On Thursday the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has called for the urgent intervention of well-meaning Nigerians in the long face-off between it and the Federal Government as it relates to the University Transparency and Accountability Solution, UTAS, and Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, IPPIS.
ASUU noted that there is a need to salvage the country’s educational sector from collapse in order to save the future of the country.
Zonal Coordinator, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Nsukka Zone (ASUU-NSUKKA ZONE), Comrade Raphael Amokaha, made this known during a press conference held at Federal University Lokoja, saying that the renegotiation of the 2009 agreement was the main reason for the strike all this while.
He opined that ASUU has apparently exercised unparallel patience and explored all avenues for a strike free solution to the government-induced crisis in the public universities without finding a headway.
According to him, this was against the backdrop of the legendary reputation of successive Nigerian governments for not honouring agreements with ASUU.
He noted, “How else can it be explained that we have a set of leaders that pay lip service to their commitment to national development? ASUU has consistently demonstrated that it is a patriotic union.”
The zonal coordinator stated that having gone out of its way to spend from the miserable salaries of its members to develop a more robust homegrown payment platform in UTAS at no cost to the government, it was hoped it would restore faith and confidence in the educational system and also, to prove again that the challenge in the university system has nothing to do with the capacity of the lecturers but everything to do with the people charged with the responsibility of running the affairs of the country.
He noted that it would seem, with benefit of hindsight, that the insistence of the government on deploying IPPIS which was used to continuously starve and subject their members to untold hardship, stressing that decapitating their salaries arbitrarily and outright nonpayment for months despite the manifest inadequacies of the platform was a ploy to distract them from their original goal.
He asked why else the government would delay the deployment of UTAS, a more efficient, Nigerian designed alternative, which has passed all the tests put forward by government agencies.
