Nigeria’s University Lecturers End Strike, Hold Out Over Payroll Software
The fragmentation of Nigeria’s federal payroll management system is a bad idea
Strikes by Nigeria’s largest union of university lecturers (ASUU) happen far too often and when they do, they linger for far too long.
Between 1999 and 2018, the Academic Staff Union of Universities went on strike 14 times amounting to over 3 years of lost time cumulatively.
The latest strike has gone on for 8 months; the union now says it’s been called off after the government reportedly accepted some of their demands, which include payroll system autonomy.
Politics aside
In Nigeria, there is a unified payroll management system for federal workers known as IPPIS (Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System).
The platform was created in 2007 by the software company, SystemSpecs. I worked on the project in its early years, but that’s a story for another day.
Before IPPIS, salaries were paid into the accounts of the different Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs). Successive governments have tried to change that by bringing one MDA aboard at a time.
The advantages of the platform are clear — in 2018, for instance, it reportedly exposed over 80,000 ghost workers in the Nigerian Police Force — but integrating each MDA with their peculiarities can get messy.
And there’s no greater mess than what’s happened between ASUU and the Nigerian federal government (FG).
ASUU initially agreed to use IPPIS, but the union says that some features that were agreed on during the requirement gathering phase didn’t translate into implementation. These shortcomings were mainly in HR policies that they say are peculiar to the university environment. As a result, its members started noticing reductions in their take-home pay.
Fast-forward to the strike action, and a major bone of contention has been how much that those arrears amounted to. ASUU also launched a separate payroll platform called UTAS (University Transparency and Accountability Solution) and demanded that payments be made through it.
Fragmentation
I think UTAS is a bad idea conceptually; it defeats one of the main goals of IPPIS, and that’s to have a unified payroll system for all federal workers.
Also, you can expect other payroll systems to spring up. Already, the Senior Staff Association of Nigeria Universities (SSANU) has announced the launch of its own system called UGPPPS (University General Peculiar Payroll Payment Systems).
That said, if the FG agrees to UTAS, I would hope that at least the directories and the databases remain centrally managed. This depends on the current architecture, of course, but an employer must be able to have an independent record of all its employees.
However, the government hasn’t exactly been a model employer.
For one, ASUU isn’t the only union to have issues with IPPIS, and as long as no Government Act is backing the platform, many more will continue to view adoption as optional.
At the same time, accommodation is important. Tweaking IPPIS to either include the features that ASUU wants or integrating it with other payroll systems shouldn’t be rocket science, the fact that it seems that way lets you know that there are some inefficiencies in the government’s payroll system that technology alone can not solve.
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