FG: Universities to get N30bn revitalisation fund soon

The federal government says it will soon commence disbursement of the N30 billion revitalisation fund to public universities.

Chris Ngige, minister of labour and employment, spoke on Friday in Abuja after a closed-door meeting between the government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

The meeting was held to evaluate the level of implementation of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed by both parties in December 2020 and the resolutions of the follow-up meeting in August 2021.

Ngige said the government is committed to uplifting the standard of public universities in the country.

“The Buhari administration will try as much as possible within its limited resources, to make meaningful contributions to the development of the university system,” he said.

On the issue of revitalisation funds for public universities, the minister said the National Universities Commission (NUC) and the federal ministry of education did a good job in terms of getting the universities to defend their various allocations.

“A committee to monitor has also been sent up by the NUC. We are happy about that and expect the disbursement of the revitalisation funds to commence very soon,” he added.

He said N22.17 billion was provided in the 2021 supplementary budget for earned allowances to all university workers, adding that payments to the individual universities would commence on or before October 30.

He said the government has also received the report from the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) on the preferred payment platform of ASUU.

“We are also happy with the report they gave. We asked them to liaise with ASUU and NUC, to work on this system for deployment by the users as soon as possible,” he said.

The minister said the issues of promotion arrears and other outstanding payments for university teachers were looked into during the meeting. 

He said by the end of October, all the issues would be resolved.

On the shortfalls in payments, he said the meeting urged the Integrated Payroll and Personnel information system (IPPIS) office to have a template and liaise with vice-chancellors and bursars in the universities to hold a discussion next week.

He sad this will ensure the development of a foolproof template that will enable affected persons to get their salaries.

“We have it on good authority that some university teachers have not been paid for several months because of issues of incomplete data,” Ngige said.

“We have told the IPPIS office to gather those data as soon as possible to ensure that those university teachers are paid.

“A worker is due in wages. As a government, we do not agree that we will use issues of incomplete data to hold back the salaries of workers for months. We think that should be sorted out as well. We gave a timeline of the end of the month to do this.”