By ADESINA WAHAB

The controversial payment system introduced by the Federal Government, the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, IPPIS, may lead to the disruption of activities in the nation’s polytechnics, as the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics, ASUP, has cried out against the lapses inherent in the system and is threatening industrial action.

Speaking in a chat in Lagos on Thursday, the Yaba College of Technology, Yabatech Chapter Chairman, Mr Remi Ajiboye, said salaries of members were being cut indiscriminately, citing an instance in which he was paid N4, 000 as monthly salary.

Ajiboye is a Senior Lecturer whose salary should be over N300,000 monthly. This is as many federal workers are complaining about the irregularity in the payment of their salaries.

A Vice Chancellor in a federal university in the North was reportedly paid N72,000 as salary at a point in time.

The IPPIS became a compulsory means of receiving salaries for federal workers in February, 2020. Ajiboye added that his members were also being owed 10 months’ new minimum wage arrears and that despite the promise to clear the arrears by July last year, nothing has been done.

“We are in support of our Council of National Officers, who have been battling for months to get many of the issues redressed. Actually, we can say that the government is killing us gradually with this IPPIS of a thing. Deductions like for cooperative societies are not remitted. Even our union dues are not remitted regularly.

“Now, nobody can say this is what he or she earns a month. The salary has become an undulating object, you only get whatever catches the fancy of those in the IPPIS office.

“There was a month I was paid N4,000 as monthly salary. And it is not that the money forcibly taken away would be repaid any time soon,” he said. (Vanguard)

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