true.
The Owerri zonal coordinator of ASUU, Comrade Uzo Onyebinama who stated this at a press conference at the FUTO ASUU secretariat, regretted that the Federal government had wilfully reneged on agreements it freely entered into with the union, which occasioned the ongoing two-week warning strike that commenced March 9, 2020.
Onyebinama said: “The warning strike is an attempt by the union to draw attention to the breach of the 2019 Memorandum of Action (MoA) by the Federal Government and to call on all men of goodwill to prevail on the government to honour its agreement in order to forestall a major crisis in our University system.”
He maintained that the issues in the 2019 MOU include the release of outstanding balances of the Revitalization Fund for Universities, constitution of Visitation Panels to Federal Universities, payment of of outstanding arrears of earned academic allowances as well as mainstreaming of the earned academic allowances into the Universities’ budgets, among other things.
He further noted that, “the futile attempt by agents of the Federal Government to blackmail the union over the resistance to IPPIS, on the guise that IPPIS is anti-corruption oriented is scandalous. IPPIS as it is, is pro-corruption. In addition to its manifest shortcomings in addressing the peculiarities of the university system, its violation of the autonomy and localisation of our universities; it does not border on transparency and accountability.”
ASUU observed that a performance audit of IPPIS by the office of the Auditor-General of the Federation indicated a myriad of shortcomings that make IPPIS prone to ‘manipulation at will’ by the system operators.
