IPPIS, Workers’ Salary, And Slavery
The report in the front page of a national newspaper of 18th December 2019, detailing the prospect of stoppage of December salary for academics who stuck to ASUU’s direction to disregard the federal government’s misguided directive to register with the flawed Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) was troubling indeed.
The newspaper captioned the in-bound dark mood as the prospect of “a bleak Christmas,” and that really is bad. What kind of government would target hardworking university lecturers at Christmastime in order to gift them “a bleak Christmas?” What are we getting at in Nigeria? For me it will be the height of badness to dampen my December celebrations because nearly all those I do a “Happy Christmas” for over here in Minna are Muslims of my neighbourhood. I have done my bit in the closing year as my contributions to moulding young minds for
Nigeria, by way of teaching and a whiff of undergraduate thesis works, that I think I should wrap up the year with no hassles at all.
What the federal government would not know was my enthusiastic inputs into my past students’ theses, sometimes borrowing from my daughter to get refreshments for my students out there in the field doing their petrographic control studies for groundwater prospects at the Gidan Kwano Campus amongst other statistical correlations works with respect to these past groundwater studies. Need I even mention the VES interpretation and production of topographic maps? It was really stressful, but that is why the lecturing job is unique. My students are so full of confidence now that they could be trusted to strike up independent work habits for their higher degrees. I know this because they felt so fulfilled about their theses that I even learnt a thing or two from them.
That, now, is progression. Thus, AGF, do not stop our
December salary because the International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention on the rights of the workingman (and now, the workingwoman) stipulates that an employee is a free man, quite distinct from a slave, who has rights to make inputs into the workings of the organisation that the employer has put up.
In order to ensure that the employee is protected and to also ensure that he could make his due inputs into the employers’ system for the overall good, the workers’ union is now recognised under international law as the vehicle by which the employee may make positive changes.
Thus, a workers’ union (like ASUU) is not a crass-pot of misguided unshaven academics. No, not at all. Presently, ASUU has developed an acceptable alternative to the IPPIS that the federal government adopted wholeheartedly from a foreign source.
––Sunday Adole Jonah, Department of Physics, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger State.