By Ngozi Nwankwo
Colleges of Education Academic Staff Union, COEASU, has commended the decision of the Federal Executive Council, FEC, under the leadership of the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to exempt tertiary institutions from the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, IPPIS.
According to the union, it was the best decisions taken so far by the President since he assumed office.
This was contained in a press statement issued to journalists by COEASU President,Dr Smart Olugbeko in Abuja, on Thursday.
It said, “We commend President Tinubu for hearkening to the voice of reason and taking the decisive action. This action has further shown that Mr. President is not just a listening leader with great passion for fairness and smooth-running of the Nigerian education sector, he is also in charge of his administration.
“We equally commend the Honourable Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman, who brought the attention of President Tinubu to the obnoxious IPPIS and its damaging effects to the education sector.
“By this development, the College of Education,COE,system in particular and the tertiary education sector in general, have been delivered from the backward bureaucratic bottlenecks, encumbrances and corrupt practices associated with the centralized pay system.
“Our exemption from IPPIS has restored normal procedure for staff recruitment as it will stop donation of staff by some opaque stakeholders. Now, the Governing Councils and Provosts will be able to perform their constitutional roles as the managers of their respective institutions; they will be able to effectively exercise their statutory control over staff recruitment, promotion, discipline and payroll administration.
It has also ended the frustrations imposed by intractable errors of IPPIS against individual staff, such as short-payment, regular pay omission, withholding and/or delay in remittance of third party deductions, to mention just a few.
“Our Union has consistently put up a strong opposition against IPPIS as a fraudulent and ineffective platform. It is sad that such a platform with its obvious lapses was allowed to wreak havoc on the education system for such a long time.
” It will take a long time before our institutions can be completely healed of the injuries caused by IPPIS. As at today, more than seventy lecturers who embarked on sabbatical leave between 2020 and 2022 were not paid salaries throughout the duration of the sabbatical leave while some were paid for few months. Also, many lecturers are still being owed salaries and IPPIS could not explain the reasons for the omission. All efforts to make IPPIS effect payment to these lecturers yielded no result.”
Meanwhile, COEASU, expressed fear that certain persons in critical ministries whose interests have been wounded by the President’s action will play sabotage by putting up measures to ensure that its institutions have problem accessing their funds.
The union advised that IPPIS should be given a deadline to clear all its liabilities to institutions as it will be detrimental to industrial tranquillity if these liabilities were transferred to the Governing Councils.
COEASU, therefore, urged Mr. President and the Minister of Education to be wary and take appropriate steps further by ensuring that tertiary institutions have unhindered and timely access to their pay wallets and the wallets should be well funded to take care of the needs of the institutions in the areas of monthly salaries, Peculiar Earned Academic Allowance, PEAA, sabbatical leave and recruitment of new staff to fill existing vacancies.