By Professor Abubakar Mu’azu, University of Maiduguri
When the champions of the Integrated Personnel Payment Information (IPPIS) insisted, against the law, to forcefully integrate public universities into that Civil Service payment template, the chorus was that it would check corruption. Contrary to that claim, the template became a choreographed contraption for corruption. Academic and non-academic workers in the public universities had different experiences as victims of IPPIS. However, the recent staff verification exercise in the universities is further exposing the false claims of the anti-corruption credentials of IPPIS. The insistence on including the universities into the IPPIS payment template, with decided and arrogant refusal to configure it to address the peculiarities of the universities, would have minimised the disaster that it continues to inflict on the public universities.
For the Buhari-led Federal Government, it was a convenient template for the abrogation of elements of the negotiated ASUU -FGN 2009 agreement. Either wilfully or by default, it was an effective template for underpayment of salaries and allowances of the university workers including deliberate omissions of bona fide university staff and withholding their salaries unnecessarily. In the course of the implementation of the IPPIS template, an impression was created that the federal government was recovering either over-paid salaries and allowances or from purported elimination of ghost workers.
For many university workers, who were direct victims of underpayments or no payment of salaries, the claim of recovering money using IPPIS was seen as deceptive and false. Many believed, it was the money fraudulently deducted from and underpayment of their salaries that was presented as the effectiveness of IPPIS. Given the experiences of payment of some professors ‘ salaries of as low as less than N250,000 per month, it will require credible details to disprl this perception. In fact, at one time one Vice Chancellor revealed that the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation, in the name of IPPIS, was paying him the equivalent salary of a Graduate Assistant, a fresh graduate’s salary in the university system. Some professors received N5,000 as their monthly salary.
To people who were not victims of the disaster inflicted on university workers by the IPPIS payment template, the reasonable assumption was that these were inevitable mistakes that could be easily corrected. However, that was not the case from experience. The implementation of the IPPIS payment template is a disturbing revelation about the people that are described as civil servants. It would seem from experience and looking at the issue from an uncharitable perspective that some of them are decided evil servants. Let us assume that some of the civil servants are not evil servants. From a charitable perspective, the pains inflicted on university workers using the IPPIS payment template was a result of a combination of factors: lack of familiarity with the template, shortage of competent personnel, conflation of the university system with the civil service system, deliberate inefficiency and carefree attitude.
The Vice Chancellors in the affected universities became weakened and frustrated by the deluge of complaints from all categories of staff, cutting across academic, administrative and technical on no payment of salaries, underpayment of salaries to prolong periods of non-payment of salaries, in some cases, running to 18 months. The Vice Chancellors became errand boys between the universities and the office of the accountant General of the Federation trying to resolve the issue of payment of salaries for their staff. The Vice Chancellors were made to be torn between running their universities and addressing the failures imposed by the operators of and the IPPIS payment template itself. It was inexcusable that the Vice Chancellors were being made to be answers able by default to the Accountant General of the Federation. This avoidable imposition made it difficult to sanction any staff that was a victim of the IPPIS visitated hardships.
It was simply scandalous how the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation was exposed as an inefficient, soulless and inhumane operation. The universities would write letters of complaints and nothing was done within reasonable time. Submissions would be made in the first week of the month, in the belief that this gives sufficient time to the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation, to address the issues concerning university staff salaries. The practice assumed a frightening dimension that suggested the Bursars and the Vice Chancellors were actually not bothered. Meanwhile, such submissions were actually in the decidedly long, unwieldy and slow bureaucratic pipeline of the civil service system.
Although with the introduction of IPPIS seeming unfilled vacancies were used to employ staff, the exercise was another highly abused opportunity. Instead of emploing people needed to meet the manpower needs of the university, it was used to over staff the universities with non-academic staff. Yet the universities were in great need of academic, not non-academic staff. It would seem that this is what is leading to the shocking revelations to the universities that their staff have been inflated through the use of the IPPIS payment template.
The IPPIS payment template is not really what it was touted to be. In the first instance, it was the irresponsibility of those who said that the universities must be integrated into IPPIS, without adaptation to the peculiarities of the universities that contributed to the present traumatic experiences of the universities and the staff. Some of the officials of the government that arrogantly insisted on the inclusion of the universities into the civil system are no longer in government. They have succeeded in contributing to the challenges of the universities.
The staff verification exercise in the universities will expose more of the abuses and compromises that are collectively called corruption in the implementation of the IPPIS payment template. The government will be seen to be respecting the interpretation of the court that inclusion of university workers into the civil service payment template was a violation of university autonomy. It is welcome that the Federal Government has given directive for the removal of the universities from the IPPIS payment template for civil servants. It is correct that the universities are verifying their bona fide staff to weed out the illegally added elements into their payroll. This is an avoidable burden. But is this an indication of the corrupt practices that is daily occurring in the civil service?
The summary is that IPPIS is a colossal failure and to some extent, a scam.