The Federal Government, on Wednesday, approved the exemption of federal universities, polytechnics, colleges of education and other tertiary institutions of learning from the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System.

Henceforth, remunerations to staff members of these institutions will no longer flow through the platform, it said.

The Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, disclosed this while speaking to journalists at the end of this week’s Federal Executive Council meeting at the State House, Abuja.

Mamman said, “Today, the council directed that universities, polytechnics and colleges of education should be taken out of the IPPIS service to allow for efficiency in the management of the universities and tertiary institutions, generally speaking.

“Also, before now, when the tertiary institutions wanted to make recruitment, they ran to the office of the Head of Service for waiver and approval.

“Today, the council, through the directive of the President, has exempted them from that.”

Explaining the rationale for the decision, the education minister said, “Simply, the President and the council are just concerned about the efficiency of management of the universities, and so it has nothing to do with integrity or platform options.

“The President cannot understand why vice chancellors should leave their duty post and run to Abuja to get staff enlisted on IPPIS when they get recruited.

“The basic concern is that universities are governed by laws. And those laws give them autonomy in certain respects and most respects and the IPPIS has sort of eroded that autonomy granted universities by their act.

“Today, the universities and other tertiary institutions have got a very big relief from the IPPIS. What that means in simple language is that the university authorities and other tertiary institutions will now pay their personnel from their own end instead of relying on the IPPIS.”

Reacting to the development on Wednesday, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, which had for long clamoured for exemption from IPPIS, commended the government for the decision.

ASUU, the umbrella body for lecturers in Nigerian universities, had resisted the implementation of IPPIS within universities, arguing that it undermined university autonomy and does not accommodate the unique nature of academic work.

ASUU had instead proposed an alternative system called the University Transparency and Accountability Solution, which they believe better addresses the peculiarities of the university system, such as sabbatical leave, adjunct engagements and part-time contracts.

This led to tensions and a protracted standoff, with ASUU continuing to push for the adoption of UTAS over IPPIS, which they saw as a foreign-imposed system unsuitable for the Nigerian tertiary education sector.

ASUU  National President, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, in an interview with Journalists, said, “We commend the government but it is more than three years. We want them to resolve other issues like the seven-and-a-half-month arrears in which we were punished for going on strike, the Earned Academic Allowance, and others.”