FG paid 92 Billion to ASUU- Ngige

The Minister of Labour, Employment, and Productivity, who spoke to State House correspondents at the end of the meeting with the president about the Ongoing strike, claimed the Federal Government had so far paid over N92 billion as earned allowances and revitalization fee to ASUU.

Recall that ASUU embarked on one month warning strike on Feb. 14, to press home their demands for a payment of N1.2trillion arears and also the adoption of the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) payment platform by the Federal government.

Hon. Chris said this was part of the implementation of the 2020 December agreement reached with the ASUU. In his words:

“The 2020 December agreement we had with ASUU is on course in terms of implementation. ASUU requested for the payment of N40 billion for (Earned Academic Allowances (EAA) for ASUU and other unions, and it has been paid.

“N30 billion was also paid for revitalization. N22.127 billion earned allowances for 2021,was also in the December agreement, to be paid from supplementary budget which was passed around June-July was also paid late last year.

However on the controversial issue of introducing the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) payment platform as preferred by ASUU instead of government’s Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), the minister said the matter needs to be revisited again.

“Because UTAS, which the Universities developed and prefer has been subjected to test by the Nigeria Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), which ran a user acceptance test also called ‘integrity and vulnerability test,’ wrote to ASUU in their report that, the areas of lapses in the presently configured UTAS platform, will not make it usable.

“But ASUU wrote back to NITDA that some of those observations were incorrect.”

According to Hon. Ngige, plans have now been concluded for the technical teams of NITDA and ASUU to meet and jointly conduct or repeat the test on the UTAS platform, so as to find a solution to the halt.