The Academic Staff Union of Universities on Thursday described the Minister of Finance and the Accountant General of the Federation handling the Integrated Personnel Payroll System as high priests of corruption.
The union also said the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Education, Sonny Echonu, was Federal Government’s appointed liar considering his roles on the IPPIS.
The academic union asked Echonu to disclose to Nigerians the percentage of lecturers in the fake statistics of enrolees on the IPPIS.
The Zonal Coordinator of ASUU, Prof. Ade Adejumo, spoke at a joint conference in Ibadan, comprising University of Ibadan; Ladoke Akintola University of Technology; University of Ilorin; Kwara State University and Osun State University.
He said the Union had been battling with problems such as underpayment, overpayment, outright omissions, following the payment of February salary to those who enrolled on the IPPIS platform.
ASUU said in the light of this, if the agreements reached with the Union were further prolonged, it would embark on full strike.
Adejumo said, “Presently, the outcry emanating from university workers over the payment of February salary has vindicated ASUU’s position on the evil platform of IPPIS as an unworkable platform. To say the least, IPPIS is a haven for corruption rather than assisting in curbing it.
“The attention of our union is drawn the latest gibberish from the odious stable of the Permanent Secretary of Education, Mr Sonny Echono. Ordinarily, we would have ignored the silly vituperation unbecoming of an officer entrusted with such high responsibility.
“We would simply have consigned it to the ash tray of irrelevant irritation to which it rightly belongs, but the public must not be allowed to be misled by this public liar, Echono, a trained architect who now finds haven in the civil service.
“If this architect of lies found satisfaction in his primary calling as an architect, he should have remained in private practice and be a proper employer of labour rather than joining the civil service where he now becomes an uncharitable purveyor of lies against the patriotic struggles of the nation’s body of academics in search of the best for our country.
“Echono should be truthful to himself and the nation rather than playing politics with fake statistics. Of the over 70 percent of university workers that he claims to have already captured on IPPIS, what is the percentage of academics in his figure? The socalled balance of 30 percent, what is the percentage of academics?
“In what way has the government responded to the plethora of sharp practices and irregularities that have been trailing the IPPIS implementation? How many university administrations have been prosecuted or even indicted for staff padding? Why have ASUU’s demands for visitation panels to the universities over the years been treated with such flippancy by the government that this high priest of IPPIS serves?
“On ASUU’s composition of its negotiations team, Echono’s parable of the carpenter and the nail falls flat on its belly. If the woes of the country have grown from bad to worse since the ‘Ali must go’ saga, to our current nightmarish experiences, if the deficit of good governance and trust continue to be our abiding fate, if our civil service continues to be populated by cancerous uncivil servants in the mould of Echono, ASUU will not shy away from looking for bigger and stronger nails to drive those that run our country to the path of responsibility.”
