Now that tertiary institutions are off IPPIS hook

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu put smiles on the faces of members of the academic and non-academic staff of Nigeria’s higher institutions by the singular act of removing tertiary educational institutions from the list of federal government agencies whose monthly salaries are paid through the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) platform. After a Federal Executive Council meeting, the Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, disclosed that decision, saying: ‘’Today at council, a most important decision was taken concerning the education sector of the economy. The vexatious issue bothering the stakeholders in the sector, including the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), was settled. The payment of university staff through IPPIS has been settled and they are now to use their platform to pay their staff. They are now to also recruit their staff through normal criteria…’’

Though the FEC’s decision may be seen as victory for the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and other labour unions in polytechnics and colleges of education, the removal of these institutions from the IPPIS platform was a vote of no confidence on IPPIS as an effective way of monitoring and sanitising the payroll. Prescribed by the World Bank in 2006 as a means of entrenching accountability and transparency in the payment of federal government workers’ salaries, the operators of the IPPIS failed to adapt the platform to the peculiarities of the Nigerian system and utilised it to perpetuate unexpected forms of corruption. 

The IPPIS was conceived under the Bureau of Public Service Reform (BPSR) for the purpose of centralised payment of all civil servants in the employment of the federal government.  As a department within the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation (OAGF) of Nigeria, IPPIS is responsible for payment of salaries and wages directly to government employees’ bank accounts with appropriate deductions and remittances of third party payments. It was expected to help establish a reliable and comprehensive database for the public service, facilitate manpower planning, eliminate record and payroll fraud, facilitate easy storage, update personnel records and its retrieval for administrative and pension processes and staff remuneration payment with minimal wastages and leakages.

The IPPIS was seen as genuine attempt to tackle a perennial problem of gross inadequacies in the payroll and personnel records in the public service, mainly as a result of the manual computation of salary and documentation of personnel information, which gave room to overpayment or underpayment of salaries, omission of staff names in monthly payment, wrong calculation of promotion and pension that was due to staff and ex-staff.  The government’s good intentions for the establishment of IPPIS was defeated by the misapplication of the technology or the abuse of the IPPIS. 

Among civil servants, the IPPIS created a nightmare; it took between six months and a year for duly recruited civil servants’ details to be captured on the payment platform. The situation is worse for civil servants who work in government agencies in distant states from Abuja. They would have to make multiple journeys to the OAGF and enlist the support of some staff at the headquarters to ensure the information they provided were logged into the IPPIS. In the case of workers in tertiary institutions, they faced multiple problems because the  IPPIS did not recognise or adequately capture the flexibility and peculiarities of the university system in terms of replacement/recruitment of staff, movement of staff (visiting, adjunct and part-time), the process of promotion of academics in professorial cadre, retirement age of 65 and 70 years for academics who retired before reaching professorial cadre and those on professorial cadre respectively, remuneration of staff on sabbatical, external examiners, external assessors and earned academic allowances (EAA). The IPPIS system only recognised staff members on permanent and pensionable appointments. 

Over the years that tertiary institutions’ staff were compelled to enroll on the IPPIS, several things came to a standstill. Firstly, the payment system violated university autonomy, as the Governing Councils of the institutions no longer exercised full control over the finances; the OAGF took over that role. Secondly, the chief executives of tertiary institutions lost the prerogative to recruit their staff, which caused shortage of lecturers in the institutions. Worst of all, the recruitment process through the Head of Service, the Federal Character Commission (FCC) and OAGF was marred by irregularities and corruption. The arraignment of the Accountant General of the Federation, Mr Ahmed Idris, by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission at the Federal High Court in Abuja over about N109.4 billion fraud spoke loudly about the extent to which the IPPIS and other ‘transparency strategies’ were being misused for personal gains. 

As we commend the Tinubu government for removing tertiary institutions from the IPPIS payment platform, we suggest that the system should be reviewed and overhauled to remove all the difficulties that it has created for civil servants. It is not wrong for the World Bank to recommend a system that can curb corruption; such measures must be adapted to local peculiarities for it to succeed. No policy should make it difficult for the government to pay its workers. A labourer deserves his wages.

We also urge the leadership of the tertiary institutions to ensure that the new system is not abused by corrupt personnel in their respective institutions.