By Daniel Amarachi

The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU ESUT chapter has disclosed that the union received with mixed feelings the exemption of universities, polytechnics, colleges of education and other tertiary institutions from the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) payment platform describing the police as a n evil wind.

The Chairman, ASUU ESUT, Professor Chinedu Aguba stated this in an interview with ESUT Monitor in his office on Thursday. Prof Aguba who said that the ESUT Union is happy with the development, wondered why the federal government allowed the university to suffer loss of academic calendars and man power before realising it should do the right thing.

“The entire ASUU community received the news with mixed feelings; we are very jubilant that our struggle has not been in vain, we have been vindicated. At the same time, we feel that this is what the government ought to have done without the struggles – loss of academic calendar and also loss of man power.

“We are very happy that the entire intellectual community has come to realise that ASUU is an intellectual body that whatever they sit down seeing, many organisations may never see that while standing,” he said.

He described IPPIS as an evil wind that does no one good adding that the proposed system was aimed at crippling the universities and making Vice Chancellors beggars

“The components of the IPPIS is an evil wind that blows no one good in the university system. A situation whereby the university machinery is pigeonholed into a single line that before you recruit any lecturer or staff, do certain things in federal universities, you must go cap in hand to Abuja to beg the IPPIS staff.

“Some of them who are not even qualified to be clerks to the Vice Chancellors and Professors in the universities. We thank God that at last, justice has come.”

The federal government, it could be recalled, on Wednesday after its Federal Executive Council meeting presided over by the President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced the removal of the tertiary institutions from the IPPIS system.

The removal of the institutions from the IPPIS system has been one of the reasons the university lecturer had continued to embark on indefinite strikes in recent years including the nine-month strike in 2020 that brought academic activities in the universities to its knees.