By Rita Esegine
The Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU) has announced that it would embark on trike immediately academic activities resume in all the federal universities, polytechnics and Colleges of Education in the country.
Mr Peters Adeyemi, the General Secretary of NASU, disclosed this to newsmen in Abuja on Monday, adding that the non-teaching staff union is protesting short-payment of its members’ salaries since February this year.
The NASU scribe also said the Association has filed official complaints against the Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF) and also notified other appropriate parties.
He explained further that they have filed noticed under the Trade Dispute Act CAP 432, Trade Disputes (Essential Services) Act, CAP 433 and the Trade disputes (Amendment) Decree No 47 of 1992, otherwise called Form TD/3.
Made available to journalists were the complaint in Form TD/3, titled ‘Notification of Trade Dispute, Inter and Intra-Union Disputes by Employers/Workers Organization”, saying they raised issues which included non-payment of salaries to some staff, short payment of salaries to some staff, failure to pay approved allowances as contained in the FGN/NASU, year 2009 agreement, non-deduction of check-off dues, and non-deduction of cooperative and other deductions of its members in the federal universities and inter-university centres, federal polytechnics and federal Colleges of Education.
The Association also stated in the petition that various steps aimed at resolving the crisis had failed.
It also listed the steps taken so far to include: meeting of NASU leadership with the Director, IPPIS on 21st January 2020, and another meeting of NASU leadership with the same director on the 4th of February 2020, which did not yield desired result.
Also in a letter to the Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, declaring the trade dispute, Adeyemi, said despite the assurances given by Ngige, the crisis had continued to linger.
“Regrettably, despite your assurances via a telephone discussion sometimes in early April, 2020, the officials of Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) have refused to effect appropriate corrections of all the anomalies observed by NASU members in the Federal Universities and Intra-University Centres, Federal Polytechnics and Federal Colleges of Education up to this current moment, i.e salaries paid to our members in February, March and April, 2020,” he said.
Furthermore, Adeyemi said that NASU’s complaints as contained in its letter dated 7th April, 2020, fell on deaf ears as none of the issues in it was addressed in the March salaries.
He also accused IPPIS of deceiving it into accepting the payment platform, saying its peculiarities are still not embedded into the payment system which results in short-payments.
“It is unfortunate that IPPIS has only betrayed the leadership of NASU by deceiving us into accepting that the IPPIS platform will take on board all the peculiarities affecting our members and that there will be no problem if we key into the platform.
“Now we know better. IPPIS promise of doing a three-month experiment has come our very disastrously and we are unable to allow this defective and deficient process to continue,” it said.
In the notice with reference number NASU/CD/307/209, NASU stated that the 14-day warning strike would be used to protest the refusal of IPPIS to react positively to issues that affect the correct payment of its members’ salaries and other errors identified which were placed before the IPPIS for correction.
