The Academic Staff Union of University has commences a two month strike after a one month strike, accusing Federal Government of spreading lies and insensitivity.
The Union made it’s decision after the meeting of the National Executive Council (NEC), in the union’s national secretariat of Abuja, which started on Sunday and ended in the early hours of Monday.
Asuu had earlier on Sunday issued a statement on the controversy about the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) developed by it’s technical team to replace the Integrated Personal Payroll Information System (IPPIS) currently used to pay its members’ salaries.
The union was angered by the director-general of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) kashifu Inuwa claim. At the State House on Wednesday, he said UTAS failed three integrity test of user acceptance, vulnerability and stress conducted by the agency.
“We did all these three tests with them and the system couldn’t pass. We wrote the reports and submitted it back to the honourable minister, which he forwarded to all relevant institutions, including ASUU. As we speak now, ASUU is working, trying to fix all the issues we highlighted with the system and we will review it again. But that is just one half of the story,” Inuwa said.
Asuu insisted UTAS scored 85 and 75 per cent, which are “high class grade in any known evaluation system.”
The Union stated that the first integrity test by NIFDA was carried out at NUC headquarters with relevant government agencies and all end-users in the University system present and all accepted UTAS as a proper solution for salary payment.
ASUU said; “However, in a curious twist of submission, the NITDA Technical Team, after conducting a comprehensive functionality test came out to say that out of 687 test cases, 529 cases were satisfactory, 156 cases queried, and 2 cases were cautioned.
“Taking this report on its face value, the percentage score is 77%. The question that arises from this is, can 77% in any known fair evaluation system be categorised as failure?”
Speaking further, he said NITDA “in their desperation to justify their false assertions, threw up issues such as Data centre and hosting of UTAS software which are clearly outside the rubrics of ASUU’s responsibilities in the deployment of UTAS.”
The Union had earlier began a one-month warning strike to hammer its demands.
Their demands include: renegotiation of ASUU/FG 2009 agreement, sustainability of the university autonomy by deploying UTAS to replace IPPIS, distortion in salaries payment challenges, release of reports of visitation panels to federal universities, funding for revitalisation of public universities, promotion arrears, poor funding of state universitesand earned academic allowance.
Minister of education Adamu Adamu had constituted the white paper panel of the visitation panels after the strike began, but the team is yet to be inagurated to the government to begin work.