THE Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), has cleared the air about members being stopped from receiving salaries by President Muhammadu Buhari over refusal to enroll on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS).

In a press statement made available to The ICIR, ASUU stated that its meeting with the president held on January 9, was beyond discussing IPPIS, a department under the office of the Accountant-General of the Federation responsible for payment of salaries and wages directly to Government employee’s bank account.

The labour union that still objects to  adopting the IPPIS revealed that the meeting with President Buhari covered a lot of discussions including an avenue for the members to submit their prayers to the president.

One of the prayer reads: “Government should welcome ASUU’s ongoing innovation of a more robust system of human resource management and compensation, called the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), which will address the peculiarities of universities and end inappropriate recruitments in the system.”

The union, in the statement, also pointed that the adoption of UTAS was still an ongoing discussion and at no time did the president direct that the salaries of ASUU members be stopped for failure of enrollment in IPPIS.

It was revealed that during the course of the meeting, Chris Ngige, minister of labour and employment and Boss Mustapha, secretary general of the federation proposed the ‘marrying’ of UTAS and IPPIS.

It was also stated that Zainab Ahmed, minister of finance, budget and planning, also attempted to paint the union in bad light in the presence of the president, by creating a wrong impression about members of ASUU enrolling in IPPIS, a claim debunked in statement.

“The minister – in reference to Ahmed, created the wrong impression that a substantial number of ASUU members had enrolled in IPPIS in defiance of the union. For avoidance of doubt, however, the minister failed to provide the ratio of academic to non-academic in her questionable data.”