There is a sharp division between your union and the Federal Government on the IPPIS. What is the controversy all about?
It is unfortunate that the political class would be running away from intellectual discourse. When the idea of IPPIS was first mooted, we as scholars believed that as a developing nation we have to critically analyse some policies before we begin to implement. We realised that the IPPIS will not be able to address certain peculiarities of the university and as a result there and then we said this platform would create problem in the university system. We made our position known to government as far back as 2013. One of our reasons is that the university system is different from the civil service. In the university system, there is regular movement in terms of personnel, especially academic staff. If we have to wait for a clearance all the time before we engage people, it would lead to chaos. For example, at the beginning of every session, you allocate courses to lecturers, you make provision for sabbatical staff; you make provision for visiting scholars. The IPPIS platform cannot capture this peculiarity and most importantly, the issue of university autonomy. It is the responsibility of the council to hire and fire. Hiring and firing involve recruitment, discipline and sanctions. The moment you remove these powers from the council, you are inviting anarchy because the law clearly stipulates the roles of the university governing council. All financial matters are supposed to be administered by the council. All these we explained to the government but the government kept on saying ‘we are trying to curb corruption.’ Now who is trying to encourage corruption?
Government does not release money to ASUU, they release money to the university through the governing council and they appoint the chairman of the governing council. If there is corruption, let the government hold the various council chairmen accountable. There is no way ASUU is involved in funds administration in the university. The Vice Chancellor is an appointee of government; the bursar is appointed by the governing council and the chief accounting officer is the vice chancellor. So, how is ASUU involved in this?
What we are saying simply is, in the interest of the system, especially in public universities, if this is allowed to go on, appointment and recruitments would be skewed in favour of private universities because they don’t have too much of the bureaucracy. And it was because of the bureaucracy that the university was removed consciously from the bureaucracy of the civil service. So, taking the university back there will be a major setback.
The government is of the opinion that they are the ones employing and therefore should decide how their employees would be paid. The impression is that ASUU is running away from the desire of the government to channel funds for proper monitoring, or what is the view of the union regarding the agenda of the government?
With what is being designed, the government is only out to kill the university system; there is no other motive behind this IPPIS thing other than that. The IPPIS was introduced to this country by the World Bank and it’s a way to make sure that the culture of protest in Nigeria is completely eroded.
How?
It is because if you complain, they can now turn off the tap of your salary from Abuja. Secondly, if there are issues, you will have to leave your duty post and go to Abuja to sort it out. Ask me if they have not been monitoring the disbursement of funds through the current platform called the GIFMIS which has been in place since 2012/2013.
So, what’s the difference between the GIFMIS that is currently being used and the IPPIS?
The difference is that the university system still prepares the payroll. Now they want to centralise the preparation of the payroll. In GIFMIS, the money of every university is no longer in the commercial bank. It is in the CBN. Who controls that CBN, is it not the government? Why is it difficult for them to monitor disbursement from CBN if they truly believe in monitoring disbursement, because all the collation from the various universities would still be submitted to the GIFMIS platform?
So, is it that GIFMIS is more expensive to run than the IPPIS or, could it be that there is a grey area that is yet to come to light that your union and the government are fighting over?
Through GIFMIS, like I said the university, one way or the other, has contribution in who gets to the payroll and how the money is disbursed but in IPPIS, everything is centralised in Abuja. It is purely the government and, unfortunately, it is going to be manned by a consultant, a consulting firm, not even the government. Even from the point of security, it is risky to submit the entire payroll of a nation to a consulting firm. Government is not even looking at that side; they are looking at a one-size-fits-all thing; once everybody is enrolled in IPPIS today, all our problems will b solved. There will be electricity supply 24 hours daily, all our roads would be okay, health sector and educational sector would be permanently fixed and compete globally. As far as I’m concerned, it’s as if the government is clueless. That’s the way I see it. How can the government say it’s either this way or none other? We are telling them that there are so many other ways which could give the same result and at the same time, will not break the laws of the land.
The government has accused ASUU of not coming up with any form of alternative for the IPPIS.
Have they asked us to come up with alternatives and we failed? If they ask, we ready to give them alternatives. But what they are trying to do is to forcefully enlist lecturers in IPPIS as if that is the only solution to Nigeria’s problems, and we are telling them that this cannot work. We are saying an emphatic no.
From the arguments on the table, it is clear that the government is saying that ASUU doesn’t want its members’ finances or financing or university financing etc monitored. There are also insinuations that ASUU and its members have something to hide. How do you see this?
ASUU does not control the funds released to the universities. So it is not possible that ASUU is hiding anything. Even our check off dues, which we collect from our members, we submit our audited report to the Registrar of Trade Unions every year. So we are open, we are transparent and we have nothing to hide. It is the government that has something to hide. If they don’t have something to hide, they will not be insisting that it is either IPPIS or nothing.
What do you think will be the outcome of this standoff now, because the government has said it is IPPIS or nothing while ASUU is saying ‘no way’?
We are open to negotiation. We are ready to talk. But we will not allow the Nigerian intellectual discourse to be reduced to the issue of payroll alone. There are other fundamental issues that this government should address beyond just the issue of payroll.
Fundamental issues as they concern the university academics or the nation in its entirety?
The issues concern both the university system and the country as a whole. They claim that they have saved about N273 billion, as contained in an advertisement by the Accountant-General of the Federation. We have been asking them to name the ministry, department or agency where the said money was recovered from. Who are the culprits? Where is this money? How many people have been prosecuted? If there is a single ‘ghost’ worker in the university system today, no student will wait. Every one of them will run home. The government knows where the ghosts are; they should look elsewhere for their ghosts. They came to the university two years ago from this same Accountant-General’s office. They called themselves PICA, Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit. They asked everybody to line up one by one, physically and we were counted. We submitted all our documents. Let them make that report public because they spent public money to carry out that exercise. If they make the report public and they can tell us that in so and so university, we were able to find so and so number of ghosts, then such university should be sanctioned. Otherwise they should just keep quiet.
So, as it is now, on the part of ASUU, there is no retreat on the anti-IPPIS stance of your union?
No.
Even if you negotiate…?
We will tell them that this country belongs to everybody. We are not slaves in our country and so we should not be treated as such.
Is this a unanimous decision of ASUU or that of some universities?
Apart from the autonomy of the university, IPPIS is a violation of the University Autonomy Act. So, we will not fold our arms as scholars and allow government to break the laws with impunity.
and then