ASUU and Homegrown Solutions: UTAS to the Rescue!!!!

Nigeria, a country of 206 million people, is larger than Russia (population: 144 million), and by 2050, it is expected to pass the U.S.A. as the third most populous country on the planet. The population is primarily youthful and increasingly digital-savvy. Fortunately, Nigeria’s tech ecosystem is the envy of many of its continental rivals. Its startups attracted up to 35% of funding for African startups 2020, and Lagos has become the vibrant center of all things African tech. It was no accident that in late August of 2016, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise visit to Lagos. Nigeria is viewed as the “Silicon Savannah”— a rising power in the tech world. Today, Nigeria is home to the second-best Ruby developers globally and has become Africa’s most significant source of Venture capital (VC) investment for tech startups. Currently, Nigerian startups excel in e-commerce, media, and mobile money transfer.

According to the Nigerian University Commission (NUC), as of July 2020, there are One Hundred and Seventy-One (171) universities in Nigeria. Out of this figure, forty-four (44) are federal universities, forty-eight (48) are state universities, and the remaining seventy-nine (79) are private universities. With all this progress witnessed by the country, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), a Nigerian union of university academic staff in Nigeria, is on a one-month industrial strike.  The industrial action has become almost an annual ritual that is partly justified. Part of the reason ASUU is on strike has to do with technology. The Union has vehemently stood in opposition to enlistment into a platform called Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS). It has consistently issued directives to its members in the country to refrain from giving out their particulars to anybody for the sake of registration into IPPIS.

The Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS), which was engineered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, is a payment system used by the Federal Government to address poor personnel administration, inadequate information on the size of the civil service, over-bloated wage bills, ghost worker syndrome, etc. The critical aspects of the Systems, like enrollment and making changes to employee’s critical data, monthly payrolling, and managing/maintaining the database of employees, have been contracted to two vendors, Messrs Soft Alliance and Resources Ltd. Despite the significant funds committed to the project already, the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation (OAuGF) uncovered the ineffective governance, operation, and management of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) and the Government Integrated Financial Management System (GIFMIS). According to the report, this may have cost the Federal Government several billion in losses annually. The operators of the two systems (IPPIS and GIFMIS) connived with the consulting vendors and operators to defraud the government.

Against this backdrop, the Union developed an alternative to the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) tagged the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS). The system was subjected to various integrity tests to verify its efficacy and ascertain that its final product would pass the necessary technical attribute test as specified by National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA). On Dec 21, 2021, NITDA, after unveiling the integrity test results on UTAS, was so impressed that it issued a statement strongly recommending that the payment platform developed by the university lecturers be deployed in government Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs).

The least we could do is thank ASUU for leveraging indigenous technology and developing UTAS with the least possible cost. Nigerians and the Federal Government should be thankful and borrow a leaf from ASUU. It is no news and ironic that our brightest and most innovative are leaving our shores and developing the already developed world. Nigerians in the diaspora are remitting peanuts compared to the billions or possibly trillions of Naira they are contributing directly/indirectly to the economy of the already developed world. With such glaring potential, a serious government will go out of its way to secure necessary funds, finance education, sit back and watch it bear fruits in a decade or two. ASUU’s demands are genuine and should be viewed from an objective lens. No serious nation will put the database of its workforce, including intellectuals, into the hands of a corrupt third party. In fact, no serious sovereign nation that is economically independent will be strong-armed into implementing reforms that are not in its best interest. As ASUU has shown, and the tech world agrees, we have the wherewithal to develop indigenous technologies to address our issues. So, what/who is the government afraid of?