Finance minister: Lecturers who are not on IPPIS won’t get February salary

Zainab Ahmed, minister of finance, budget and national planning, says lecturers who have not enrolled for the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System(IPPIS) will not get their February salary.

Speaking with reporters at the opening of a management retreat in Kano on Thursday, the minister said about 55 percent members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have been captured on the platform.

In January, the federal government had ordered stoppage of salaries of lecturers and all workers of tertiary institutions who are not enrolled on the IPPIS.

Some lecturers, who were not on IPPIS, had threatened to embark on strike if they did not receive their salaries but they were later paid.

ASUU had rejected the federal government’s directive for workers to enroll in the centralised payroll system, saying it would affect the autonomy of universities.

However, Ahmed said though the federal government had resistance from ASUU over IPPIS, the objective of having them register is to check corruption.

“Unfortunately most reforms that you undertake you come across resistance. We have had resistance from ASUU on the implementation of the IPPIS and I am happy to report that at least up to 55 percent of ASUU members are registered and the ones that have not are not getting their February salary,” Ahmed said.

“It is in eliminating ghost workers because you register on the IPPIS using biometrics and we are currently working with the office of the head of service to link up the IPPIS HR management module with the payroll itself. It will help us better maximise the efficiency of the system.

“I know that we have up to 70,000 ghost workers that have been identified in this process and we hope that we will come to a time when we will say that we have no ghost workers.”