The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and office of Accountant General of the Federation have agreed a timeline of three months to co-opt University Transparency and Accountability Solutions (UTAS) into the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System(IPPIS).
The agreement was reached on Monday, before Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, during a resumed meeting over the disagreement between ASUU and the federal government.
Gbajabiamila while speaking on the essence of the meeting said it was intended to have a timeline that will be acceptable to ASUU and the federal government, reminding ASUU that their agreement in the last meeting with the leadership of the House was that features in UTAS will be brought into IPPIS, to address certain peculiarities of the university teachers.
“If ASUU is asking for a signed agreement by the federal government where then is the issue of trust and said by ASUU. If it is based on trust I won’t have called for this meeting. This is the first time after several meetings I’m hearing the word interim. This is not the agreement. The agreement was that UTAS will be brought into IPPIS.
“We’ll continue to work with the agreement based on trust as you said”, he said.
Earlier, President of ASUU, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, noted that they called off the strike based on trust going by the House Speaker’s commitment to resolving the strike as they did not sign any document or presented any concrete thing to their members.
Prof. Osodeke explained that ASUU were challenged by the minister of Labour to produce UTAS to replace IPPIS adding that not as if they were compelling the federal government to use UTAS.
“We’ll accept IPPIS as an interim measure”, he said.
On his part, the acting Accountant General, Sylva Okolieaboh, called on ASUU to trust them as they will make sure IPPIS live up to everybody’s expectation.
