The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has said more than 500 of its members in federal universities nationwide are currently being punished by the Federal Government for not enrolling into the newly introduced Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS).

The body said the punishment is in form of non-payment of their salaries since February last year despite the presidency’s waiver to the contrary.

The National President of ASUU, Prof Biodun Ogunyemi, gave this hint in an exclusive interview with Nigerian Tribune.

He said the Federal Government through the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation deliberately omitted names of the affected members from the payroll submitted by their respective universities so as to force them to enrol into IPPIS, the new salary payment system for the federal civil servants that caused serious controversy between the Federal Government and ASUU, particularly during the general COVID-19 lockdown.

Prof Ogunyemi, however, listed the University of Ibadan; University of Lagos (UNILAG); Usman Dan Fodio University, Sokoto; Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO); and Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta (FUNAAB) among others as universities where most of the affected union members teach.

“And many of these universities have up to 20 of our members who have not been paid salaries for the past 13 months for no fault of theirs, ” he noted. “And this is unacceptable to us as ASUU.”

He said all the efforts made so far by the affected individuals and also at the union level to get their salaries paid were to no success.

He explained that at the initial stage of this development, the affected workers were always asked to meet their respective bursary department for action and that they had done so repeatedly by supplying their details now and then but with the efforts yielded no positive result.

He said whenever the affected members get to the bursary departments, they always ask why they were resisting enrolment into IPPIS.

“So, they are twisting our members in order to stylishly get them enrolled into IPPIS. But we will never succumb to enrolment,” he stressed.

He said the union is engaging the higher authorities already to ensure that the affected members are paid their backlog of salary arrears and also continued to be paid their salaries alongside their colleagues.

“IPPIS is not for university lecturers and that remains the ASUU stand,” he stressed.

•Text (excluding headline): Nigerian Tribune.

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