ASUU Strike: COEASU To FG- Drop Your Ego, Accept UTAS
BY TEMI OHAKWE, ABUJA – The Colleges of Education Academic Staff Union (COEASU) has urged the Federal Government to drop its ego and accept the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), as a payment solution in all tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
This is as COEASU declared that the adoption and use of UTAS would go a long way in addressing its concerns on payroll security and the peculiarities of the tertiary education system in general.
It stressed that being a home-grown and hack-proof payment system, the Federal government should adopt the UTAS solution for the entire tertiary education sector as it takes care of the peculiarities of the institutions including financial autonomy, sabbatical service, and the administration of discipline.
COEASU in a statement in Abuja by its President, Mr Smart Olugbeko said that UTAS has proven to be far better than the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) deployed by the federal government as payment solution in tertiary institutions which is not working as it failed to capture basic issues.
The Union noted that the challenges created by the IPPIS have been great source of worries and constituted one of the major issues prone to industrial crisis in the College of Education (COE) system.
COEASU specifically noted that IPPIS breaches the establishment integrity of the tertiary institutions system, undermines the statutory functions of the Governing Councils, and opens the payroll up to unilateral manipulations.
It further states; “Within a short time after its unilateral imposition on tertiary institutions by the Federal Government in February 2020, academic Unions’ opposition to it was vindicated as the IPPIS pay platform engendered several irregularities, such as salary omission, accommodation of ghost workers, mutilated salary, and inconsistency in payment of salary of staff on sabbatical and study leaves.
“Details of the audit findings submitted to the National Assembly in September 2021 by the office of the Auditor General of the Federation (OAuGF) revealed how operators of the IPPIS connived with the consulting vendors and operators to defraud the government.
“We are therefore thrown aback by the latest game of sheer ego resorted to by the Federal Government through the lazy and mischievous blackmail of UTAS because of unsubstantiated claims of inadequacy,” COEASU said.
The Union also said that the National Information Technology Development Agency’s (NITDA) assessment of UTAS carried out between March 8 and 16, 2022 which subjected the solution to 698 cases gave UTAS 97.4% and 99.3% before and after remediation respectively.
It therefore declared that this great feat is enough for the Federal Government to give kudos to ASUU for providing a home-grown solution to the problem of payment system in the country and quickly adopt it for payment, rather the resorting to blackmailing of ASUU and UTAS.
