By Marcus Ikechukwu
There are strong indications that the crisis rocking the Nigerian universities system may be far from over, as the Federal Government on Wednesday, disclosed that the alternative payment platform recommended by the striking Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) for payment of their emoluments has failed integrity test.
Recall that one of the factors that necessitated the ongoing strike by ASUU had to do with the union’s rejection of the Integrated Personnel Payrolls and Payment System IPPIS which the federal government asked them to key into for their salaries.
Rather ASUU recommended that the government use the Universities Transparency Accountability Solution, UTAS, payment platform to pay them.
All these came to the fore when Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa fielded questions from State House correspondents at the end of the Federal Executive Council, FEC, meeting presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo at the Council Chambers, Presidential Villa, Abuja.
According to Inuwa, UTAS does not meet the required standard to be used as a payment platform going by assessment conducted on it.
When prodded further to get how the agency arrived at its conclusion about UTAS, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Pantami came to the rescue, saying when he received a letter from the Minister of Labor and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige requesting a review of the submission and the technical ability of the software of the system, he forwarded the request to the National Information Technology Development Agency.
According to him, “They (NITDA) conducted their own analysis, their own testing and sent same back to me, and I drafted a cover letter I forwarded to the Minister of Labour and Employment and I copied the two Ministers of Education, Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, and also office of the Accountant General of the Federation and even NUC (National University Commission).
The Minister, however, directed the DG of NITDA, who sat beside him to give the situation report on the matter.
Giving clarification on the position of UTAS, the NITDA DG said, “When we received the request to review, UTAS, you know, building complex system like UTAS that involves employees’ personal data, and also payment system, we have to subject it to do best practice tests before approving. Normally, when we are reviewing that kind of system, we perform three tests.
“Firstly, because when you’re building system, it’s not just about the technology, you need to consider the people that will use this system and the process. If you don’t align people, process and technology, you will never get result. No matter how good the technology is, if the people don’t understand how to use it, they won’t use it. And if the process is different from the way the people work, also, they won’t use it. So that is a process of building technology.
“Firstly, you need to get the business requirement. What do you want to achieve? So it’s not the technology that will come first, it is the business requirement, what do you want to achieve, then you need to identify the capabilities you need to achieve that is your business objective.
“Part of the capability is the technology you need to bring in and the people that will operate the technology before you start thinking of the technology, because technology is always a tool that will help you to achieve an objective or to do your work. If you bring the tool before knowing what to do with it, it will be useless.
“The second half of the story also, we need to find where to put that system like IPPIS we have a data center built for it. ASUU where are we going to put it? That means we need to have the data center and also that data center, we need to check to make sure it meets minimum requirement. Because if you put people’s information and the system crashes, how can you pay them salary?
“You need to build redundancy. There are a lot of things to do. So but as we speak, they’re trying to fix all the issues we highlighted with the system. Then when we finish that, we need to look at the second half of the story, getting where to install it.”
