NASU, SSANU Present New Salary Payment Platform To FG

The Joint Action Committee of the Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU) and the Senior Staff of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) have presented a new payment platform to the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, through which they want their salaries to be paid.

However, Adamu has said that the platform will be subjected to an integrity test by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) before any action can be taken on it.

The new platform, which is called the University Peculiar Payroll Payment System (U3PS) was presented to the Minister during a meeting with officials of the tertiary institutions-based unions.

“The ministry and the government are always open to new ideas. I must also tell you that I am not an expert to know that this one is workable or better than what is already available or better than what is being proposed by ASUU, but what I know is in the end, we probably have to accept the situation and your own platform may have some edge in a particular area, UTAS may have an edge and then these two platforms can be used to make Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System better,” the Minister said at the event.

Also speaking, the SSANU President, Mohammed Ibrahim, said the platform is established such that it would work for all stakeholders within the university system.

Ibrahim also said they created the U3PS because the Unions could no longer use the FG’s IPPIS because it was full of inconsistencies.

“We joined hands with the government to give Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) a try, believing, according to the government, that it was going to fight corruption. We went through IPPIS from the first month to the fourth and thereabout, it was full of inconsistencies.

“Our members could no longer bear the inconsistencies and within us, we found out that we have technical and ICT experts that could help us to develop an alternative to IPPIS, which is the U3PS; where we believed that all the IPPIS inconsistencies would be resolved”, he said.

Before this, the two Unions, as well as the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), had rejected the government’s Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS).

Subsequently, ASUU presented the FG with its own platform, the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), which is still being subjected to Integrity tests.

THE WHISTLER reported in March that ASUU and Federal Government officials had expressed differing opinions on whether or not UTAS had failed some of the integrity tests it was subjected to.

ASUU had specifically accused the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof Isa Ali Pantami, whose ministry oversees NITDA, of deliberately kicking against UTAS because the union rejected his professorship which had attracted controversy among Nigerians.